"Mentally Ill?"

[bloom]

from http://amananta.wordpress.com/2006/05/05/mentally-ill/ "Screaming into the Void"


Mentally Ill?
May 5th, 2006
Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Welbutrin, Valium, Xanax, Ativan. PTSD, depression, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, BPD, Social Anxiety Disorder, Anxiety Disorder. What do all of these things have in common besides the obvious, that they are psychiatric conditions and psychiatric medications meant to treat these conditions?

Answer - all of these affect women more often than men by a significant ratio. Now, to anyone with a feminist consciousness, this should not be surprising in the slightest - cross culturally and world wide, women are oppressed. Oppression is scary and depressing, oppression saps your energy and kills your dreams. Endemic oppression such as woman hating leaves you no place to escape from it. There is nowhere a woman can go without being reminded that she is considered less important, not one single place on earth. Not in her daily work, where she is almost invariably paid less or not paid at all; not in marriage, where she inevitably loses legal rights; not in deliberate spinsterhood, where she receives unwanted pity and social disapproval; not in motherhood, where as a married woman, she is considered to be the default caretaker of children who belong to her husband, or as a single mother, where she is made the scapegoat for society's ills; not even if she is a lesbian separatist on a farm in the middle of nowhere, for the mere fact of knowing that right outside the gate lies a world of people who would gladly burn her home around her ears for her temerity in carving out a space for herself.

<big snip>

The patriarchy benefits by labelling sad and angry women as "sick" rather than admitting that they have every reason to be sad and angry and that the system needs to change. Admitting that women have a reason to be sad and angry would mean patriarchy supporters would have to admit that rape is a crime for which men should be punished, instead of nominally naming rape a crime yet convicting only 2% of REPORTED rapists and discouraging over half of girls and women who are raped from reporting it at all. Admitting that women have reasons to be sad and angry would mean they would have to admit that a system which ensures women will usually be paid less than men, consist of most of the impoverished people on the planet, and are discouraged or outright barred from higher payer and more socially prestigious professions, would have to change so that men have an equal chance of landing the shit jobs they've been foisting on women for substandard pay or no pay for thousands of years. Admitting that women have reasons to feel the way they do would mean they would have to LISTEN to our complaints instead of writing them off as the rantings of a crazy woman. And admitting that women have good reasons to be angry and sad would mean the psychiatric/psychological professions would lose big bucks from inappropriately drugging women or sending them into years of psychotherapy to try to understand what strange and buried reason they have for being so "irrationally" angry.

I used to take SSRIs, I used to go to therapy. I will be honest and say yes, I do sometimes still take anti-anxiety drugs. Sometimes it is the only way for me to cope wih this world which is so cruel and insane and is filled with people who think I should be a doormat who smiles all the time while eating like a bird so I can remain at a socially acceptable weight, spend most of my free time cleaning my house until it looks like a picture out of "Women's Day" magazine, always put my own needs and wants after those of my husband and child, remove all body hair that does not grow on my scalp no matter how painful and time-consuming and expensive and utterly pointless it is, and be happy to spend the rest of my life in this pink collar ghetto while being gushingly happy that I have "a good job". So as I said above, I don't blame any woman for being on drugs to help her cope with life in a milleniums-old patriarchy, memories of past abuse and the vast indifference of the world to her pain, or the constant struggle to keep what little legal rights to her own bodily integrity there still are.

But one thing I do ask of those of you like me, who have been on the psychiatric bandwagon, is to stop blaming yourself. Stop blaming your brains for having "bad chemistry", stop blaming your bodies, stop blaming your hormones. Stop blaming yourself for feeling sad and miserable and enraged. I don't believe you are sick for having these feelings - I believe you are reacting in a completely understandable way to a world that hates you. And I want to extend my cyber support to you in whatever you feel you need to do to ease your pain.

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