To think psychiatry is misogynistic?

[tvde]

I have been reading works of feminist psychologists such as Jess Taylor and critical works of people such as Joanna moncrieff.

the argument is:

• Trauma responses to abuse are normal, rational, and proportionate to what someone has experienced.
• What is often labelled as “mental illness” can actually be understandable reactions to violence and oppression.
• The mental health system has a history of pathologising women’s responses, especially after abuse, instead of addressing the trauma itself.
• This can become a form of victim blaming, where women are judged for their reactions (e.g. being “too emotional,” “unstable,” or “making bad choices”).
• These patterns are shaped by broader systems like patriarchy and racism, which influence how people are diagnosed and treated.
• Common narratives shift responsibility away from perpetrators and subtly place it on victims (e.g. questioning behaviour, choices, or credibility).
• Widespread rape myths reinforce this—such as believing it’s not “real” rape without physical resistance or injuries, or that men “didn’t mean to.”
• theyre given drugs which don’t actually have good success rates (see moncrieff)

I see this countless times working with women and child victims.
Have you experienced this to?

Well it depends which services.
i agree trauma work with someone not in a stable place can be dangerous.

Ignoring the 🤮 of abused person syndrome - The same would keep happening because working with traumatised people is hard work, emotionally difficult work and takes a long time and needs properly funding to ensure enough staff who are properly trained, supervised, supported in the work and not burnt out.

That will never happen, so you have burnt out and demotivated staff frustrated at the limitations of the NHS, or without adequate training, who don’t understand their patients and resentment at the frustration of the systems and cuts and difficulties of the work get transferred to the patients because they also do not get enough space and time for proper supervision and reflective practice.

Was ever thus.

yes we can’t silence them so let’s thoroughly discuss them and come to intelligent conclusions. Which we seem to be doing here, very politely. This is lovely

Drugs do work for a lot of people including me but only if given correctly. Antidepressants aren't going to work because your life is crap or you hate your job they are for depression and anxiety etc.

I think almost everyone who works in CAMHS is concerned with the over medicalisation of children. It is well acknowledged that systems around distressed children need to change but often the drive for medication comes from parents. This is understandable as parents just want their children to feel better, and medication can be a game changer, but it has its limitations.

Unfortunately systemic change is not easy but most of the professionals I know are advocating for this. I think this is why Jessica Taylor is frustrating, she suggests that she’s the only person who identifies these very well recognised problems, and she does nothing (and can do very little because of her lack of professional qualifications) to illicit any real change (other than tweet about it).

I've worked in mental health and from my experience, psychiatrists are equally dismissive and condescending to both male and female patients. They dislike and disrespect them behind closed doors equally.....

Is it misogyny or the patriarchy?

My HRT gives me a 5 day break from the progesterone. This makes my boobs sore and my mood grumble.

Why? I don't think I need a break from it chemically. The 'break' is for the bleed. Which I won't have. Do I medically need this break or is it because no man asked any women whether they'd like to avoid sore boobs and being tetchy?

I agree - both that psychiatry is flawed, and that it is misogynistic. I am not well versed on the academic arguments, but it seems so obvious to me from my own life experiences.

I was diagnosed with PND and an anxiety disorder after the birth of my first child. The treatment was antidepressant medication.
I was traumatised from an horrific birth and (I realise in later life, absolute crucially) severely sleep deprived. This was compounded by the change in my life from being a highly regarded professional with a busy, intensely social life to being up all night feeding a baby and then at home alone all day with him.
In later life, I can see that my struggles were a totally normal response to all of this. ‘Postnatal depression’ seems such an inadequate description for what was essentially a combination of torture-levels of sleep deprivation and the consequences of societal structures that isolate women after childbirth. It says ‘there is something wrong with you’ , with no regard to the circumstances.

Years later, I had a period of very poor mental health - a severe depressive episode lasting about 18 months that totally floored me. A ‘nervous breakdown’ in old money. I was very quickly diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a psychiatrist and put on a combination of heavy meds.
By some stroke of luck, I was given a review with a psychologist - a lovely young woman - who looked at my history, asked lots of questions and said very frankly at the end of the review ‘I do not think you have bipolar disorder. I think you are experiencing the effects of trauma and a complete overwhelm/burnout’.

I had been working full time while trying to care for two children, one of whom is disabled with complex needs. My disabled child had been excluded and was out of school placement, I’d had to give up work and I was essentially trapped in my house all day with a distressed, at times violent child. The psychologist saw this clearly - it’s not YOU, it’s your circumstances. So how are we going to solve this now?
I don’t think the psychiatrist ever even considered any of this, and our appointments were mainly him trying to find the ‘right’ combination of drugs to ‘treat me’, as nothing had worked. The next step was lithium, and I can’t believe I was actually considering it until the psychologist review and a sort of lightbulb moment…

I have now worked with vulnerable teenagers for many years and my heart sinks when I hear yet another 16, 17, 18 year old girl has been diagnosed with ‘emotionally unstable personality disorder’ or ‘bipolar disorder’. Children who have been neglected, abused, exploited, being offered a few sessions at CAMHS and then a life of medication to ‘treat’ then. There is a flip side, with vulnerable boys being routinely diagnosed with ‘oppositional defiance disorder’ etc…but if we are talking about females, there is absolutely this tendency in psychiatry to label women and girls with a ‘touch of the vapours/hysteria’- type disorder because bad shit has happened to them, leading to a life of medication and stigma and a poor understanding of themselves.

Wow, that was long! Thanks for reading if you managed it!

I should add, I am NOT anti-medication.

In my late 30s, I broke down in my GP’s office over how horrific my PMT was and the young locum asked me if my usual GP had discussed PMDD with me and if I’d ever been offered a low dose of Prozac for it? He was baffled when I said I had never heard of PMDD or been offered meds, and he said ‘try it - if it’s going to work, you’ll know quickly, within a couple of cycles. If it doesn’t, stop taking it’.

It worked. Within a cycle, no more black moods, rage, tears, self hatred.

The relief was immense, but I also felt sorrow and rage that I had lived with this horrendous cycle of moods for decades when it could have been treated so easily and GPs are handing out antidepressants like sweets for all sorts of other things….

Yes but someone who lives with the impact of trauma DOES tend to have a problem... because even if they were treated with great empathy and compassion by professionals all the time, this still isn't enough in itself to give someone what they need to have a good life. If someone acts in a way that others find upsetting, confusing, distressing, difficult, as a result of their trauma, that tends to make it more unlikely that they will form the sort of supportive relationships that could help with the process of healing and of building a meaningful life. If someone who has been through terrible trauma does things that harm others (a war veteran with PTSD who commits acts of violence at home; an abused woman who abuses her own child), no amount of empathy for that person can lead us to ignore the fact that they are hurting others. There is some basic cause and effect here - no one can escape it, no matter what we've been through.

I completely agree that we need to be trauma-informed and am a big fan of the Power Threat Meaning framework personally (stop asking 'what is wrong with you?' and start asking 'what has happened to you?'). The framing matters. Being non-judgemental matters. And I also agree that many people end up pathologised for emotions that are completely understandable reactions to the reality around them (and whilst we're at it, why do we judge emotions based on whether they are 'understandable' anyway? Everyone's emotions are their own and I don't see why compassion has to be contingent on some sort of externally validated logical thread... but that's perhaps a separate rant).

What I don't get is what we can do with this understanding. Whatever the causes of our emotions and our behaviour, we still have to live with them and with their consequences. Change still can't happen without some sort of spark of commitment or willingness from us. There is no therapy for trauma that I know of (or even the preparation work needed to get to the point being ready for trauma therapy) that doesn't involve some sort of motivation and commitment to change from the person who experienced the trauma. And yes, ideally everyone in the world would have loving, compassionate support around them, and the right soil in which to grow, but medical professionals can't make that happen.

If you have an answer for me I'd be grateful. I'm a mental health professional myself. I strive not to invalidate anyone's experiences and to be alert to systemic injustices. I don't judge anyone for not being able to change, but I also can't help people much unless they also want to help themselves.

I would also not say misogyny. Rather another example of women being seen as the second sex, who's purpose is to facilitate men. Which is not the same as hating us (no more than we hate our support animals.) We are utilitarian and if we break that is seen as a problem with our functionality. Its a bad worker blaming his tools rather than his own misuse of them.

Having worked in MH, men complete suicide more often then women because they choose more violent ways to communicate distress. Women choose the more passive way of an OD etc. Women have been taking OD's for years and nobody was bothered about the 'crisis in women's MH' but suddenly men start doing it more regularly and there is a crisis.

I agree. After being groomed into a relationship with a 30 year old bipolar man who mentally abused me from aged 14, I naturally developed trauma which, instead of being addressed, earnt me a diagnosis of BPD. I was put on anti-psychotics, which really didn't do me any good, left me unable to function, had to leave college because I was like a zombie. I haven't been on them in years and do not believe I was given a correct diagnosis and would like it removed.

BPD and CPTSD are distinct mental health conditions, though they share overlapping symptoms that can make them challenging to differentiate or diagnose correctly.

But they are not "both trauma responses to abuse".

The difference lies in their origin: bipolar disorder is a mood disorder linked to brain chemistry and genetics, whereas PTSD/C-PTSD is a trauma-related disorder caused by external events.

Nobody would diagnose BPD if the patient was reporting significant trauma.

If you're seeking to have BPD diagnoses reclassified as PTSD just because one carries a stigma then that's the same madness that's trying to redefine women, and its madness because the treatments are different also.

If you're trying to argue that continuous low-level trauma is trauma, then that's a different discussion - including whether men/women cope with that differently, as well as whether women suffer it more/different types.

Bpd isn’t bipolar disorder. It’s borderline personality disorder

BPD is not bipolar and yes they very much do diagnose BPD when significant trauma (CPTSD )has been diagnosed too and unbelievably autism. I have two children where this has happened. Male and female.

I don’t really. What can you do when someone’s life is objectively shit and you can’t help them except help them cope better? Are these medications kinder in this sense? It’s really hard isn’t it?

My DD (an IT professional in a high performing role) was recently diagnosed with anxiety because she kept feeling faint, often when giving lectures at conferences.
She was prescribed Propranolol despite telling the GP that she did not feel at all anxious.
In the end AI suggested POTS and the NHS reluctantly performed the tests which confirmed this.
I do wonder whether a man would have been treated the same way.

It is really hard! 'Objectively shit' can be about right.

I hate the idea that we shove medications at people to silence them, dampen them down, make them more 'productive' or 'easier to manage' or whatever. But nor do I feel good about leaving people to their pain and not offering anything just because they're not 'ready to engage in therapy', as the professional-speak goes. There's a lot of interesting literature about there about how to definite recovery from mental health challenges (I like the CHIME framework, which focuses on replacing a symptom-based approach with seeking to promote connectedness, hope, a sense of identity, a sense of meaning and a sense of empowerment). Again, it can be hard to drill down to what this looks like in practice for a given individual, especially when people are living with so much distress that they can't imagine what better might look like for them.

I ramble... but a very thought-provoking thread, even if I find myself demoralised by my inability to see clear answers.

It's the other way round. The first meaning in ancient greek of hysteria meant 'of the womb'. Then the idea that it was a mental illness came later. So they're saying 'you're acting like you have/are a womb' when they say 'you're hysterical'.

As someone with bpd and bipolar I can assure you they are very different conditions

I would much rather have been told I was having a normal response to trauma than be told I was overreacting and it was somehow something fundamentally wrong with me causing my problems.

I actually knew it was trauma because it was obvious from how things had started, and because I, as a random member of society, was actually far more psychologically informed than the way psychiatry operated at the time. I was refused therapy and treated as a trouble maker and attention seeker - the "evidence" of my attention-seeking being me trying to get therapy.

I do take your point about the way psychiatry would twist that though - using it as an excuse not to offer help. "Oh it's normal to be completely messed up in your situation - don't worry, byee!"

However I'm not sure they're really offering services to many traumatised people at present - I gather it's even harder to get appropriate therapy than back when I tried. So it'd just be swapping one excuse for another.

We need service that recognise shit happens, which affects people, and to provide timely and appropriate interventions.

@JobhuntingDespair ai agree with all of your post.

I have been refused services, told I’m attention seeing, treated appallingly. Some people blame the diagnosis for that treatment. I don’t. I blame the people who allowed their own stigmatising attitudes and frustrations to justify treat me badly.

I have also received compassionate and trauma informed care, by people who COULD be bothered to actually learn and understand what causes the development of a diagnosis like PD, instead of just listening to bigoted and stigmatising colleagues who don’t give a shit.

Ultimately I had to go outside the NHS for the long term trauma therapy I need. The NHS just can’t afford it, and until it prioritises this instead of short term sticking plasters, the mess will all just continue, regardless of what you call it.

The Greek word 'Hystera' means uterus. A hysterectomy means removing the uterus.

The other meaning of the root 'hyster' came second.

It can be but Jess Taylor certainly wasn’t the pioneer or the founder of such thinking. She was in no way original. Her books are very pop psychology. She’s also not a forensic psychologist.