Mental Health and the Fairer Sex

A new report released today on gender-based differences in mental health shows women are nearly twice as likely as men to suffer from major depression. The report addresses many other mental health issues facing women, including the effect trauma and violence can have on long term mental health, and outlines action steps for policy makers, health care professionals and researchers.

Action Steps for Improving Women's Mental Health, released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office on Women's Health (OWH), brings together the most recent research on mental health issues in women and explores the role gender plays in diagnosing, treating and coping with mental illness. It also points to resiliency and social support systems as key factors in overcoming mental illness. Other highlights include:

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Rates of anxiety disorders are two to three times higher in women than men.
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Having a history of violence, trauma or abuse is associated with increased risk of depression, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic disorder and a tendency to engage in risky behaviors.
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Female veterans may face a higher risk of PTSD than their male counterparts.
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Family and other interpersonal connections in a woman's life may play an important role in building resiliency and offering protection from mental illness.

Acting Surgeon General Steven Galson, M.D., M.P.H., emphasizes, "Mental illness is often incorrectly perceived as a weakness, which prevents women from recognizing the signs and symptoms and seeking treatment. In order to reduce stigma, we need to encourage open, honest conversations."

The report also outlines specific action steps for policy makers, health care providers, and researchers to take in an effort to address the burden of mental illness on women's lives and increase their capacity for recovery. "We have an unprecedented opportunity to improve the mental health of women," says Dr. Wanda Jones, Director of the Office on Women's Health and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "Our hope in releasing this report is that these groups will come together and turn these recommendations into action so that we better the health of our nation."

The Office on Women's Health also produced a booklet for women that addresses the stigma associated with mental health. Women's Mental Health: What It Means To You includes information on the signs and symptoms of mental illness, suggestions about where to turn for support and solutions for preventing and coping with mental illness.

Action Steps for Improving Women's Mental Health and Women's Mental Health: What It Means To You are available for free by visiting www.womenshealth.gov or by calling 1-877-SAMHSA-7 (1-877-726-4727).

Why I Volunteer

I have a tendency to rely on familiar phrases a little too heavily, so I wonder how many times someone has heard me say that no one learns about mental illness until the train hits them. I dearly love the visual of that metaphor ... can think of few things that capture the essence of serious brain disorder more completely than a train wreck. The onset of mental illness is a scene of total chaos and destruction, and it matters little if that onset happens to you or to someone you love. In an instant the world is transformed into a scary and perilous place; there is only darkness, twisted metal and pain.

The train hit me four years ago when a sobbing girl called my cell phone to tell me my son was on his way to St. Joseph's - that he had taken a lot of pills and she had called 911. I was standing in Safeway at the time, and I thanked her and left a cart full of groceries to start the hour drive it would take me to get to the hospital. I wasn't sure what I would find when I got there. It was the longest hour of my life. I don't remember what went through my head as I drove. Maybe darkness, twisted metal and pain.

That was the beginning of this journey, and I've been trying to make sense of the train wreck ever since. Luckily, my son came home with me the next day and began his own journey of recovery, slowly and shakily at first; but always making some progress. Medications, the frustrations of dealing with the VA, relapses, lost jobs, different medications, breaks, weight gain, counselors, blood tests and on and on it goes. Good days, a wedding, and growth as well. Lots and lots of learning - book after book and then the NAMI Family to Family course. A learning curve of unbelievable proportions for everyone. Through it all - love - and a deepening respect for anyone who has to live with these things. And more love.

So why do I volunteer? Penance, I'll tell you with a laugh. Doing time for all the mistakes I made before I understood the nature of the disease. As a way to honor his fight to survive and define my own. But more than that, volunteering is a way for me to help someone who just got hit by a train. Volunteering helps me shine a little light on the wreckage and find the survivors. So I'll teach a class, or facilitate a group, listen on the phone or pass on some information. It takes so little. It does so much.

Find your local NAMI affiliate for volunteering opportunities here.

Listening to Madness

We don't want to be normal," Will Hall tells me. The 43-year-old has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and doctors have prescribed antipsychotic medication for him. But Hall would rather value his mentally extreme states than try to suppress them, so he doesn't take his meds. Instead, he practices yoga and avoids coffee and sugar. He is delicate and thin, with dark plum polish on his fingernails and black fashion sneakers on his feet, his half Native American ancestry evident in his dark hair and dark eyes. Cultivated and charismatic, he is also unusually energetic, so much so that he seems to be vibrating even when sitting still.

I met Hall one night at the offices of the Icarus Project in Manhattan. He became a leader of the group—a "mad pride" collective—in 2005 as a way to promote the idea that mental-health diagnoses like bipolar disorder are "dangerous gifts" rather than illnesses. While we talked, members of the group—Icaristas, as they call themselves—scurried around in the purple-painted office, collating mad-pride fliers. Hall explained how the medical establishment has for too long relied heavily on medication and repression of behavior of those deemed "not normal." Icarus and groups like it are challenging the science that psychiatry says is on its side. Hall believes that psychiatrists are prone to making arbitrary distinctions between "crazy" and "healthy," and to using medication as tranquilizers.

Hall and Icarus are not alone in asking these questions. They are part of a new generation of activists trying to change the treatment and stigma attached to mental illness. Welcome to Mad Pride, a budding grassroots movement, where people who have been defined as mentally ill reframe their conditions and celebrate unusual (some call them "spectacular") ways of processing information and emotion.

Just as some deaf activists prefer to embrace their inability to hear rather than "cure" it with cochlear implants, members of Icarus reject the notion that the things that are called mental illness are simply something to be rid of. Icarus members cast themselves as a dam in the cascade of new diagnoses like bipolar and ADHD. The group, which now has a membership of 8,000 people across the U.S., argues that mental-health conditions can be made into "something beautiful." They mean that one can transform what are often considered simply horrible diseases into an ecstatic, creative, productive or broadly "spiritual" condition. As Hall puts it, he hopes Icarus will "push the emergence of mental diversity."

Read all of this fascinating article here, and thanks to Mike for the link.