If you're a woman living in the United States chances are you've heard something along the lines of this...
"My ex-girlfriend was the worst! She's always asking me to be like, present for her emotionally.
Like what does that even mean? Women are crazy sometimes."
[Sound of record player needle scratching.]
Unfortunately the intersection of mental health stigma and sexism is all too common in our culture.
Women are often depicted as "crazy," emotionally unstable, overly sensitive, or hysterical.
This is what I like to refer to as The Hysterical Woman Stereotype. [Ding!]
Not only is the stereotype used to disregard women's thoughts, feelings, and
opinions, but it also paints mental illness in an extremely negative light.
On one hand the hysterical woman stereotype demonizes women who express their emotions.
On the other hand it portrays mental illness as a defect
that can be used to write off mentally ill people altogether.
The stereotype functions to categorize women and mentally ill people as abnormal, weak,
incompetent, and inferior to social majority groups such as men and non mentally ill people.
Some of you might be wondering where this stereotype came about in the first place.
Well, the construction of mental illness and the construction of femininity are actually pretty similar.
Historically mental illness has been constructed as a mental defect or the lack of ability to function in mainstream society.
If non mentally ill people set the standard for how "normal people" should function in
everyday life, then mentally ill people by definition are considered dysfunctional and not the norm.
Social views about mental illness, like disability, are rarely articulated explicitly but still remain deeply ingrained in our cultural consciousness.
Mentally ill people are stereotyped as emotionally unstable, untrustworthy, incompetent, lazy, weak,
dependent, and even dangerous. Not only does the stigmatization of mental illness create
prejudice against mentally ill people, but it also makes it more likely that
mentally ill people will be discriminated against in larger social
institutions, like schools housing and the workforce.
It's also extremely ironic that we label the mentally ill as violent and dangerous, because on top of discrimination mental health
stigma puts mentally ill people at a higher risk of being abused or sexually assaulted.
This violence directed at mentally ill people can be perpetuated
by individuals, but it can also stem from government-run institutions such as mental hospitals and the criminal justice system.
In her incredibly important piece on disability theory Emory University Professor Rosemarie
Garland-Thomson coined the idea of the ability/disability system.
According to Garland-Thomson the ability/disability system is a pervasive cultural system
that stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations.
This system can also be applied to mental illness and other mental variations like autism or what
some people describe as neurodiversity. Neurodivergent, a term coined in the late
nineties, is used to describe people whose minds function differently than
what societal standards consider normal. Activists who use the
neurodiversity paradigm argue that, "Neurodiversity is a natural and valuable
form of human diversity." and the inequality that neuro-diverse people
experience is a result of social power dynamics and not an innate biological inadequacy.
The neurodiversity paradigm and the ability/disability system are
really helpful when looking at mental health stigma because they attribute the
discrimination that mentally ill people face to cultural factors rather than
demonizing mental illness. "But what about the construction of femininity in
relation to mental health stigma?" you might be asking... maybe... I don't know.
According to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson feminist disability theory illustrates
that disability and womanhood are not natural states of inferiority but
culturally fabricated myths. Similar to the social construction of race.
Women have historically been stereotyped as dependent, frail, incompetent,
unintelligent, and submissive. Like mental illness the state of womanhood has
similarly been conflated with being flawed or inadequate. According to Simone
de Beauvoir's The Second Sex men are constructed as the default gender
whereas women are constructed in relation to them and
almost always as inferior. De Beauvoir argues that masculinity represents both the
positive and the neutral whereas femininity represents only the negative.
Damn... Additionally, "feminine perceived" behavior is also stigmatized.
For instance women are frequently stereotyped as being too emotional or hypersensitive.
According to a 2014 study women are more likely than
men to be characterized as expressing negative or inappropriate emotions in
response to external stressors. I don't know about you but I've seen some of my
brother's reactions to "external stressors" and I would argue that
punching a hole in your door is less than appropriate. The study states,
"People perceive women, relative to men, as experiencing more distress, embarrassment,
fear, guilt, sadness, shame, and shyness."
On the other hand men are considered to be more rational logical and in control of situations.
Aside from being linked to a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, gender
and ideologies surrounding femininity specifically rely on negative cultural
stigmas surrounding mental health. Women, regardless of mental health status, are
often labeled as hysterical or crazy simply for expressing their emotions.
Overall women receive more mental health diagnoses than men, and these diagnoses
often use gendered criteria that specifically target women. This hierarchy
of gendered behaviours pathologizes feminine coded reactions to stress as symptoms
of mental illness, whereas masculine coded reactions are set as the default
for mentally healthy behavior.
Therefore, feminine coded behavior is not only attached to a hierarchy of
masculinity and femininity that devalues women, but it's also attached to a
completely separate hierarchy of ability and disability that devalues the mentally ill.
So next time you think about calling your ex-girlfriend "crazy" for expressing
her emotions, you should probably reconsider, because calling one woman
crazy really only ends up hurting all women and all mentally ill people and
makes it easier to justify discriminating against them.
This video is part of a series for Everyday Feminism, an online magazine
that helps you stand up to and break down everyday oppression.
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