chapotraphouse

The history of the psy-professions’ pathologisation and abuse of women for being women is deeply disturbing and should shame even the most ardent supporters of the mental health experts. In the name of science and progress, the mental health system has sought to con- trol almost all aspects of women’s experiences, emotions, and behaviour through physical and moral interventions. Chesler ( 2005 : 218) notes, for example, that many women were incarcerated in asylums for mak- ing claims of sexual abuse against their family, mothering “illegitimate” children, or for “suspected lesbianism.” Further, Masson ( 1986 ) com- piled a collection of highly authoritative psychiatric articles on women from the nineteenth century to vividly demonstrate that acts of physical constraint,removed, torture, and female castration by the profession were all justifi ed as appropriate (if not mandatory) treatment for women who questioned or defi ed their place in Victorian society. Th e discussion in this chapter, however, is concerned specifi cally with explaining the central reasons for previous female oppression by the psy-professions as well as the continuation and expansion in neoliberal society of what Ehrenreich and English ( 2011 ) have called the “sexist ideology” of medical profes- sionals. As none of the mental disorders in the DSM with which women have been labelled have validity (Chap. 1 ), psychiatric interventions can- not be argued to be concerned with the care and treatment of any real distress that women may experience. Instead, we need to understand such institutional interventions within the broader context of structural gender inequalities in capitalist society. As Penfold and Walker ( 1983 : vi) have summated, “[p]sychiatry is an institution in a society in which women are oppressed [and it] plays a specifi c role in that oppression.” A critical understanding of psychiatry’s focus on women, gender roles, and deviance can only be fully understood through a thorough assessment of the structural determinants of the division of labour in capitalist society which has devalued female roles and confi ned women to the status of second-class citizens. Th is analysis necessitates an investigation of patri- archal forms of domination and the intersectionality with the relations of production—something that has concerned a host of critical feminist scholars since the advent of second wave feminism in the late 1960s. My argument here is that while an examination of the psychiatric profession clearly demonstrates that it continues to be an institution of patriarchal power, the distinctive form that structures this oppression is determined by the needs of capital (such as the requirement for paid and unpaid labour, the reproduction of the labour force, the necessity to suppress working-class resistance, and the normalisation of gender roles in indus- trial society as “natural,” equitable, and common sense). Th us, the critical analysis outlined here follows in the spirit of Donna Haraway ( 1978 : 25) who has succinctly argued that “[t]he biosocial sciences have not simply been sexist mirrors of our own social world. Th ey have also been tools in the reproduction of that world, both in supplying legitimating ideologies and in enhancing material power.”

The section that follows discusses how the traditional family struc- ture of agrarian society was fundamentally disrupted by industrialisation and eventuated in the gendered division of labour that demarcated the “private” and “public” spheres of life which, in a slightly adapted form, remain today. Psychiatrists become increasingly important throughout the industrial period as initially incarcerators of deviant working-class women and then as moral enforcers of gender roles, “respectable feminin- ity,” and the sanctity of the family. In this way, the institution of psychia- try takes over the moral role previously performed by religion in feudal society. This socio-historical analysis is followed by specific case studies on the diagnoses of hysteria and borderline personality disorder (BPD) to illustrate in detail how psychiatric hegemony serves to regulate prescribed gender roles in capitalist society.

See chapter six of Cohen’s Psychiatric Hegemony.