I discovered the book “Women and Madness” by Phyllis Chelsers while watching a Netflix documentary (“Feminists: What were they thinking?”), and immediately, I knew I had to read it.
That is because the gender disparity in mental illness is not merely something I heard about; it is something I experience through myself and my female friends. Today, in the world, the prevalence of women diagnosed with depression is twice higher that of men. We take more pills, we attempt suicide more, we have more anxiety. The World Health Organization also states that we are more subjected to common risk factors for mental illness:
“Gender-specific risk factors for common mental disorders that disproportionately affect women include gender-based violence, socioeconomic disadvantage, low income, and income inequality, low or subordinate social status and rank and unremitting responsibility for the care of others.”
The problem is that ever since the dawn of time, we live in a world that is defined by its patriarchal rules. The pillars of moral and ethics, of law and civility, of science and wisdom, were based on the way men see the world and in reference to them. Science was dominated (and still is!) by men. That is a remarkable truth if we ponder upon its consequences. The body of knowledge that we use daily to survive in a highly technological world, the wisdom we resort to understand ourselves, all we consider “scientific truth,” was built by an elitist congregation of mostly white cis men. And it is not to say that science done by them is useless or evil; it is just not complete, and in turn, oppresses the ones that do not conform to its notions.
Women have increasingly been given more space in academia and in all professional fields. But how do those women survive, and are supposed to thrive, in environments not built by them and for them?
Being a woman is living in a constant paradox. Society judges you into being the perfectly nice pretty girl while instantly devaluing the role of women and feminity in every turn. We are raised to be compliant, yet the world rewards non-compliant people. To reach success in a male-dominated world, women need the ability to navigate through environments that do not correspond to our ways of doing things. And no one prepares us. Instead, they mock us for not fitting in, for not buying into the competitiveness and the hierarchal systems, for being “soft”, for feeling emotions, for caring for others, and letting empathy weigh in on decisions. The ways in which women are raised to be clash with the patriarchal men-worshipping society we live in. So here is the paradox: women are pressured to be in a certain way, and then immediately undermined for being like that. Chelser put it this way:
“We live in a culture in which science and Christianity have increasingly devalued female biology, without yet freeing women from being defined solely in biological terms.”
There is no way out, and the women are always to blame in the end. Society has used us to evade blame from itself and themselves, so it is often left to us to carry the weight and consequences of everyone’s actions. Marital arrangements push women to own all the responsibility for the house and children, and are blamed for any bad behavior of the child. In psychology’s history, there is an extensive emphasis on the role of the mother in psychological diseases, sometimes with quite ridiculous explanations, while the father is left out of any analysis. This is important because the way we understand psychology affects not just the way we treat its disorders but to what we even consider a disorder in the first place. “Women and Madness” call out this specific fact to expose the truth about how we diagnose mental diseases, how the male-dominated scientists, clinicians, and psychiatrist imprisoned and tortured women in mental asylums through history and until not so long ago.
It was only last century that we were locking women up in mental facilities because they didn’t want to get married, have kids, have sex, have sex with men, dresses pretty, learn to embroid. Women were being locked up and considered insane for not following social rules. Think of terms as hysteria and frigidity. Any woman that has been called hysterical for carrying out an emotional response knows that the problem lies not in her reaction but in what triggered it. Fridigity was a term to describe a woman that did not want to engage in sexual intercourse with their partner. It was considered a symptom of mental disorder and motive for hospitalization. Although I believe women are less subjected to this kind of clinicization in today’s medical procedures, internally in their own relationships, women still feel pressure to have sex and often surrender to their partner’s needs without wanting it. These women keep quiet, while we engage in a culture that values sex and the phallic as a social expression of success and essential to the woman role.
Nowadays, we are raised to find a husband and have a family, yet fewer women find happiness in male dominated relationships. We feel misunderstood. We urge for independence while being trapped by our own notions of stability and fairy-tale endings. We fall in love with our chains because we think we do not exist without them. And we are drowning in pills and filling up mental hospitals all around, while still being told that the doors are open for us to thrive. Society causes our confusion while being completely blind to its effects.
It is perfectly normal to feel depressed when your inner self is repressed, when you feel like your voice is dampened and your ways of being put you in a lower rank in society, unable to achieve the success expected of you.
Phyllis describes the role of a feminist therapist would be in shifting these ideas around: “A feminist therapist believes that women need to hear that men “don’t love enough” before they’re told that women “love too much”; that fathers are equally responsible for their children’s “problems”; that absolutely no one will rescue a woman but herself; that self-love is the basis for love for others; that it’s hard to “break free” of patriarchy; that the struggle to do so is both miraculous and lifelong.”
We need to do better not only to give opportunities to women but to finally start valuing female traits and modes of being. As women, we must accept no less than a place to be ourselves, beginning on our own self-awareness that we are our best not despite being a woman but because we are. It is not about adaptation anymore. Valuing women’s ideas, bodies, projects, lives, choices, will not only liberate us, but tremendously change society. It is not about equality of opportunities anymore. It is about a revolution in the way we think, define, and live in society. It is revolutionizing our value systems, our ethics and our morals. The disparity between sexes in mental ilness is a statistic that hides a long lasting history of opression and invisibility. There is no way out the mental health crisis without addressing these issues.
