Women and madness- the relationship women’s bodies occupy with regard to evolving social systems

This is an excerpt from a lecture I delivered at University of Salford today.

Images of mad women in popular art and literature have become tropes. Both these categories i.e. women and madness inhabit inferior positions in our society. When conflated they produce a voiceless subject whose exploitation is often ignored. 

Gin Lane are  print issued in 1751 by English artist William Hogarth 

Women’s bodies are politicised spaces on which patriarchal structures exert pressures to conform and normalise. Madness silences those voices and relabels them as dangerous to society. It is widely documented that women’s bodies are in constant fear of being harmed physically. In the case of the mad woman the process is institutionalised.  What constitutes madness is still a contentious issue. 

Looking at the past one can point out the obvious errors of mislabelling conditions affecting women as misunderstandings of a society that is not as advanced as ours. Take for example hysteria a condition whereby a woman’s uterus was thought to wander in her body which drove her to madness. Medicalisation of female biology has predetermined female inferiority. Immersed in our present culture psychiatric explanations seem unquestionable and even natural. I would like to argue it is harder to see discrimination in our own time, which is not very different from a previous era. Through examples of current mental disorders that pathologise women I will attempt to show how the spectre of the ‘mad woman’ still haunts our society through biologised understandings of madness.

Psychiatry has been described as system based on social control, although in a more insidious manner. Kvale (1992) asserts Psychology- all of it - is a branch of the police; psychodynamic and humanistic psychologies are the secret police". The power psychology exerts on the way we conceptualise the world around us is often unchecked. Often reifying existing prejudices in society. Women are a target population of this system. It is a well-known fact that women are not equal in most societies around the world, these inequalities are often justified by pathologising women or singling them out.

Long before David Rosenhan conducted his experiment investigative journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane’s conducted a similar experiment. In 1887 she published the book Ten Days in a Mad-House. It was based on her experience in an asylum for ten days. She deliberately presented  herself as a stereotypical mad woman. Conditions in the asylum were far from satisfactory. 

Here is a link the Rosenhan Experiment 

                                       

Part 1 of Ten Days in a Madhouse, audiobook

                                       

Part 2 of Ten Days in a Madhouse, audiobook

Reference/ Suggested reading:                                                                                                    

Chesler, P (1972). Women and madness. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Davar, B. V. (2008). From Mental Illness to Disability Choices for Women Users/Survivors of Psychiatry in Self and Identity Constructions. Indian journal of gender studies. 15(2), 261-290. Available at http://ijg.sagepub.com/content/15/2/261

Foucalt, M.(2006). History of Madness.  Edited by Jean Khalfa translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London. Routledge.

Foucault, M.(1979). Disciplined and Punish The Birth of the Prison Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage/Random House.

Foucault,M.(1975). The Birth of the Clinic An Archeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage/Random House

Kvale, S. (Ed.). (1992). Psychology and postmodernism (Vol. 9). Sage.

Lorde, A. (1978). Uses of the erotic: The erotic as power (No. 3). Crossing Pr.

Here is a the same essay in video format

Masson, J. (1992). Against Therapy. Glasgow. Fontana.

Plath, S. (2013). The bell jar (Vol. 50). GoodBook LLC.

Wetzel. J.W. (1991).Women's Experience Universal Mental Health Classification Systems: Reclaiming. 1991; 6; 8 Affilia. Retrieved from http://aff.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/3/8

Terms to look up

Sylvia Plath effect                                                                                                                           Neurosexim                                                                                                                              Psychologisation                                                                                                                                  Hysteria

  Women and madness -Activity.

Think of the last time you saw images or heard jokes about mad women think of what ideas were being conveyed. What impact did this have on you?

Think of the way the ‘crazy cat lady’ image/joke is used and how do you think it regulates women and their lives? Think of the many ways this image is used. 

To what extent do you think your understanding of both madness and women’s nature has been determined by psychology in the mass media. 

A mainstream alternative

Last week as part of the video learning class we had a debate on 

mainstream counseling vs. alternative therapy. The class was divided 

into two groups and after a brief activity the debate began. At the end of 

the debate 2 videos were shown on alternative healing – reflexology 

and hypnotism. 

The term alternative is quite misleading when you think about it. An 

alternative to what? Traditional mainstream system of thought perhaps? 

The first thing that comes to mind is that alternative therapy is practiced 

by an unskilled healer in an unscientific manner, or perhaps alternative 

therapy is just a bit more than a party trick with some mystical element 

thrown in. Whatever the idea it all boils down to the fact that alternative 

therapies whatever they are not a by product of positivist science. Is 

healing (I am using the word deliberately here) can therapy be nothing 

more than what we have come to believe in? Alternate systems rather 

what we call alternative now were once the dominant system of healing. 

Auyuveda, acupuncture, yoga were all validated systems in their era, 

but as notions of illness and the body changed so did the system. The 

current system of treating the body and isn’t always accepted neither 

are all forms of mental health intervention.  

Health insurance is a necessity for most of us these days and that 

ensures that we go to see practitioners who are grounded in the 

allopathic system and are subject to the coldness that goes with the 

sterile course of treatment. But in this current system the practitioner is 

the authority figure who has more knowledge than the sufferer, the 

symptoms take precedence and they need to be treated. System is 

applied to say the mental health you get a system that works almost 

similarly. The client must be treated no doubt but the system can’t 

expand beyond a point it reaches its limit. Now I don’t say yoga has all 

the answers it certainly does not. No system of the body or the mind 

can predict illness or health both concepts are always in a state of flux. 

No system of medicine can prevent an illness it can only make 

assumptions sometimes validated assumptions.  

What heals or cures is a subjective domain rather than a rule. Illness or 

maladjustment will remain, but the nature and definition will continue to 

vary. As new illnesses are invented new systems of cure will emerge 

.But that doesn’t mean that one system of healing is better or dominant 

over the other the use of term alternative and mainstream implies a 

binary opposition. Each system has a point a very valid point the 

methods are different but the goal remains the same – to cure. To 

oppose an older system as primitive or to discard it in favour of a newer 

method only develops a system that is reactionary.  

The goal for a practitioner of health- bodily or mental is not to work for 

the system but for the ever present subject of enquiry the client or the 

patient.