4
In the eighties and nineties, these diagnoses began to expand across class, income and
race, and included: eating disorders, conduct disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder, borderline, masochistic and multiple personality disorders, post-traumatic stress
disorder, pre-menstrual dysphoria, and numerous types of depression and anxiety
disorders. Historically in psychiatry, the symptomatic behavior of hysteria, neurosis and
depression has been pathologized as mental disease. Since the mid-eighties, depressive
symptoms have been increasingly diagnosed as Major Depression, an “Axis I” disorder—
meaning the brain is sick. However, these diagnoses of are understood by many (i.e.
feminist psychotherapists, social workers and others) as collections of symptoms
indicating women’s distress in response to violence, or financial stressors. At the same
time, some feminists scholars view these as cultural moments where women’s defiance of
traditional sex roles was pathologized.
Manifesting Pathology: New Women, Deviant Women
Women’s mental illnesses have been reinscribed and resistance pathologized
following different “waves” of the women’s movement in North America. The first wave
in the late 19
th
century was succeeded by a new fervor in psychiatry, a rise in asylums
and the height of the hysteria epidemic. Numerous studies have documented that women
were asylumed against their will simply for failing to meet role expectations.
3
Many
characterized their "taking ill" period with symptoms of lethargy and hopelessness
(especially associated with seeing no place where they fit in the world, that can easily be
3
In their text featuring narratives by asylumed women in the 19
th
and early 20
th
century, Geller and Harris
(1994) provide the voices of asylumed women who contend they were never sick, and asylumed for merely
failing to meet family and expected role obligations. The women were regularly tortured, raped and
submitted to drudgery in order to make their domestic duties desirable in comparison.
Convention