Mental health and the patriarchy.

[poshsinglemum]

To what extent does the patriarchy contribute to the poor mental health of both men and women? I am thinking along the lines of men ''unable'' to express their emotions due to rigid gender stereotypes and women taking valium when staying at home to look after the kids. I know that these are stereotypes in themselves but please tell me your insights!

It has been well documented that Sylvia Plath was chronically depressed due to Ted Hughes infidelity. Is this patriarchy or simply human nature?
Virginia Woolf had a distrust of the psychiatriactric profession marking it out as a male dominated/patriarchal system even though she had major mentalhealth issues.

Do you think that woemn are seen as ''hysterical or mad'' under a patriarchal system as it seeks to repress the emotional side of life.

Also; why does patriarchy dismiss emotions when they are such an important part of everyday existence? Is it not possible to be both rational AND emotional? Does it serve to justify the staus quo and capitalist alienation from nature? Phew!

this is a great thread.
When you think that women are oppressed in so many ways, I think they're amazing that they do as well as they do, and cope the way they do.
I really struggle being financially dependand on DH (even though is is a fantastic husband on that front) because I did not feel that working to make money for some Big Bossman was worth not being with my kids for in their earlier years (and am extremely grateful I had the choice)

But why should I have to choose between raising my children myself (as opposed to giving them to another carer) and being financially independant? I think this takes a toll on my mental health.

Another area is that I find the role of a daughter incredibly oppressive. It's only as I was getting married I realised my parents had expected me (as the eldest and only girl of 5 kids) to take care of them in their dotage. In fact, I believe I had been conditioned for that role in many ways because I felt like such a BITCH for taking their free carer away from them. I was treated like a bitch for moving away as well. My brothers have never had the same expectations foisted upon them.

It's ironic that women get so many responsibilites in our society and yet so little power.
In Iran females get no real rights as adults and yet from the age of 9 they can be punished as an adult by law. Males get all the rights but don't get punished by law until 15.

There's a massive disconnect between what is expected of females in our society and the resources and power they have available at their hands to carry out their responsibilities. The people with the money and power simply do not care about these things (care of the elderly, disabled and children)

I believe the entire set up affects women's mental health.

And that's before you get onto all the rape/murder/pornification

I disagree with dittany about the mother relationship. I think the child's relationship to its mother is crucial in emotional development.

However

Patriarchy makes it impossible for mothers to mother they way they could in a non-patriarchal society. Isolated, unsupported, vulnerable, in poverty, dependant, vilified (if single mother), abused by a partner, PTSD from abuse, patriarchal medical system etc etc.
Patriarchy makes it near on impossible for women to mother the way they could if they were given real access to resources and power, not just the scraps that patriarchy deigns to throw at them

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Dittany, I wish you could discuss this less aggressively. It is such an interesting thread, and it is so patently wrong to paint minx in the colours you are attemtpting to. Your position is valid of course, but so dogmatically pursued as to lose value.

Plath was plainly a very distressed woman before she met Hughes. To blame him for all her sadness is on a par with giving him credit for all her poetry. She was herself. And it is no more wrong to 'diagnose' her than it is to reduce her to the effects of men on her.

The problme Eleison and I've seen her do it on other threads is she very quickly personalises arguments and begins to needle people about nonsense frankly. Pickig on the fact that i used an acronym in such a snipy aggressive way and then berating me for the language i used in another point is unpleasant. It's the kind of thing that happens in emotional abusive relationships tbh. I'm usually quite wary of joining feminism threads because i find she dominates them and is extremely dogmatic. It makes open and honest discussion hard. I completely respect differences of opinion but I think it's unnecessary to be personal.

However I do know about women and mental illness. I have read extensively about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes including all her poems, several biographies and lots of critique. Si I wanted to make a contribtion.

"Patriarchy makes it impossible for mothers to mother they way they could in a non-patriarchal society. Isolated, unsupported, vulnerable, in poverty, dependant, vilified (if single mother), abused by a partner, PTSD from abuse, patriarchal medical system etc etc.
Patriarchy makes it near on impossible for women to mother the way they could if they were given real access to resources and power, not just the scraps that patriarchy deigns to throw at them."

Very well put Sakura - you have expressed exactly what I think here.

Mothers are blamed for so much and yet they are accorded so little power by patriarchy.

In terms of personal experience, I think I had low level depression for a while. No wonder - I was sleep deprived, a frustrated SAHM with a husband who worked long hours, and no family close by. Who wouldn't get depressed looking after small nonsleeping, often crying children on their own. If DH had been abusive/aggressive/a knobber into the bargain, then I would probably have been tipped over into a proper unstable mental state.

I don't doubt that if I had gone to the doctor, he would have prescribed me pills. What I really needed was a revolution.

When I have control over my life and, my life is balanced I'm a perfectly cheery sort of person. I can remember thinking 'but I'm not depressed - I'm frustrated and bored and unhappy'.

There must be millions of women who feel like I did.

I stopped having therapy, after a brief attempt about 5 years ago, because after the therapist asked me if I had been abused (reasonable enough at that juncture), which I have not, and then afterwards kept referring to it as "as you have no memory of having been sexually abused... " which annoyed me so much I stopped the whole thing.
(Actually it was not the whole reason why I stopped the whole thing. I felt that the conversations we were having were exactly the same as the most frustrating conversations I have in the rest of my life: she just wasn't listening.
I am always thinking that, and I know it is my fault, it is because I don't make it clear to people that I want to talk, and expect them to ask me all the questions, or I want to talk about things that other people find boring, or talk about them in a boring way, or with levels of analysis that other people find boring, or drawing distinctions between things that other people think might as well be the same - but I thought you were allowed to do that in therapy and I just found that she was foisting her agenda on me in a stupid, annoying way.)

Actually vezzie, I can sympathise with that, and I wonder if it is an essential, irrevmoveable feature of therapy (although handled extraordinarily better by some therapists than by others). When you engage in therapy it is almost like an invitation for the therapist to regard your contributions to the conversation as stemming not from your self but from your disorder (or 'challenges' or 'victimhood' or 'issues', or whatever else is supposed to lie between you and being your liberated, resolved self). That can function as a licence to discount, or reduce, what you say. In the case of my therapist, the killer line was always something to the effect that 'you want to see things like that, you want to fail, you want theproblematised version of your life.

No.

I'd like to add that the mental health issues in my family seem to have been passed purely down the matriarchal line.

My great grandmother, grandmother, mother and now me clearly had issues - mostly whcih we gained form our mothers and, I think, to a certain level had validated by grandmothers.

It stops here.

I am dealing with my mental health issues hoping that my 2 dds (10 and 6, a brother in between) will not suffer the dysfunctionality of the rest of the eldeat daughters in my family.

In order to this I am in hard working serious psychotherapy (thankyou very much , the NHS!) and have also cut all contact with my mother after my Gran died as my mother is very clearly toxic).

There are many ways in which the matriarchal line generates its own dysfunctionality.

Slightly off topic (only slightly- more of a 'gatecrash')

Minx- is your thesis published in a journal anywhere? (Im a Newly Qualified MH nurse working in a Regional MSU). Your posts here make perfect sense to me. Im trying to pay no attention to the negativity from staff directed towards those with PD (specifically BPD). Its bloody hard.

Similarly, I have always wondered what happens in CBT (which I haven't had, or otherwise experienced, but I unjustly and unschooledly think of as the crassest form of this), when the therapist is faced with someone whom, say, everyone genuinely hates, or is honestly useless at their job. The whole thing seems to be based on "no! they didn't cross the road when they saw you coming because they hate you, they just, like the chicken, wanted to get to the other side. You are great at your job! You haven't spent 10 years hanging on to it by the skin of your teeth without a promotion because you are useless (and everyone hates you there too), but because you need to think about things in a different way. My way. It sounds like stupidity, and ignoring the evidence, and not listening to you, but it isn't. Really."

Disclaimer: irl, everyone doesn't hate me and I am not useless at my job, at least, I do not believe these things or need to be persuaded otherwise.

minx, there will come a time when you will thank your lucky stars that dittany is on the feminist topic

weegiemum, same here with the matriarchal line, but please look at it in the context of patriarchy. Patriarchy made the women in our families ill

Look at their relationsihps with their partners. Was your grandmother able to divorce? Did she have money of her own to set up alone? DId she have power in her marriage? Probably not.
And when you think about the absolutely shockingly low status in society of those who rear children, or do any kind of care work, you can't be suprised if the women who do this work begin to feel doubt or self-hatred for their "uselessness" under the patriarchy.
My own mother turned to work and drink to escape the misogyny of my father and of society at large. She felt the only way she could be worth anything as a human being was through paid work, because society told her that paid work was the only thing of relevance. Under patriarchy money is all-important. My mother is a loon but when I put her life into context (her own father was a violent drunk) it's normal that she turned out the way she did.

I have no contact with her now. She seemed bent on destroying my happiness. It's very sad and I have vowed not to pass this onto my own daughter just like you.

Dittany, I haven't got any agenda in supporting Minx and disagreeing with you in this discussion, so I'm not sure what you mean to imply there. I'd never spoken to Minx before this thread. Her contributions are marked with fluidity of thought about people in mental distress -- there may be a history of sexual abuse and there may not, there may have been poor parenting and there may not. It is a question of perceiving them in their fullness and responding to what they bring to the exchange, which you can not do if you think wholly in terms of individuals being victims of men (just as, on MN, you can't really perceive the views of people who disagree with you if you think wholly in terms of their being perpetrators of patriarchy and ignore the fullness of their thought and reading.)

Nothing I said about Plath suggests that Ted Hughes played no part in her unhappiness. I'm sure that he did, and that she played a part in his. The explanation of people and their unhappiness is complicated, naturally.

As to the use of abbreviations, of course it isn't ideal, but I do think that picking on it is a strategy of cornering people and making them defensive, instead of hearing them.

I'll stick with brilliant but flawed, thanks.

sorry Minx but I'm with Dittany on the acronym - I shuddered at "I work with DSH (mostly young women) every single working day". This honestly is the kind of thing that would make me not want to seek help if I was self-harming because it feels so dehumanising.

actually, sakura, i think that a close emotional bond is crucial to emotional development, but not that it has to be with the birth mother. as mothers we are conditioned (by society, and our own bodies flood us with hormones) to believe this. yet, there are too many examples of children raised by fathers, or adopted parents, to make this true.

i think we want to feel that we are so necessary, and then at the same time made to feel guilty whether we stay home (you're not working, you're at home) or go to work (abandoning our children)

i think that the sahm, with wohd set-up lends itself far too easily to an imbalance of power. either the sahm runs everything, including her dp's life, which often leads to her resenting the responsibility, and him being infantalised, or he is the one 'doing the work' and she gets treated like the infant.

it should be possible for each adult to be respected for performing a worthwhile, contributory role within the family, whether that is based at home or not, paid or not, but that just doesn't seem to happen.

this come back to the big discussion on cognitive dissonance. i genuinely believe that as adults we wish to be respected and thanked for the roles we play, and that most of us wish to share this with an equal partner who we hold in esteem. if two adults are working together like that, then we are happy. if the balance has shifted, then not just one, but both partners feel the ill effects of this, and start to suffer. in more pronounced cases, this can lead to depression of either, or both, partners.