Depression is often not known as depression, either by the person who experiences it or by those around it, as an irritable or angry experience. The people around them may seem disappointing, annoying, or unbearable to the individual experiencing this form of depression, and the depressed person may feel as emotionally uncomfortable as someone with extreme poison oak feels physically. They can feel very upset that they can not alter the individuals that seem to be causing their pain. People may see them as mean, angry, or a bully around the angry or irritable depressed person. It might not even happen to onlookers that this person may be depressed.
I assume this perspective can be conveyed differently by men and women. Many men feel a great deal of pressure to not weep or show weakness, so frustration may be a more appropriate way to experience the emotional distress they feel when they get depressed. Men can also feel more pressure not to feel something, and so turn to drugs and alcohol to try to numb themselves when they're in emotional pain. So, while we equate depression with weeping, men might not weep, but they are just as depressed as those who do. I think this is the biggest reason why women are about twice as often diagnosed with depression as men are: many men who are depressed don't get the support they need.
If men are depressed and show it as rage, aggression, or addiction, it can further distract the implications from having the help they need. These effects can be serious, such as jail or chasing a high, but after alienating individuals, they can also take the form of depression and isolation. As depression festers, self-hate will grow inside, and the effects of rage produce more and more hatred.
Women are definitely not resistant to frustration as they undergo depression. It often comes out as irritability in females, particularly with their kids. This too can go undetected because only their children see it often, and children rarely call their mother a therapist.
Two forms of rage exist:
One is a reaction to something that happens to or around a person who feels upset, hurtful or unjust.
The other is a shield from feeling anything more insecure.
They definitely have justification to be upset when someone has been hurt or traumatized and sometimes don't have a chance to show it when the trauma happens. Rage may also continue as a sign of posttraumatic stress or may become absorbed over time into the personality of an individual. When it happens, a lot of the time, people feel angry and the rage is no longer just anger, it becomes a way of life. In order to protect the person from more violence and from the painful feelings of grief, hurt, and fear that were also part of the traumatic experience, rage is likely to grow in this way.
Veterans coming home from battle with the experiences of fear of imminent death, sorrow of losing friends who were killed, and systematic emotional preparation to turn all these emotions into rage, vengeance, and fighting are classic examples of depression articulated as anger. It's not difficult to understand why a veteran would be overwhelmed by coming home with all this, or why they would show it by domestic abuse, picking battles, or even just caustic cynicism.
In fact, anger almost always covers hurt, sorrow, or fear, or is followed by it. It almost always dissolves into tears and more fragile emotions as anger is helpfully articulated and starts to resolve. Typically, they are trapped in depression as long as a person sticks with the rage.
One way to look at this is that at the root of depression, "frozen" emotions are often. There is possibly frozen pain, anxiety, shame, remorse, or sorrow in someone who feels and/or expresses only rage. There could be frozen rage in someone who never feels or expresses anger. In either case, before their frozen feelings are safely unlocked, articulated, and resolved, the person can be depressed and suffering and will probably continue to suffer.
Although depression-induced feelings of rage may feel daunting, a therapist's support helps many people work through these feelings and resolve their depression in a healthier manner.