Mental illness in women.

[Neoma]

I've been told that more women than men end up in psychward. Until of course, the economy crashes and men get particularly stressed over not having a job, house, car, etc. And that women remember more emotional turmoils in their lives than men. I tested this on my brother... You know, totally scientifically, to see if he'd remember certain horrible events. He did not remember... But then, he could just have a poor memory.

The people who said this worked in psychward, so I'm not sure if that's true. It looks to be true by being there myself 6 times (before I was diagnosed with bipolar, and after they gave me a pill that made my bipolar 10 times worse, those bastards) and it kind of seems to be true. It seemed to be a 5 men to 10-15 women ratio.

So, maybe this is just me, but sexism might have an intsy bitsy part in that. Being abused emotionally, religiously put down, raped, and well... the results of wife beaters. (Take note, if you feel like going homicidal on someones ass, they let you cool down in psychward.)

I've also known someone who has been threatened to be put in psychward for having her toe out of line. (Being an independent woman who's atheist.) As you can imagine, it's a serious threat. You only need(ed?) two people to commit someone to psychward. And this wasn't the worst story I've ever heard when it comes to controlling women by either threatening to make her look to be crazy or making her unstable. All they have to do with women is, "cowboy them up" after all.

[WingDinger]

1. It makes sense, evolution wise, for men not to remember for instance

the look on the face of the human they slayed in battle. The beast that almost killed him while hunting etc.

[Neoma]

2. When it comes to killing...

I think women are more into poison. Because they know they'd have to clean it up.

I come from a family with sick humor, ignore me.

[WingDinger]

3. You are awesome. Wish there were more radical humorists here.

And all jurors read enough context to see it.

[get the red out]

4. I believe this but

I also believe that it works against men as well as women. Women are more likely to seek help for mental/emotional problems, from various articles I've read through the years. It also appears that the common belief that a "man just needs to blow off some steam" is frequently applied until the man blowing off steam ends up in jail or prison rather than the psych ward, that's just conjecture on my part.

We had an event that rocked my community a few years ago, a man shot and killed his wife, then the EMT that came to her aid. It turned out that he firmly believed hostile aliens from another planet had taken over their bodies, he had been delusional for some time before this event. A woman would have probably already found herself in the psych ward before the murders took place.

But then again I truly believe, and have seen this happen in my own family, that women will be drugged out of their minds to shut them up if they suffer from anything that is likely to bring any embarrassment mental health wise, even if their actual malady doesn't need extreme drug treatment. I know this especially happened 25 years ago and before. This is devastating to the point of lives being literally destroyed.

[Neoma]

5. Actually, with delusions like that, gender has nothing to do with getting help or not.

They can get paranoid over the tiniest things, and they believe cameras are everywhere. (Top reason why cellphones aren't allowed in psychwards: they have cameras in them.) Some do not seek help because there was a mark on the door or something, and they take that to be a bad sign and decide to leave.

[iverglas]

6. I think gender might have something to do with getting/not getting help ;)

Within a family or household, the husband/father is almost always in the position of greater power from the outset.

It could be more difficult in various ways for his female partner to have him involuntarily placed in a mental health facility than for him to do it if his female partner exhibited similar symptoms, precisely because of that power imbalance.

A woman might trust her judgment less, feel less likely to be taken seriously, feel that it would violate her wifely duty of loyalty to try to have such action taken, just feel more powerless all round ...

A man might be more likely to exercise his greater power over his female partner to have her treated. However, doing that can also result in a woman who genuinely needs mental health care not getting it: Andrea Yates.

A woman would also be less likely to use involuntarily mental health placement as a way of exercising power in itself. That is certainly what many women endured in the past, and we would be hard pressed to find examples of men whose wives successfully did that to them.

And yes, we know that too often it was a way of controlling women who were not mentally ill at all, who were promiscuous girls or women with depression, for example.


My mother's aunt, born about 1895, was committed to a psychiatric hospital not long after WWI. My mum didn't even know about her until the aunt died in the 1940s. She was said to have had a breakdown from grief after her oldest brother (single and with no children) was killed in the last days of that war. I have always wondered what the real story was -- although such collapses actually were not unheard of. Her mother was dead, her father was a strange duck who was 70 years old when this happened, and she was living in the men's boarding house her father operated. One can only speculate.