It’s That Time of the Month. Give Her ECT: Psychiatric “Hysteria” Still Victimizes Women

     There are about as many female as male psychiatrists, close to 50 percent each. Yet, a new study shows that 81 percent of the psychiatrists who give electroconvulsive treatments are male. In America, a male psychiatrist treating a female patient is 25 times more likely to administer ECT than a female psychiatrist is.

     “Hysteria” comes from the Greek word for uterus and has described that supposedly unique “female” state since Hippocrates. During the medieval period hysteria began to be associated with witchcraft, as well. Up until the nineteenth century the symptoms – anxiety, fainting, fatigue, and irritability — of this male diagnosed, but peculiarly female disorder continued to be labeled by a predominantly male medical field.

     Even the modern bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, listed hysteria as a mental disorder until it was finally removed in 1980, thus ending two millennia of male dominated medical misogyny.

     Or did it?

     The statistics listed above from the recent international study cited by Lisa Morrison on the Mad in America website this week suggest otherwise. Psychiatry is a male dominated field with an apparently misogynistic agenda, intentional or otherwise.

     Other data collected from this study show that ECT is a “treatment” more often enforced on women than on men. 73 percent of the 858 ECT recipients of this study were women, a figure that parallels data from other ECT gender studies, and only 50 percent of those women voluntarily consented to ECT. In contrast, almost two thirds of the men gave their consent voluntarily. Significantly, 37 percent of those women who did voluntarily consent to ECT reported that they did so only “under pressure.” Only 22 percent of the men felt so pressured.

     Are all these statistics skewed so heavily against women because females do, in fact, have some native propensity toward “hysteria” which they need to be “cured” of by male psychiatrists?

     Or are these statistics so heavily skewed against women because male psychiatrists have their own long term propensity to stigmatize women through a myopic male perspective?