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!

Yes, I agree that giving the symptoms of BPD a label takes the sufferer's symptoms out of context of patriarchy. Another one is Histrionic Personality Disorder. One of the listed 'symptoms' of this is a woman behaving openly sexual and dressing in a provocative way (!)

BPD is basically a very sad person who has most likely had a bad childhood experience which is being replicated in her current relationship with her spouse, and who has never been taken seriously or listened to, and is being knocked at every turn because society is set up to grind her down. Symptoms of BPD is a person acting out the pain they are suffering. I am someone who thinks that Bipolar disorder and Schizophrenia are also rooted in a person's environment, past or present.

There is often the subtle implication that a person was somehow born unstable. IMpossible. Everytime you hear of someone suffering mental health problems, if you scratch the surface you discover that they have suffered masses of ill-treatment at some point in their lives.

kickass, if you read accounts of adopted children you will find that their birth mother "giving them away" has a massive impact on their psyche. The absence of the birth mother becomes all-consuming. Of course it is patriarchy which creates the situation whereby a birth mother gives away her child. "The Mistress's Daughter' by A Holmes (and adoptee) is the best account I have come accross of an adult adopted child seeking to put those ghosts to rest.

Similarly, if a father raises a child, the absence of the mother will still have a phenomenal impact on their psyche (in the case of abandonment or death of the mother, for example)

I am focusing on the child here, not the abilitiy of a birth mother to nurture comparered to a non-birth mother/father. I've no doubt that many birth mothers are rubbish at nurturing their young (mine certainly was) but it can always be traced back to the absolute lack of emotional, logistical and societal support available to mothers under our current system.

minx's views and acronyms have come about, the, because this is a field which is steeped in patriarchy

But Dittany that is simply not what happens in the mental health system. There is a total willingness to look at the contribution of circumstance, and the interplay of circumsntance and self, and organic illness. When this is done poorly it is not because of any systematic patriarchal bias. It is because of the severe lack of money in the mental health system, which means that short-term cheap therapies are foisted on patients. Women suffer from this. So do the poor and the inarticulate. So do black people, especially black men, who are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.

There is such a thing as mental illness with an organic basis. And there is mental illness with no organic basis.

Dittany, In your last post you emphasise the value of looking at the whole person. I agree with that strongly. But I find that you tend not to look at the person. You tend to look at the effects of their treatment at the hands of a patriarchal system. To me this is strictly analogous to what you condemn in the 'pathologising' of women's experience: if we look to a medical model too readily and exclusively we lose sight of the person, and discount her particularity and selfhood. Similarly if we perceive the same person through a particular sociological model we lose sight of the person -- we see the social pathology instead of her, we discount her particularity and selfhood.

We need flexibility of thought. We need to be open to all the aspects of her condition, which may include organic illness, may include sexual abuse, may include neither.

No, I don't work in the mental health system. I am a client of it.

Have to go out in a mo so may have skipped a load of people saying the same as me.

I was asked about DV and lots of other things with both my pregnancies, they were standard questions in the book thing that you have to take to all your appointments.

I was also asked a stack of questions when i started my CBT on the NHS for perinatal anxiety - whether I was or had been subjected to sexual abuse, financial abuse, emotional abuse, was an ex offender, all sorts.

These questions are quite standard IME.

Eleison, your point about mental illness being organic is highly controversial. Many clinical psychologists do not believe that any mental health problems are organic, including schizophrenia.
Oliver James, though not the most popular clinical psychologist on MN, is one of those who believe all mental health problems are related to circumstances.

WHen OJ came on for his webchat I asked him about this and he said that the brains of women who were sexually abused as a child have been found to be different to the brains of people who have never been abused. IN other words, abuse in childhood results in the brain wiring itself differently in order to cope. A primal coping mechanism, most likely.

The patriarchal mental health system is quick to say that these brain differences are genetic, but they are not.

I then asked him if a the brain damage incurred by a person's early experiences could be reversed and he said there there is growing evidence to show that it can, and that in the next 10 years hard evidence will be found that a brain can heal from these traumas with the right help.

I'm thinking of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, and in some cases depresssion. It think it is fairly consensual that these or at least some of them? have an organic basis.

Freud's thought ranged over an incredibly wide area and I am fairly confident that some of it has stood the test of time. A lot of it hasn't. The best-surviving elements tend to be his contributions to a picture of the structure and dynamics of the psyche -- the broad concept of repression and the return of the repressed survive in an evolved form. Of course much of what he said, especially about women and girls, was wrong. But why on earth would we expect the contributions of a great turn of the 20th century figure not to have been influenced by the prevailing sexism of the time. You take what works and ditch the rest.

x-post sakura. I accept that there is controversy about organic basis. But the view that no mental illness has any organic basis is very much a minority one.

It is a minority one because the mental health system is designed by and steeped in patriarchy.

Freud was a product of his time. He originally wrote a paper about all the female patients of his who had been sexually abused as children (often by their father) and this was naturally ridiculed by the Victorian males who ran the show at the time. So he re-wrote it saying it was in their mind. I agree that Freud's work is of some value.

Freud's work on the ego, the super ego adn the id was brilliant. I regard it as a sort of decoding of how people tick.

I mean Freud's work was of value, it's a shame he sold out women so badly

Why would it be a product of patriarchy to claim an organic basis? Historically of course the asymmetrical claim that women's organs (the dreaded womb) produced pathology of a sort from which men are free is absurdly sexist. But why is is a product of patriarchy to, say, acknowledge the autonomy from personality of something like OCD? In fact there are posters on MN terrified that their mothering has produced the symptoms of OCD in an otherwise happy child, who deserve the reassurance that this condition (which affects men at least as often as women) is commonly regarded as being a function of distorted brain chemistry.

Of course, someone with an organically ocnditioned illness like OCD or bipolar disorder mustn't be reduced to being the bearer of that condition. There are other elements to their unhappiness that co-exist with or supervene on their illness. And the mental health system owes it to them to keep the whole person in view and support them in all aspects of their distress.

... in fact one of Freud's massive fails was to give a complex NON-organic account of ODC in terms of its sufferers' struggles with intensely vicious and sadistic wishes to inflict harm on loved ones. That model of OCD held sway for a long time and probably caused untold suffering.

OCD is connected to control, like anorexia. People who have these disorders are often suffering from a lack of control in their environment. Today I watched BBC world news of yet another meeting of world leaders. Not a woman in sight. And it is these men who decide the fates of all the women around them> WOmen literally have no control over society and the world at large, and often not even in their own homes or workplaces. OCD is a perfectly normal manifestation of the need to regain control.
A worried or anxious mother, one who thinks she is damaging her child, may not be getting all the support and reassurance she needs.

To claim mental health has an organic basis is racist sexist and classist when you think that women, minorities and the poor are those most likely to suffer. Is this Darwinian? Are white males most likely to be born of sound mind? I think not. I rather think it's circumstancial

I believe that sadism is non-organic. I have read paedophiles' own accounts of the abuse they inflicted on children written in their jail cell and published on the net by a psychologist who wanted to analyze what made them tick. Every paedophile has been abused, or at least the ones in that example. IN the case I read, it was by his father. If you trace the childhood of every single dictator or murderer without exception you find it was abusive.
Some people make it out without becoming abusers themselves, but every single abuser has been abused.

This is again a product of patriarchy, because women, mothers, have no power over men to stop this abuse in many cases. THink of all the sad times a daughter has told her mother about the abuse from her father/step-father only to discover her mother doesn't believe her. Her mother is dependant financially and emotionally on this man and in the past would not be able to divorce him. How can a mother live with herself knowing that her spouse is abusing her child? Well, she can't, so she denies.

yy to that. When I used the word sadism I wasn't at all referring to sexual offences, which I absolutely agree are very much the product of a patriarchal society; and I agree that the mental health system, and many other institutions, have failed women and children hideously in respect of sexual violence.

Sakura, this blog might interest you

neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/

thank you unwind. Will have a look.

It's an easy (and convenient) conclusion to say that sufferers of OCD are the way they are because they were born like that. Society, the world, is a mess and if we blame the victims who are suffering from the fall-out of the power-wielding minority of males who reap the gains of our current system, rather than looking at the system itself, then we collaborate with that very system that is causing all this suffering in the first place.