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!

"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"

Excellent point I think.

Well, if the claim I made was that all mental illness is exclusively organic, then the fact that poor people, women, racially oppressed groups suffer from more mental illness would entail the claim that members of those groups were more likely to have some organic condition. But I didn't say that.

To claim that some mental illness has some organic basis would only make any kind of claim about a particular social group if you showed that that particular organically conditioned illness was more prevalent in a particular social group. OCD, for example, shows an equal prevalence among men and women. If there were an organically conditioned mental illness that was more common among a certain social group (I'm not aware of any) then it would make sense to acknowledge that and devote resources arrordingly. But, afaik, the demographics of mental illenss are much much more to with things like poverty, social exclusion, etc, and so entail nothing about the genetic superiority of privileged groups. I only wanted to reject the claim that no mental ill health had any organic basis.

But you cannot make any claim for organic basis at all when you take a brief look at the mess society is in.
Mental health problems are the normal bi-product of unbearable circumstances.
Only in a perfect world and society could you make any claim that there was an organic basis to mental illness.

sorry, that was garbled. I mean, you can only hypothesize an organic basis if we already live in a utopia.
Any researcher aiming to claim there is an organic basis is biased. His research is biased because of the messed up environment we live in. In other words, there is no control for the research

ok, so where does that leave men who suffer from one of these? i know several men who have had life-long problems with mental health, but other siblings in their families don't. i realise we're not going to resolve the causes of mental health in this forum, but aren't we kind of assuming that women suffer because of men? so, why, then, do men suffer?

i have no idea of the numbers of men v women for mental illness, but is it possible that they present themselves to doctors LESS because of patriarchy?

Which means, "would this person I claim has an organic-based mental illness still be mentally ill if she was born in feminist utopia?"
there is no way of knowing.

male children are also abused. Children suffer terribly under patriarchy. I think children are a feminist priority.

kickas, there is a long history of mental health being a women thing. For a long time society belived women were mentally ill because they were women, not because they had no property rights, financial independance, reproductive rights, right to divorce...

But the absence of a control would tell against any hypothesised explanation for these sorts of suffering, if the item being explained was the prevalence in society of the suffering. So that doesn't tell againt the organic hypothesis uniquely. And in fact such hypotheses wouldn't tend to be made at the level of society anyway: they'd be made by examination of individuals, not social demographics, where controls are attainable.

But I absolutely agree that explanations of things as complex as human individuals and their suffering are so nuanced and complex as to make it hard to extract the relative significance of organic, social, cognitive, existential, etc, causes and features. That is why I made my plea for a fluid and rounded attention to the whole person.

sorry, x-posts. Mine was to Sakura Tue 09-Nov-10 15:15:19

Thanks, all, for the dicussion. I must bow out now as I am ignoring 1000000 things I must do.

No dittany.

I believe that human beings are born with 'traits'. I think yes, there is an organic basis to these traits. A mother of more than one baby knows that babies are born as complete little packages of personality.
But some innate personality traits perhaps are less likely to cope with abuse. A very sensitive child, for example, may the the one tipped over the edge by the abuse into suicide as an adult or what have you. A child with a more robust persona may end up becoming an abuser him/herself. Or vice versa.

SO a person may be more susceptible to mental illness because of their innate personality. But either way that mental illness has most definitely come about by environmental circumstances. If the same child had been raised in difference circumstances, they would have no mental health problems.

I also believe society is getting further and further away from what human beings have evolved to cope with. Lack of green spaces, indoors all day, stressed parents etc. I would say that mental health problems are due to keep increasing this century until something gives.

x-posts. The 'no' was to your earlier post.
I already said that penis envy was a Freud fail. I really wish you could discuss more reasonably dittany becuae you are knowledgeable and have interesting things to say. But unfortunatley I usually shy away from any thread that you are on.

In fact, when you think of how much stress children are under even without abuse and patriarchy, just take exam stress for a start, it seems almost obtuse to suggest there is an organic basis to mental illness. The default line of thought should be that it's environmental.

Yes, sakura. A compination of organic and environmental features is very often the way that mental illness comes about.

Really going now -- unless some snide comment after I have left pulls me back in.

In fact, hiding thread to avoid that happening. Thanks for that dittany.

x posts. I thought your "no" was "no, I'm not going to stop saying it's organic". sorry, obtuse was harsh.

you can't say that inborn personality traits are the same as organic mental illness. It's just not on the same level.