Mental Illness and Gender

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Men and women develop different kinds of mental illness because of the different stresses and societal pressure they face. Freud postulated that women were more prone to neurosis because women suffered from aggression towards the self stemming from developmental issues. But current research finds that women are not inherently predisposed to certain mental illnesses while men are predisposed to others. Instead, societal factors play a major role in the development of mental illness. Industrialization exacerbated the divide between work and home, pushing women further into the private sphere and men into the public sphere. This had important ramifications on gender roles and, in turn, the kind of mental illnesses that occurred most often in men vs. women. Other factors that contribute to the gender divide in mental illness include the pressure on men not to show their emotions and the fact that women, on average, have lower self esteem and sense of control than men. When certain factors, such as work outside the domestic sphere, are controlled, women and men tend towards a fuller range of mental illnesses at approximately equal rates. In some cases when such factors were cInsert non-formatted text hereontrolled, women showed lower rates of mental illness on the whole (Rosenfield, Sarah. “Gender and Mental Health: Do Women Have More Psychopathology, Men More, or Both the Same (and Why)” printed in A handbook for the Study of Mental Health ed. Horwitz, A and Scheid, T. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Nancy Chodrow’s object relations theory postulates that because women are mostly responsible for parenting, mothers emphasize the importance of relationships to their daughters while pushing their sons into independence. Sarah Rosenfield uses this theory to argue that males and females develop different kinds of symptoms when they are mentally ill. Men display externalized symptoms, expressing problematic emotions in outward behavior. Women tend to develop internalized symptoms, where problematic feelings are directed towards the self. In accordance with the internalized-externalized dichotomy, women are more commonly diagnosed with mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression, phobias, and Borderline Personality Disorder. Men more commonly experience substance abuse, antisocial disorders, and violence (Rosenfield, 1999). Both men and women are more likely to be institutionalized if their diagnosis is not typical of their gender (Martha Lang, 2006).

When considering gender and mental illness, one must look beyond biology, which explains little about the different rates at which men and women develop different mental illnesses, and look towards society. Rigid gender roles enforced by society often lead to different expression of frustration with the system. This frustration often affects the mind and manifests according to its source. Learned behavior also comes into play; men and women learn different ways to channel their emotions and thus develop different emotional frustrations and ways of expressing these frustrations.

Popular culture, though usually an agent of enforcing gender norms, does not tend to depict the gender divide in mental illness. Rather, when it comes to fictional depictions in mass media, the tendency is toward whichever symptoms best add to the drama or humor of a film, television show, or story, regardless of whether or not these symptoms are usually expressed by people of a certain gender with a particular mental illness.

Mental Illness