I have psychosis mild to moderate most dayz. I take low dosage of antipsychotic because it does help with stress.
But I’ve been hospitalized 4 times and the first was inhumane treatment for all the patients especially the women and the lead doctor was female bi&@tch and was the worst treating women like slaves to their busy doctors schedule.
One woman was waiting all day to be seen and decided to take a quick shower.
The female doctor didn’t let her finish her shower and then medicated her more heavily and kept her longer there for complaining.
It was awful.
I’m thinking about following up.
We shall see.
But now I’ve learned to not get locked up is to never say I am suicidal (I’m not anymore gladly it’s the worst)
Or homicidal
One year I wanted a mini vacation while changing meds so my doctor instructed me to say I was suicidal so insurance covered it.
Nowadays I just mind my own business in solitude because people where I live suck.
This is a subject very dear to my heart and I've been reading about it avidly for years. Thanks for this post. I have a theory that we're still locking women up, but in ways that don't require chains and that allow us to continue to seem to be in the world. The impulse to control and contain women is many thousands of years old and is, I think, as deeply embedded in DNA as it is in culture. Changing laws and securing rights is a vital and important move. But it alone cannot undo all of that history.
I agree, Erin. It’s taken me decades to see just how ingrained it is. A big, overarching situation is how women sit back and watch bombs drop. Societal discounting of women’s voices has been built in. Same in corporate decision-making. In relationships, it’s changing but not everywhere.
Yes. You're pointing to how difficult it is even for women who wish not to be constrained to break free from those constraints. They are deep, internal, socialized, and probably also hardwired. You're also pointing at what happens in the workplace when women are expected, even at the highest executive levels, to still be, ultimately, domesticated in thought, word, and deed.
This. Breaking this expectation means creating perceptions that don’t as yet exist. Literally creating new paradigms in thinking. It’s happening but damn slowly.
Yes. I think there is a role for storytelling here – a huge role. If we can imagine it, we can become it. If we can create characters who move out of the difficulties we face and into a more free, independent state of mind and way of life, then we'll have models and we will have a map.
The Default Human is a woman. Mother's body has to perform several very particular events (at least one involving testosterone) or the XY will never develop the Y part.
I haven't researched in over a decade or more so my slim data is certainly out of date. Recently I got interested in the subject again because of an Intersex creator. That is one helluva set of problems to negotiate as a teen.
yep. Happened to my grandma in the 50s when she was grieving the loss of her oldest son in a tragic accident. Her husband (My grandpa) had her committed and sent all the kids into foster care for 2 years since he didnt know how and didnt want to learn how to care for his kids as their father. So horrible.
In the ‘70’s I had a coworker whose husband and father had her committed and given shock treatment for two weeks. Her crime? She found out husband was sleeping with her best friend, so she took a credit card and went to NYC on a shopping spree for the weekend. It took her two years to recover from the shock treatment.
The kicker? She put him through law school. He got custody of the kids and made her pay child support on a secretary’s salary.
Most likely at that time, he had a better attorney. Prior to 1974 she couldn't have a bank account or a credit card in her name. All her finances were only allowed with permission from her husband
Post that; money, lawyers, anti-woman judges. There were lots, and lots of them
My grandmother Elsie was locked up in the Parkside Lunatic Asylum in Adelaide, South Australia from 1950 to 1962 by her husband. Her four kids were told by their father that she was now dead and was never to be discussed again. It was, till recently, a shameful family secret that I am now writing a novel about. This article is incredible and gives me the fuel to keep writing. Thank you!🙏
Agreed…and even within the laws and “rights” we have, children are used as pawns, employment/social safety manipulated by powerful connections, and rights violated when courts are corrupted.
We’ve come a long way, baby…and settling for where we are as a collective still falls short of nourishing our families and serving the whole of us as humans.
This is a great piece! Thank you for your work. I wish the active criminalization of pregnancy, miscarriages & abortions in America since the fall of Roe was included in your analysis as women are very much still locked up and medicated against their will.
That makes me so incredibly sad to read. So angry. I was a child of the sixties when women began to be liberated from a lot of that evil drama. But I know, and see, it is still manifested in so many ways.
Why does it take a number of women to say that a single man has raped or behaved badly? And he still might be pardoned for it because of any reason, just pull it out of a hat. Mainly for consideration of his own life and career. Even in the most liberated societies, our word is still not believed over a man.
On the other hand a single man can say “Behold I am a woman” and the world swoons and holds space for him, telling dissenting women that they’re bigots, whereas he is “stunning and brave”. If only being a woman involved simply wearing a dress. Tell that to women oppressed across the world because of their biological sex.
Try navigating through any medical system with a chronic condition as a woman. We have imaginary pain and anyway our lives and work aren’t important enough for care and consideration. My working and caring for an elderly woman at the same time is not enough to get a painful arthritic knee replaced, but my husband’s work must be more important because he was raced in for a hip job as soon as there was a cancellation. We are advocating madly for ourselves with no medical backup.
Try getting time off or consideration for the fact you have kids while holding a career in a tough male oriented environment, only to find that male colleagues with the same requests are gladly responded to, often by men and women in petty positions of power/control. Whereas YOU should just stay home and give up the job to these men who want to make sure their kids are ok. So cute and lovely.
Then my colleague says “you’re not a feminist are you? ….
Injustices to women have gone on since time immemorial.
It is beyond me other than the fact that women (by and large) can be a threat to males simply because they are adept in areas men are not.
There are areas women are not as adept as men (perhaps physical strength) as an example.
Why we cannot as a species or society understand whether authoritarian or governmental actions or society as a whole cannot understand the point of WHY WE ARE DIFFERENT & also the same is beyond me.
Women are the backbone of life. They not only birth it, but also (hopefully) they care for those lives and raise them to be upstanding members of society, good men and women.
Fathers need to do their part as well.
As much as most Americans would like to think otherwise, we are still predatorial and barbaric in more ways than I care to know about, and I don't mean only men or women.
Women not having rights to their own bodies means the same can be done to any members of society at any time. Allowing these limitations and not giving all human beings the same HUMAN RIGHTS also makes zero sense.
Most Women are amazing. Men can be amazing. IF everyone could just stop abusing one another for all the reasons that don't really matter in the end.
Honestly, if we all really look ---there are members of society that are abused all the time albeit in different ways and deemed to be of less value than others. Here is only 1 example.
Just look around today .........immigrants pointing at other immigrants saying you can't be here on a land that belonged to NONE of them. LOL .
Pilgrims were immigrants that took land from the NATIVES who were not immigrants.
That is just one example regardless of any other arguments or details about WHY.
Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, etc......
All are born as they are, including women.
No one has the right to deny them basic human rights or the right to live as they see fit for themselves.
Certainly no one should have the right to deny anyone their freedom simply because they don't like them.
Yes female relative in the 1960s had mental health issues, and lost custody of her kids for 2 years, was not allowed to contact them, and they ended up in orphanages because their father and extended family refused to take care of them.
Too true, Linda. The first essay I wrote here was about an amazing Italian sculptor who was in a psychiatric hospital in England for 35 years before being collected by her sister in 1982. I met her when I worked briefly at the hospital as a teenager and had always wondered what her story was. Maybe she had had a breakdown to begin with, but 35 years?!
And there were other women there who seemed institutionalised, but whose histories suggested they didn’t need to be there. Very sad.
I had a lifelong friend, who passed away five years ago. When we were in college, she was taking a history elective course which required her to research her family history. This was before 23 and me or anything like that. In her research she couldn’t find the death certificate for her great grandmother in the year
Her headstone said she died. She instead found a divorce record for that year. Her family story was the woman had died in childbirth with her youngest child in the 1920s. Her research showed the church didn’t have her name recorded as dying in its records either. She found out that her great aunt was the result of an affair, and her great grandmother’s punishment was she was committed to the South Carolina Insane Asylum. Her children thought she had died and the older ones remembered her funeral. They were all separated and raised by various aunts, while their father remarried and had even more children. However, this poor woman, my friend’s great grandmother really lived in the mental hospital until 1974 and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Her children never knew until my friend’s research for her history class in the late 1980s. Older family members still alive at that time denied knowing anything about it, were completely shocked. One of children said that their father would not let them look in the casket and got very angry when they asked to see her.
Reading this filled me with so much rage. Even on social media, if as a woman you share your opinion or even a fact that might be true, but god forbid a man sees that and doesn't agree with you, the names they call you just because they cannot accept being wrong. The number of times I've been called crazy and delusional just because I shared my POV, is insane. Men have such fragile egos and resort to insults when things don't go their way.
Thanks for your work here…
What makes you say we don’t lock women up or medicate them against their will anymore?🫤
I'm sure we probably do. But legislation in that regard has changed, so at least there's a leg to stand on
I have psychosis mild to moderate most dayz. I take low dosage of antipsychotic because it does help with stress.
But I’ve been hospitalized 4 times and the first was inhumane treatment for all the patients especially the women and the lead doctor was female bi&@tch and was the worst treating women like slaves to their busy doctors schedule.
One woman was waiting all day to be seen and decided to take a quick shower.
The female doctor didn’t let her finish her shower and then medicated her more heavily and kept her longer there for complaining.
It was awful.
I’m thinking about following up.
We shall see.
But now I’ve learned to not get locked up is to never say I am suicidal (I’m not anymore gladly it’s the worst)
Or homicidal
One year I wanted a mini vacation while changing meds so my doctor instructed me to say I was suicidal so insurance covered it.
Nowadays I just mind my own business in solitude because people where I live suck.
Don’t need hospitals anymore. 😊
Peace
This is a subject very dear to my heart and I've been reading about it avidly for years. Thanks for this post. I have a theory that we're still locking women up, but in ways that don't require chains and that allow us to continue to seem to be in the world. The impulse to control and contain women is many thousands of years old and is, I think, as deeply embedded in DNA as it is in culture. Changing laws and securing rights is a vital and important move. But it alone cannot undo all of that history.
I agree, Erin. It’s taken me decades to see just how ingrained it is. A big, overarching situation is how women sit back and watch bombs drop. Societal discounting of women’s voices has been built in. Same in corporate decision-making. In relationships, it’s changing but not everywhere.
Yes. You're pointing to how difficult it is even for women who wish not to be constrained to break free from those constraints. They are deep, internal, socialized, and probably also hardwired. You're also pointing at what happens in the workplace when women are expected, even at the highest executive levels, to still be, ultimately, domesticated in thought, word, and deed.
This. Breaking this expectation means creating perceptions that don’t as yet exist. Literally creating new paradigms in thinking. It’s happening but damn slowly.
Yes. I think there is a role for storytelling here – a huge role. If we can imagine it, we can become it. If we can create characters who move out of the difficulties we face and into a more free, independent state of mind and way of life, then we'll have models and we will have a map.
This drives home men’s ownership of women like how a person owns a dog.
The default human being is a man. Default societal leadership is male.
I grew up almost never questioning this. Between God, Jesus and my dad, the holy male trinity was impenetrable.
Then I got in the world and saw that the only thing different about male vs female intelligence was the long arc of history.
You feel like upsetting men, and their manliness?
The Default Human is a woman. Mother's body has to perform several very particular events (at least one involving testosterone) or the XY will never develop the Y part.
I haven't researched in over a decade or more so my slim data is certainly out of date. Recently I got interested in the subject again because of an Intersex creator. That is one helluva set of problems to negotiate as a teen.
yep. Happened to my grandma in the 50s when she was grieving the loss of her oldest son in a tragic accident. Her husband (My grandpa) had her committed and sent all the kids into foster care for 2 years since he didnt know how and didnt want to learn how to care for his kids as their father. So horrible.
In the ‘70’s I had a coworker whose husband and father had her committed and given shock treatment for two weeks. Her crime? She found out husband was sleeping with her best friend, so she took a credit card and went to NYC on a shopping spree for the weekend. It took her two years to recover from the shock treatment.
The kicker? She put him through law school. He got custody of the kids and made her pay child support on a secretary’s salary.
Due to problems recovering from the shock treatments.
Why did he get custody?
Most likely at that time, he had a better attorney. Prior to 1974 she couldn't have a bank account or a credit card in her name. All her finances were only allowed with permission from her husband
Post that; money, lawyers, anti-woman judges. There were lots, and lots of them
My grandmother Elsie was locked up in the Parkside Lunatic Asylum in Adelaide, South Australia from 1950 to 1962 by her husband. Her four kids were told by their father that she was now dead and was never to be discussed again. It was, till recently, a shameful family secret that I am now writing a novel about. This article is incredible and gives me the fuel to keep writing. Thank you!🙏
Omg, Carolyn. I am so glad you are writing her story. xo
Agreed…and even within the laws and “rights” we have, children are used as pawns, employment/social safety manipulated by powerful connections, and rights violated when courts are corrupted.
We’ve come a long way, baby…and settling for where we are as a collective still falls short of nourishing our families and serving the whole of us as humans.
This is a great piece! Thank you for your work. I wish the active criminalization of pregnancy, miscarriages & abortions in America since the fall of Roe was included in your analysis as women are very much still locked up and medicated against their will.
That makes me so incredibly sad to read. So angry. I was a child of the sixties when women began to be liberated from a lot of that evil drama. But I know, and see, it is still manifested in so many ways.
Why does it take a number of women to say that a single man has raped or behaved badly? And he still might be pardoned for it because of any reason, just pull it out of a hat. Mainly for consideration of his own life and career. Even in the most liberated societies, our word is still not believed over a man.
On the other hand a single man can say “Behold I am a woman” and the world swoons and holds space for him, telling dissenting women that they’re bigots, whereas he is “stunning and brave”. If only being a woman involved simply wearing a dress. Tell that to women oppressed across the world because of their biological sex.
Try navigating through any medical system with a chronic condition as a woman. We have imaginary pain and anyway our lives and work aren’t important enough for care and consideration. My working and caring for an elderly woman at the same time is not enough to get a painful arthritic knee replaced, but my husband’s work must be more important because he was raced in for a hip job as soon as there was a cancellation. We are advocating madly for ourselves with no medical backup.
Try getting time off or consideration for the fact you have kids while holding a career in a tough male oriented environment, only to find that male colleagues with the same requests are gladly responded to, often by men and women in petty positions of power/control. Whereas YOU should just stay home and give up the job to these men who want to make sure their kids are ok. So cute and lovely.
Then my colleague says “you’re not a feminist are you? ….
Preach it, sister! The darkest days were not that long ago, but it's hard to make that understood today, and I fear we're heading backwards.
Injustices to women have gone on since time immemorial.
It is beyond me other than the fact that women (by and large) can be a threat to males simply because they are adept in areas men are not.
There are areas women are not as adept as men (perhaps physical strength) as an example.
Why we cannot as a species or society understand whether authoritarian or governmental actions or society as a whole cannot understand the point of WHY WE ARE DIFFERENT & also the same is beyond me.
Women are the backbone of life. They not only birth it, but also (hopefully) they care for those lives and raise them to be upstanding members of society, good men and women.
Fathers need to do their part as well.
As much as most Americans would like to think otherwise, we are still predatorial and barbaric in more ways than I care to know about, and I don't mean only men or women.
Women not having rights to their own bodies means the same can be done to any members of society at any time. Allowing these limitations and not giving all human beings the same HUMAN RIGHTS also makes zero sense.
Most Women are amazing. Men can be amazing. IF everyone could just stop abusing one another for all the reasons that don't really matter in the end.
Honestly, if we all really look ---there are members of society that are abused all the time albeit in different ways and deemed to be of less value than others. Here is only 1 example.
Just look around today .........immigrants pointing at other immigrants saying you can't be here on a land that belonged to NONE of them. LOL .
Pilgrims were immigrants that took land from the NATIVES who were not immigrants.
That is just one example regardless of any other arguments or details about WHY.
Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, etc......
All are born as they are, including women.
No one has the right to deny them basic human rights or the right to live as they see fit for themselves.
Certainly no one should have the right to deny anyone their freedom simply because they don't like them.
Yes female relative in the 1960s had mental health issues, and lost custody of her kids for 2 years, was not allowed to contact them, and they ended up in orphanages because their father and extended family refused to take care of them.
Too true, Linda. The first essay I wrote here was about an amazing Italian sculptor who was in a psychiatric hospital in England for 35 years before being collected by her sister in 1982. I met her when I worked briefly at the hospital as a teenager and had always wondered what her story was. Maybe she had had a breakdown to begin with, but 35 years?!
And there were other women there who seemed institutionalised, but whose histories suggested they didn’t need to be there. Very sad.
This makes so many things make sense now… and yet none of it makes sense. How fucking awful. Thank you for this. I feel an obsessive spiral coming on…
This is hard to read because it's true. Honestly, it breaks my heart.
I had a lifelong friend, who passed away five years ago. When we were in college, she was taking a history elective course which required her to research her family history. This was before 23 and me or anything like that. In her research she couldn’t find the death certificate for her great grandmother in the year
Her headstone said she died. She instead found a divorce record for that year. Her family story was the woman had died in childbirth with her youngest child in the 1920s. Her research showed the church didn’t have her name recorded as dying in its records either. She found out that her great aunt was the result of an affair, and her great grandmother’s punishment was she was committed to the South Carolina Insane Asylum. Her children thought she had died and the older ones remembered her funeral. They were all separated and raised by various aunts, while their father remarried and had even more children. However, this poor woman, my friend’s great grandmother really lived in the mental hospital until 1974 and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Her children never knew until my friend’s research for her history class in the late 1980s. Older family members still alive at that time denied knowing anything about it, were completely shocked. One of children said that their father would not let them look in the casket and got very angry when they asked to see her.
Reading this filled me with so much rage. Even on social media, if as a woman you share your opinion or even a fact that might be true, but god forbid a man sees that and doesn't agree with you, the names they call you just because they cannot accept being wrong. The number of times I've been called crazy and delusional just because I shared my POV, is insane. Men have such fragile egos and resort to insults when things don't go their way.