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!

Sakura, I agree with you to the extent that I think the vast proportion of mental illness does not have any organic component that's my take on my own depression, for example. And even in the case of organically conditioned illness, it seems clear to say that the actual illness will often (usually?) be an interplay of organic and environmental factors. I was only reacting to the assertion that no mental illness has any organic factor. That is an astonishingly strong claim based on what?

And it isn't true to say that there is no evidence for organic factors in some mental illnsss. There is a host of evidence that is as good as the evdience in favour of the role of other factors.

Really going now. I'm sure you understand the difficulty of leaving a thread when you feel your views are being misunderstood.

As for a Freud, I don't care to defend him as a person. Only to say that there is much insight among the many mistakes in his thought.

I do lots and lots of risk assessments, you end up using acronyms! when I'm with the person I usually ask what they would call it, what is meaningful to them. And when did I say we didn't look at context?? I repeatedly saying to other professionals that we need to look at the context in which any behaviour occurred rather than taking it at face value. E.g. a 7 year old putting a shoe lace to his neck in front of teachers and saying he wants to kill himself (just an example), there's clearly loads and loads of context and the first task after keeping him safe is to try to manage the systems around that child so he is less distressed.

re environment and temperament, it's an ongoing argument, serious mental illness does seem to run in families but it may well be about learnt behaviour rather than genetics. I do beleive that children are born with an innate temperament but risk and protective factors have a massive role in the development of mental health difficulties.

It's true some CBT can be weilded inexpertly like a blunt instrument! I'm a bit about some of the protagonists of it despite being trained. I don't believe in a one size fits all approach which is why I want to learn more about interpersonal and cognitive analytic and 3rd wave cognitive therapy.

Finally patriarchy or not I think in oir role as mothers women can be our own worst enemies, we are competitive and fanatical about things such as breasfeeding which although nutrition wise is best for the baby (I bf both of mine at the expense of my emotional well being) is restrictive and a from of enslavement for the mother (IMO not professional here!). Other women moan about their husbands but they infantalise them in their treatment of them, they are controlling and martyr like in their selfless devotion to motherhood and the Dads become hapless and inept. I've seen it so many times over and over again. And then the mother complains it's like having an extra child? Who's fault is that?

And I'd be careful if anyone wants to go upholding Oliver james as an "expert", the man has many critics and some of his views could be interpreted as pretty mysogynistic.

' I think in oir role as mothers women can be our own worst enemies,'

do you not think we have worse enemies than ourselves?! because I definitely think so!

a little bit of competitiveness over breastfeeding, say, is pretty trivial IMO compared with the financial penalty for having children, for example, or the damage done by formula companies, or other stuff that the patriarchy does....
And as for dads becoming hapless and inept, and whose fault it is - er, perhaps partly the woman's, but mostly the dad's! How come women have to take responsibility for their own behaviour and men don't?

i have just started reading 'the outliers' which examines why some people get to be 'super people' - you know, the big success stories. it argues pretty strongly that the environment is what creates the success, not the person. it also, therefore, assumes that the environment is responsible for why some people aren't so successful - which would be relevant to this discussion.

'freakonomics' had a similar take on the success of kids in school - it is their upbringing, not their own personality, which is the greatest influence.

yet we still blame the victim ANd idolise the successful.

(school bus here, got to go get dd)

There is an element of organic in mental illness, to try to argue a polarised opposition to this really just shows how much you don't know. With degenerative mental illness such as dementia and schizophrenia, explaining twin studies purely in terms of social construction is difficult even for fans of social constructionism such as myself. Anyway, I'm not sold on everything having an organic cause, particularly personality disorders which are a whole different ball game anyway.

But lots of men suffer from anxiety, depression, bi-polar disorder, OCD, schizophrenia etc. Including men who have every class privilege going. So I think there are causes of mental ill health other than Evil Patriarchy and Evil Capitalism, somehow.

SGB more men are sectioned under the mental health act than women, more men are diagnosed with more violent personality disorders. There are far more men in prison than women, 70% of whom are thought to have a mental health problem. More men also complete suicide. It could be argued looking at those stats (particularly suicide) that men have a shitter time of it than women.

FWIW for those who are accusing me of being cold and the like i don't like the label of borderline personality disorder either, it's critical and harsh sounding for individuals who're struggling with mood swings, emptiness, self loathing, interpersonal difficulties and fear of abandonment and all the other shit that comes with it. However it's the label that's used, there is a movement to describe people with these difficulties with something else. Each and every person who'd been diagnosed with it is different, but for many people to finally have the diagnosis can be a relief. they can give a name to what's going on for them, they can research therapies and seek help and begin to understand themselves better rather than living lives governed by medication and crisis led interventions with numerous different professionals.

Mumsnet is full of hypocrisy, I' being derided for my researched, opinion on Sylvia Plath after having read loads about her and Hughes for the last 20 years. However many on this forum see fit to diagnoses narcissistic PD in posters partners and other relatives on the basis of a few paragraphs from someone they know little about . It's rife on AIBU threads and relationships too. The cries of "leave him he's NPD!!" because he came in a few hours late and refused to get up with the kids because he had a hangover trivialise what can be a very distressing and dangerous condition for those who have to live with it. And before i get flamed I'm not talking about the NPD support thread here.

All the other thread where a poster is pissed off usually with good reason and there's always at least one or two posters who wade in and cry "he's got NPD!". It happens.

Not every bloke who's an a**hole sometimes has NPD.

Anyway I've talked a lot about this, I've stated my position, tried to be articulate. i think that's it now for me on this thread.

SGB, I've covered that. Male children are abused too. VIolence, emotional and sexual abuse as a child. All those are the catalysts for the disorders you describe.

Minx, men of a certain economic status have a shitter time of it than men higher up the patriarchal pecking order. Feminists have always acknowledged this and it's a "what about the men" argument that comes up every other week on here.
Men and women are built differently, wired differently if you like. WOmen tend to aim their suffering inwards towards themselves. Menact outwards and are violent. It is also more acceptable for men to be violent than women. 2 women a week are murdered by their spouse, for example. Men are not dropping like flies to the same degree. I would say that women have a shitter time of it than men.

Eleison, the problem with the organic disorder is that as you've said yourself, while it could possibly be a factor, there is no evidence to show that it is and lots of evidence to show that overwhelmingly mental health problems are environmental. Which begs the question of why it is getting so much attention...

...and that brings us to the lucrative pharmaceutical industry which has a vested interest in claiming that mental health problems are innate and organic.

From my favourite academic,

"At the start of the 1990s it was reported that more sedatives, tranquilisers and other such drugs were being dispensed per inmate in British prisons than in its psychiatric institutions. The highest recorded 'doping' was of an average of 941 doses per woman in the same year in Holloway women's prison in London.

Worldwide, at the same time, a single company was making a billion US dollars a year just from selling Valium .By the end of the 1990s some 11 million children in the US alone were being prescribed Ritalin to calm them down and 83 million adults were being prescribed Prosac or its equivalent.

It is being reported more and more often that to stabilize populations '...mass treatment options are not far off.' These could include anything from over-the-counter sales of former prescription drugs, to more sinister suggestions which would begin with compulsory medicating in prisons.'

IN addition, people in power who benefit from a system based on the feminization of poverty and women's free or cheap labour combined with lack of power. The lucrative porn industry can also be connected to sexual assaults but governments do not want to shut that down. THose in power want plenty of prostituted women available for themselves and other men. These things could be shut down and changed if those in power wanted them to and that would improve women's mental health statistics.

Minx, people on here think that OJ saying the mother-child bond is significant is akin to misogyny because he wants to get women back in the kitchen That's not the case at all.

Dementia is a degenerative disease. Why is that being classed in the same group as those who are reacting to childhood abuse
The jury is out about schizophrenia, as I said earlier

There is more to dementia than neurobiology. There is a socially constructed element to it too. In all the debate about schizophrenia, I still don't think anyone is ruling out any organic component. I dunno how much reading you've done around the subject but i'm surprised that people are choosing to ignore this aspect. You'd be oversimplifying it just like you did re dementia.

The default line of thought is that these mental health problems must have an organic component to them. That is the 'general consensus' as Eleison put it.

Well.. that's strange when there is zero evidence of that, and overwhelming evidence to show that environment influences mental health.

My point is that the over-emphasis on 'organic components' is handy because it means that the "faulty" individual becomes the focus rather than the faulty society and circumstances (at a huge profit to the pharmaceutical industry)

What I mean is, without a control (i.e a perfect society) how can one begin a research hypothesis on how mental health issues stem from organic factors?
Well, you can't.
If a researcher personally believes there is an organic component to mental health problems, and carries out research to that effect, his research can only ever be biased.

thank you for those posts SaF.

Organic components, my arse

Swallowedafly how and .

My business parner used to be a psychiatric nurse, she also worked with teenagers. She would agree with a lot of what you say. It's why she isn't a psychiatric nurse any more.

She used to get bollocked by the doctors for letting the patients talk about their experiences - the doctors used to say that it 'upset them', made their behaviour worse and made them too difficult to 'manage'.