What's my book about?

From hysteria to hormones, patriarchy to pills

My book started out as one thing and turned into something quite different. If we go back a decade, what I really wanted to do was write a book about my grandmother’s life. She was diagnosed with bipolar in her mid-fifties, at a time when there was little knowledge or understanding of women’s mental health in midlife.

Photo by Mikołaj on Unsplash

But every time I sat down to write, nothing would come out. And I realized it was because I needed to tell my grandmother’s story through my own story—and through the stories of other women who have been dismissed, shamed and misdiagnosed for their mental health challenges.

I was first diagnosed with depression and anxiety in my teen years, at a time when stigma about mental illness was rampant and “social media” wasn’t even part of our lexicon. Although I received excellent care from a child psychologist, I racked up multiple diagnoses in the decades that followed, saw dozens of therapists, and went on and off antidepressants many times. Nothing worked.

As people began opening up about mental illness and I felt more comfortable sharing my own struggles, I noticed a trend (which science confirms). Most people suffering from anxiety, depression, and PTSD were women. I wanted to know why, and what it was about gender that might play a role in mental illness.

There are a handful of incredible books out there about how gender bias in the healthcare system causes significant harm for women’s health: Doing Harm, by Maya Dusenbury; Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (which is about so much more than health); Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn; and BLEED by Tracey Lindeman are a few that have had a lot of influence on my writing. However, there are no books that explore these issues within mental health.

Gender bias essentially means that you get treated differently based on your gender. Sometimes this is overt discrimination (e.g. firing a woman for getting pregnant) but most of the time it’s unconscious bias—people don’t even recognize their bias or the ways that they change their behaviour in response to it. That’s precisely why it’s SO pervasive.

For centuries, women complaining of mental or physical health symptoms have been told a whole range of things: their womb is wandering, they’re evil and possessed by demons, womb problems again, they have weak nerves, they subconsciously want a penis (my fave), they have a broken brain, and most recently, their hormones are “imbalanced.” Hysteria is not gone; it’s just changed tack. And whether it’s mental or physical, what ails women seems to always come back to what’s in our heads.

But what happens if the problem that girls or women are facing is indeed psychological and not physical? Yes, all mental illness is “physical” (and most people experience both physical and psychological symptoms), but culturally and medically we still treat it as a mind/brain problem and not a body problem.

My book is a rallying call to reframe and reclaim women’s mental health. I argue that most mental illness is less of a biological problem (although yes, I acknowledge biology plays a role) and more of a social one. It’s about a world that is biased to maleness and whiteness, and how these powerful systems are making us sick.

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Misty