The mental health of prominent women has faced particularly appalling public criticism and criticism. This spring, millions of online viewers tuned in to a weeks-long libel trial between Amber Heard and her ex-husband Johnny Depp. The trial was used as fodder for social media posts seeking to portray Heard as “unstable,” and included direct speculation about her mental health by a forensic psychologist called in by Depp’s team. The outcome of the case did not matter. When it comes to stigma and career, the costs and harm to a woman weigh heavily if she is typecast with a mental illness, they cannot be undone.
Women face widespread prejudice, discrimination, and unrealistic expectations, including regarding their emotional well-being. They need to be seen as holding everything together. They need to be successful in their careers, maintain likability, serve as caring mothers, etc., all while performing their jobs with increased proficiency. Y modesty than their male counterparts. Actresses, singers, and other celebrities carry the added burden of social prescriptions to be sexy at the same time. Y innocent. This bond is impossible to negotiate, and there are significant mental health costs of having to do so.
Society can easily weaponize the mental well-being of high-profile women, as the Heard case shows. In other cases, this scrutiny has even cost some women their basic autonomy. Take the example of iconic pop star Britney Spears. Images of a “crazy” Spears first surfaced more than 15 years ago, when she grabbed a pair of razors at a salon and shaved her head in full view of the paparazzi. Tabloid reviews followed: Could she no longer do her job, be a mother to her children, or manage her own finances? Had she completely lost her mental capacity? A court commissioner soon placed her in a conservatorship run by her father, James Spears, and only in late 2021 did a judge release her from this hold. The idea that a 40-year-old billionaire professional couldn’t handle her personal affairs (including her own) reproductive rights) seems totally wrong.
Other female celebrities have faced criticism for their mental health issues. After pop star Selena Gomez shared her experiences with depression and panic attacks, members of the media made fun of her and commented on the cruelty he faced. Singer and actress Lady Gaga defended mental health rights sharing her own struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, noting that revealing her mental health issues was a controversial experience that exposed her to the public eye. Mental health diagnoses are still heavily laden with deep-seated stigma, despite the fact that serious clinical disorders are common and many people recover or manage them successfully.
The coverage of women’s mental health contrasts sharply with how famous men are portrayed in the media. Kanye West has bipolar disorder and Jim Carrey has suffered from depression, and no judge has placed them under guardianship. At times, these men have even received praise for how their mental illness made them stand out from other artists. Pop culture has sometimes romanticized the mental illnesses of male painters, novelists and composers, from Ernest Hemingway to David Foster Wallace, as essential to their genius. Female celebrities face a different reality: they must live up to the impossible expectations of having to be compassionate and competitive while perfectly projecting a sexual persona. The resulting internalization and feelings of powerlessness can only harm mental health. One of us (Hinshaw) clearly stated this case in the triple bind.
Sensationalizing mental health difficulties in a high-profile woman perpetuates the view that she is inadequate and incompetent, and that these deficiencies impair her craft. Basically it devalues and stigmatizes it. It is important to note that society and the courts continue to perceive women as unreliable reporters—overly dramatic, less competent, and less “logical” than men. Using mental health as a weapon gives people with power an avenue to say, “She’s lying.”
Despite increased public awareness of mental illness, the stigma remains strong, particularly for women. As Hinshaw has argued in the mark of shame Y another kind of madness, many people denigrate behaviors perceived as irrational, and this is particularly true for women. After all, if unpopular or “deviant” behaviors are the product of mental illness, any social or political value they have must, by definition, be irrational and disposable.
Women experiencing mental disorders are more likely than men to show “self-stigma”—internalizing the idea that they are flawed and do not deserve evidence-based treatment. These biases start early. Teenage girls are subjected to a cascade of simultaneous and often conflicting stressors, a real unreasonable bondage of high expectations.
Not surprisingly, rates of binge eating, depression, anxiety, attempted suicide, and non-suicidal self-harm (cutting) continue to rise, especially in adolescent girls and women. discussions about mental health stigma have increased in recent years, and one of us (Gruber) started a free online course called #talk about mental illness to fight it. But not enough attention has been paid to how this stigma interacts with gender. Do girls and women pay a higher price, missing out on more opportunities and even freedoms in both their professional and personal lives? Too often, these problems are dismissed as personal frailty or female “attention-seeking” rather than a matter of clinical and public health concern.
Society’s captivity to women’s mental health challenges, and the shocking losses of personal and professional freedoms and reputational damage some women have experienced as a result, should open our eyes to the enduring stigma and weight of mental illness for girls and women. It is time for discussions of mental health stigma to acknowledge and address this double standard so that women and girls can get the support and treatment they need without the looming fear that their lives will be destroyed if they do.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the opinions expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily those of American scientist.
