A very female malady

It doesn't take a degree in Psychology to know mental illness is gendered...... having said that it has taken me a few degrees to get to that conclusion. In my masters I learnt disorders have a gender, alcoholism for men depression for women. These distinctions are not new mental illness has been tied to gender for a long time. Hysteria is a prime example, wandering uteruses caused women to turn mad (insert behaving unacceptably), we now know internal organs don’t move instead we blame women’s hormones on their fluctuating mood. Women are emotional and not very rational we are told. Anyone who had witnessed men watching sport can vouch for strong emotions accompanied by violence being displayed.  Why is football violence seen as unemotional and the product of a rational mind or war for that matter? Why is a woman natural response to a bad situation indicative of pathology attributed to her anatomy?

It would be very easy to dismiss psychiatry of the past as unsophisticated in its diagnosis and treatment but have we changed? Do we ignore the present because we are entrenched in it?  We accept female hormones make women emotional wrecks, that their menstrual cycles control them. These ideas need to be questioned, as do their purpose. Mental illness serves a very strategic position in our world, it helps us lock away undesirable individuals in asylums when prisons wont take them. It also helps control individuals by telling them how to behave.

Open any women’s magazine and they are full of advice by psychologists and counsellors. Popular psychology magazines are similar in content if not style in this regard. I often look at issues of Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Psychology at my supermarket till and they all have the same content and intent. We have become accustomed to being corrected by an all pervasive psychology that controls every aspect of our being. Gender is on the top of that list. Symptoms of mental illness are not stable as are its manifestations.

Location also influences the production and maintenance of mental illness. Culture bound syndromes is what the International Classification of Diseases calls conditions that are only prevalent in one culture. This too is an area that is seldom questioned if conditions such as depression and ADHD were produced in the west how is it they aren’t culture bound?

The symptoms of mental illness are culturally manufactured I have found. Alcoholism and addiction while understood as universal manifest themselves differently across the world. While clinically individuals may appear the same their diagnosis is based on their age, class, gender, race, ethnicity and many other factors. Women who are diagnosed with this very male condition are often seen as worse than the men. This is an idea commonly found in rehabilitations and in scientific literature. Women occupy a strained relationship with madness, often their gender is used against them to diagnose and treat them.

Reference:

Chesler, P. (2005). Women and madness. Palgrave Macmillan.

Culture, Continuity and Breast Cancer- Agnes Arnold- Forster  http://www.historytoday.com/agnes-arnold-forster/culture-continuity-and-breast-cancer