Mental Health

Mental health is a vital part of our overall health and our lived experience. Our mental and emotional states affect nearly every aspect of our bodies, including breathing and blood pressure, the regulation of our digestive systems and nervous systems, our perception of pain, and our ability to get enough rest. When we have freedom, autonomy, respect, esteem, support, and positive relationships with other people, we feel better, are more resilient, take better care of ourselves and each other, and even live longer.

Sex and gender matter to mental health. Women, girls, and gender-expansive people have lower rates of some mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia, and higher rates of others, including depression, anxiety, and eating problems. Female bodies often respond differently to medication than male bodies. Medical and mental health professionals regard our symptoms and suffering differently too, especially when we are also BIPOC, incarcerated, immigrants, or in any other oppressed community.

Our mental health is also influenced by genetics and epigenetics. Mental illnesses and psychiatric disabilities—for example, major depression and alcoholism—often run in families. But even when we have a predisposition toward a particular issue, it generally takes a trigger or triggers for the disorder to take root and grow in us. And most conditions are caused by some combination of heredity and environment.

Feminists have been building alternative approaches and influencing the mental health fields for generations now. Millions of us have found, and continue to find, help and healing in the mental health system. Certainly we deserve high-quality, culturally appropriate treatment options for our mental as well as physical health. Still, it can be very challenging to find appropriate help for our mental and emotional suffering in our capitalist health care system. Mental health institutions, professions, and practices—like all institutions in society—have deep histories of racism and sexism, and have harmed millions of women and gender-expansive people with oppressive diagnoses and “treatments.” Large numbers of feminists have entered the mental health field since the 1970s seeking to overcome some of these problems.

Mainstream psychiatry and psychology continue to medicalize our suffering, however, looking for causes mainly in the individual. In tandem with for-profit health care, they typically offer pills rather than holistic treatment. While medications may be effective, and even lifesaving, they should not replace competent, caring clinical treatment. Mainstream psychiatry rarely acknowledges how racism, poverty, homophobia, transphobia, and patriarchy affect our mental health.  And they too rarely consider factors such as violence in our communities, sexual abuse, harassment, assault, cultural and media expectations about femininity, and our disproportionate responsibility for children, elders, and families. Instead of connecting our mental health to our environments, mainstream psychology and psychiatry focus on labels, diagnoses, genetics, biology, and “distorted thinking.” Social work, among the mental health fields, tends to be better at understanding human suffering in more holistic, humanistic terms.

Despite our critiques of the mental health industry, women and gender-expansive people need real solutions to help us through life’s psychological stress, suffering, and disabilities, whether caused by oppression, genetics, or inevitable human experiences like heartbreak, grief, and great fear.

When we view sadness, anger, fear, unwellness, loneliness, and even aggression with an intersectional feminist lens, we understand our experiences and emotions in a new way. Feminism also gives us more tools that help us to survive and thrive.