Throughout the history women were perceived as week, hysterical, small-mined creatures. Even today, in order for women to succeed in male dominated businesses, they need to acquire characteristics ascribed to men such as masculine, rational, less emotional, and strong. As a result, women try to hide their feelings, their emotional states, and fears because they are afraid to be considered weak and feeble.
The stigma put on women as being weak creatures makes women to hide their weaknesses that can be either normal behavior for women or signs of a mental illness. For example, Mary Wood describes in “Life Writing and Schizophrenia” how while her mother was getting sick, her fears based on prejudice against women and Jews turned into her reality. However, instead of asking for help, Wood’s mother was afraid that her children would be taken away from her because of her sickness. In addition, Julia Holland, psychiatrist, in her “Medicating Women’s Feelings” says that women get medications to suppress their natural behavior in favor of men like behavior in order to succeed in the modern society. Based on Wood’s mother experience of being mentally sick and Holland’s account how healthy women are put on medications to suppress their personality, the society makes women to sacrifice their personalities for stereotypes imposed on them.
After being put on medications for schizophrenia, Wood’s mother lived in constant fear of loosing access to medications, becoming homeless, suffering from medications side effects, and loosing herself in probable spike of schizophrenia. A good example of how Mary Wood’s mother lost her personality is the story Wood tells about how she told her mother about amazing authors she discovered and her mother told that she read all those authors. Because of schizophrenia, side effects of medications, inattention of doctors who do not try to understand their patient, health system that does not guarantee people with mental illnesses lifelong medications they need, constant income, people with mental illnesses as Wood’s mother lose their personality to their illnesses.
However, in the American society with large income gaps between people, many people with mental illnesses do not have access to medical care and medications they need. According to Siobhan Brook account, her mother never had access to medications she needed. Moreover, in “Black Feminism in Everyday Life” Brook does not mention or may not ever know about her mother’s personality before she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. For Brook schizophrenia is not central piece of her mother’s personality. Instead Brook concentrates on how being raised by black, poor mother makes her life experience different from experience of white women.
Wood and Forney raise the problem of the price on medications for metal illnesses. High prices on medications for mental illnesses mean that many people cannot afford medications they need or to go to a doctor. Forney says that she pays two hundred dollar for a visit to her psychiatrist. So people like Brook’s mother cannot afford to go to a doctor. As a result, they lose their personalities and lives to mental illnesses. But even with access to medications and doctors, women lose parts of their self to medications since doctors do not care about personalities because they are concerned only about suppressing abnormal chemistry in patients’ brains. Forney, for example, manages her live with bipolar II disorder and continue to be an artist. Linda Logan also with bipolar II disorder with the support of her family managed to live relatively normal live while never being able to return to her passion, teaching. Wood’s mother with schizophrenia with the help of medications was prevented from slipping into her own reality. However, she could not function normally, could not read, could not work, and could not be a woman she used to be. Mental illnesses take away some parts or the whole of women’s self. And not only an illness takes away something, medications and absence of knowledge of how to help women with mental illnesses sometimes takes as much of self as illness.
Anastasia,
You’re right to raise the issue of medication and what it does to the “self.” It’s an interesting question to think about: what IS the self when one has a mental illness? Is the self what the person is like without the medication? or is the self the new version with the medication? What about when the medication seems to dull their mind and make them not feel like themselves? It’s a dilemma for many people who feel weird side effects from the medication that helps them to function in their everyday lives.