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There is a statistical question here that interests me. The literature tells us that depression and some related illnesses are much more common in women than men. But, if men don't own up to it, or don't go the the doctors, then the stats will be skewed.

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No doubt about it, and a lot of the research on depression acknowledges this. It's tough because you can't measure what you can't observe. It's probably fair to assume that male depression is more common than the stats would have us believe, but we can't say for sure how much more.

In the old days, everything was judged by the standard of masculinity. So a woman in business might be judged to be "under aggressive" when in fact she was relating to people in an entirely different way. Ironically, women judge men's emotions by the standard of femininity. When they don't open up and share their feelings on a regular basis, many women judge them to be "under emotional" or repressive, or whatever. In reality, men have different ways of expressing emotions from women, and it doesn't make sense to judge them by female standards.

I'm not trying to say that men don't deny their feelings at times, just that the fact that they don't "open up" to others the way women do isn't by itself a sign that there's a problem.