Gender Differences Between Mental Illness And Gender

Mental illnesses were also treated depending on the gender of the patient, this is because of the social views on the gender. For women, having a mental illness was “unladylike” and required “surgical intervention” (Dr. Eve Leeman). Occasionally, women were put through unnecessary procedures such as a clitoridectomy. The treatment of the mentally ill was also affected by the fact that some illnesses are more common in one gender compared to the opposite gender. For example, depression is the most common women’s mental health problem but it may be more common in women than men, and is present differentially in the two genders. Certain illnesses such as depression and anxiety affect women more than men in different settings. Reasons for the gender

differences on mental illnesses include genetic factors, hormonal factors, and societal factors. Many mental illnesses coincide with puberty, which supports the idea of estrogen being partially responsible for the gender difference in mental illnesses. Treatments need to be sensitive to reflect gender differences. In some cases, women respond better to treatment and may not need the same dose of medication as men. For example, an experiment to test the effect of olanzapine and risperidone on the risk of diabetes among schizophrenics was conducted by Weiss et al. Compared to men, Weiss et al found notably higher mean concentrations of olanzapine in female patients on stable medication dosages. Some believe that this finding is because of the higher side effect profile in women.
In asylums, the patients were segregated depending on their gender. Originally, the female wards gave them little opportunity to go outside or participate in any recreational activities. Instead, women stayed indoors and eventually began working in areas throughout the asylum, difficult tasks being assigned to the more problematic patients. Because women were working in areas around the asylum, there would be staff shortages on the female side of the hospitals, which led to nurses having to dose the patients with paraldehyde, a medicine used to treat convulsive disorders, to ease the crowd. As for the male patients, their sides were smaller in numbers. Because of their size in population within the asylums, it was more common for men to escape than women. Men also worked in the asylum, but unlike women, they had more freedom to participate in recreational activities.