Reading Jessica Taylor’s Sexy but Psycho, a feminist challenge to the psychiatric labelling of women and girls, I find myself thinking of contemporary psychiatry as the abusive partner who tries to control you by telling you how shit all the other men are.
“C’mon,” he wheedles. “It’s not as though I’m administering electric shocks until you start to have seizures. Or sticking an ice pick through your eye socket and wiggling it around in your brain matter. It’s just, like, a pill or two. What’s the big deal?”
Taylor is uncompromising, stating that psychiatry is wholly incompatible with women’s liberation. The present-day examples she offers are numerous and shocking: women and girls harmed by sexual violence being told their signs of trauma reveal them to have personality disorders; abused women being encouraged to get diagnostic labels in order to access support, then having their diagnoses used to discredit their testimonies; women’s reports of violence and abuse being treated as evidence that they are fantasists, particularly if they already have histories of being labelled mentally ill; women’s physical ailments being treated as emotional, while their emotional distress is treated as physical in origin.
A psychiatric diagnosis robs women and girls of two of the things for which feminists have fought longest and hardest: our credibility and our right to consent to what is done to our own bodies.
In 1990’s The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argued that “new possibilities for women quickly become new obligations. It is a short step from ‘anything can be done for beauty’ to ‘anything must be done’”. She was right. In 1990 it was not normal for wealthy women to have their faces injected with poison during their lunch hours; now it is. I think the same principle operates in terms of psychiatric labelling and treatments. If it can be done, it will, and once it is being done, it is seen as justified.