Gender still proves to be determinative in the type of disorder exhibited by an individual, at least insofar as it relates to an official diagnosis and treatment plan. Data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that, among teenagers aged 12-19, females are more likely than males to report using antidepressants, whereas males surpass females in reported usage of ADHD medications. However, available mental illness statistics cannot be wholly divorced from the biases that continue to pervade the diagnostic process. Even when standardized assessments and presented symptoms alike belie no marked differences in severity, physicians remain more likely to diagnose depression in and prescribe psychotropic drugs to women than men, thereby imbuing long-standing and detrimental gender stereotypes with some degree of legitimacy.
Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (2010), wrote the following of society’s overwhelmingly feminized conception of mental illness: “Contemporary statistics always emphasize women’s greater propensity to suffer from the ‘sadness’ end of madness. Go to any hundred websites and this will be reiterated, and perhaps not only because women buy more self-improving drugs…These figures may be true enough. Certainly if they aren’t ‘true’, the cultural illusion prevails. A magazine like Psychologies, which looks at the softer side of psychic order and disturbance, always carries a woman’s face on its cover, as if psychology, that whole business of understanding the (troubled) mind and relations, were uniquely a feminine undertaking, whatever the gender of the doctors.”
Appignanesi examines the past two centuries of female mental health services, attempting to explain why we, as a society, have classified women as mad, bad or sad so much more frequently than we have men. Do events unique to the ‘female experience’ simply increase one’s likelihood of succumbing to mental illness? Or, rather, has the present relationship between women and mental health problems resulted from a continuously perpetuated popular narrative, in which female experiences are broadly subject to pathologization, and the subjective perspectives of the ‘second sex’ are institutionally marginalized?