by Justin Brass Content warning: This post discusses personal experiences with mental health, and sensitive topics of BDD (body dysmorphia disorder). Please read with caution. The social identities of people are categorized through a psychiatric model of studying mental health, which treats women’s mental health quite problematically. This is due to how psychiatry is presently structured in relation to its own historical biases, which have apathologized women’s experiences for many centuries through feminine distain. Today, this distain is found in many examples of scrutiny towards women’s health, both physical and mental, which are regulated through a variety of derogatory behaviours like using sexist phrases (e.g., “she’s on her period so that is why she is acting unwell”), mislabelling/diagnosing of female behaviour as pathological (e.g., “she is acting unstable so she must have a mental illness”), and neglect by the structural bias of psychiatry. Such that, when we see physicians because we are worried about our mental health, we are taught to reserve parts of our mental suffering in ways that are very specifically based on our gender. This also teaches many women to belittle themselves when they do feel mentally unsound, and instructs the rest of us to think critically about how we present ourselves when looking to receive the best kind of help for our mental health (i.e., by asking questions like how do we want to be perceived). In this post, I outline the concerns of how gender bias affects the treatment of men and women’s mental health and how many women fear being apathologized because psychiatry categorizes them into misdiagnosed, disrespected, and misrepresented groups. As well, I will compare these ideas to my personal experiences of gender bias from a psychiatric standpoint, which will be used to explain the importance of convincing psychologists to study how these systems reflect our gender biases more critically. For many years women have been scrutinized for their mental health as femininity has been associated with negative mental health outcomes such as hysteria and outspokenness, which are terms that have been used to categorize women into an unpredictable or ‘puzzling’ subgroup of our society. This culture is problematic because psychiatry and the DSM are highly gender biased, as they approach psychiatric health from a medical model that categorizes different ways in which people suffer based on how their state resembles a biological illness (e.g., diabetes, which can be understood pathologically from inside the body via insulin and sugar regulation). In doing so, the psychiatric discipline is neglectful to several intersectional measures of understanding, which approach mental health and illness through understanding the many layers of providing a diagnosis. That is, since mental health is comprised of a state of mind that is much harder to isolate within a single person, it is therefore inappropriate to categorize all women into a specific set of circumstances (e.g., being hysteric, sensitive, vulnerable). Such that, there are many factors that influence the ways that people suffer but are still neglected by the psychiatric system, which places people into biological groups based on the distinctions around the ways that people feel mentally unwell. Thus, in this field, we have built ourselves into believing that everything depends on receiving a diagnosis, which is based on that there is no recognition of the factors that influence women’s mental identity. In fact, in the context of femininity, women can attract much worse than a psychiatric diagnosis, as there is only so far that they can break away from gender stereotypes before facing backlash by society. Especially in the instance of being a woman, there are real and severe sanctions for how women behave or when they develop into being overly masculine or overly feminine individuals. As a man myself, I have only faced this kind of gender scrutiny when my mental health matched certain feministic features such as vulnerability or hysteria, which were labels that were placed on me because whenever I was upset, I was told that I was acting like a woman. Hence, I believe men are categorized by the psychiatric world in different ways, which may permit, accept, and rationalize the behaviour of masculinity even when it is greatly misguided or biased. For example, across the United States there have been many examples of active male shooters who have fallen back on excuses of having “a bad day” or poor mental health as an excuse for why they decided to go out into society and kill people. In doing so, the system very clearly favours ‘man’, which is based on the idea that men’s mental stability is more sound and important to women. Hence, I believe instilling categories into our psychiatric framework of understanding femininity and gender bias is beneficial only when it accounts for the effects of individual experiences on mental health. This is a more integrative and intersectional approach, which would look at a case of an active male shooter and ask questions that go beyond the claims that he is having a bad day. In turn, psychologists can ideally account for the stereotypes of what it means to be a “woman” and what it means to be a “man”, which influence how each gender is viewed by society and psychiatry as a whole. It is evident that using a diagnosis is a way that psychiatry subdues women into specific (or 'lesser') groups. Such that, if a man were to receive a diagnosis, it would be seen for a more legitimate reason by society's standards. Justin is an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph, and is part of the Romantic Relationships & Anxiety Studies Student Lab. Do you want to highlight a concept in psychology through a blogpost? Make sure you fill out our submission form and send it back to us by email so we can showcase your ideas! Resources and Additional Links
Telehealth: 1-866-797-0000 Mental Health Helpline: 1-866-531-2600 Romantic Relationships & Anxiety Studies Student Lab: https://justinbrass49.wixsite.com/website
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