The other day, I was helping a friend do some historical research (I have a library card in the country where her records were held. Quick aside: Records like newspaper archives and photos are often behind a kind of non-paywall that people can access with their local library cards. But if you’re researching in a place other than where you live, you will be locked out. I feel like library cards should be universal for this purpose? I’ve had to track down friends in different cities to get old newspaper clippings and it’s a pain. Anyway.).
We were talking about family histories and the people who made it. At one point, we started talking about “complicated women” of the past. There were the relatively benign complicated types who drank too much or stepped out on their numerous husbands. But there were also the acidic, toxic sort. Great-great aunts who were notorious for their tempers and too quick to reach for a hairbrush or wooden spoon.
“if I’d lived in a different era, I’m positive it would have become the Bad Kind of complicated,” I wrote.
“i mean it would be very nearly impossible not to,” she responded.
And you know? It would be.
A Yellow Wallpaper Of One’s Own
Much of mental healthcare throughout time has been expressly focused on women. A lot of diagnoses were distinctly gendered (hello, hysteria) and of course, “insanity” was one of the best cudgels for annoyed-and-or-abusive husbands, overbearing dads, and the rest of the male-dominated culture.
Compounded with the fact that any kind of gender transgression — wearing pants, owning property — was considered either cause for committal or incarceration up until very, very recently (read up on the Lavender Scare if you haven’t before) and yeah, a lot of people of all genders would have been presumed mad or actually driven to madness. Because constraint, in and of itself, is hugely detrimental to our mental health.
Basically, “bitches be crazy” is a fundamental pillar of American society and has been since Puritanical ding-dongs stole their preferred patch of land in the colonies and subsequently nearly starved to death.
For decades, “insanity” was a relatively easy way to contain this pushback. Women who didn’t want children were crazy. Women who were unhappy with their prescribed home life were crazy. Women of color, in general, were crazy (think of all the stereotypes around literally every single female archetype that has even been marginalized). Gender nonconforming people were crazy. Really anyone who was a threat to a person or institution’s power could be crazy — even Charles Dickens tried to lock his wife up.
Kate Moore, who’s written a handful of really fantastic historical books, wrote a piece for Time about the role of psychiatry and gender-based control. Here’s one paragraph:
The received medical wisdom of the age was that assertive, ambitious women were unnatural, and therefore sick. For centuries, women’s natures had been thought inextricably linked to their reproductive organs and, over time, this supposedly scientific fact had evolved into the belief that it was natural for women to be fulfilled solely by being wives and mothers. When, in the 19th century, biological-based gender roles came to the fore (work and intellect for men, home and children for women), it was one small step for doctors to declare that any woman who rejected her submissive, domestic role was medically impaired. Said one doctor after visiting a girls’ school in 1858: “You seem to be training your girls for the lunatic asylum.” Women who studied or read—or who simply had minds of their own and a determination to use them—were demonstrating “eccentricity of conduct,” which meant they were “morally insane,” a diagnosis invented by James Cowles Prichard in 1835. They were to be locked away until they conformed to more natural, feminine behavior.
This method of sociological and societal control — don’t be too whatever! I’ll commit you to the bin or make you stare at the wall for all eternity! — cuts two ways. Not only has it served as an effective threat (and a very real form of incarceration), it has also ensured that women are were (and still are) socialized to keep their feelings buried, lest they be viewed as “hysterical” or “crazy.” It’s the reason that women have, for many years, been told to calm down when we try to ring the alarm bells over things like our reproductive rights, even though we are more keenly aware of the stakes.
Though we’re several decades removed now from forced committals of difficult wives, these lessons are still being passed on through generations, often by women to other women. We have long been cautioned not to let our crazy out, even though the threat of reprisal is different now.
Our Crazy History: Looking Back and Forward
There are so many pieces of literature which speak to this subject and help us contextualize it. The Yellow Wallpaper is probably one of the most well-known, right up there with The Bell Jar and, of course Gas Light, which was a play before it was a movie. It’s less centralized in other great works, like Madame Bovary and Jane Eyre. Hell, consider the women in Hamlet. Or Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House, wherein the subtext is that maybe madness is the scariest thing we can envision, not ghosts.
When we read contemporaneous fiction, it’s a window into our shared history. And what we see in literature is that women and their lady problems are responsible for bad things, for trapping men, for causing problems. We also see plots of women not being able to fit into culture, who either reject norms or lose their minds trying to adapt to them. We see that women weren’t, themselves, crazy — they lived in a world, in a structure, under expectations that made them that way.
I remember first being alerted to the presence of this particular breed of “crazy” in a lit class in college when I read the absolutely essential The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In it, they describes the way that women are socialized into numerous opposing realities. In cultures of extreme restriction — like where say people don’t have bodily autonomy and are kept from pursuing their career paths based on a morality which they do not share — this often leads to revolt and, ultimately, the attempt to quash it.
“A life of feminine submission, of 'contemplative purity,' is a life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of 'significant action,' is a life that must be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story.”
I think this background and these deep, deep roots are why there’s something so liberating about talking about mental health openly, especially for folks for whom “crazy” has long been weaponized and used as a means of control. Social media is loaded with images and videos of people talking about their own mental health struggles, the care they’ve received, and what other people can expect. Whereas even just one generation ago, this would have been beyond mortifying — it might have been dangerous — it’s now become fairly normalized to talk about what we’re living with.
In the footprints of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Wurtzel, people other than cishet men are writing openly about their mental health. On Instagram and TikTok, we’re finding that, after being called crazy for so long, it feels kind of nice to shake our pill bottles in the faces of those who thought it would get us down because yeah. It’s true. What’s your point?
bell hooks wrote described shame as “one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.” People — especially those in marginalized groups wherein mental healthcare has been even more stigmatized — are shrugging off the shame and in doing so, racing toward autonomy.
We can do this because of new liberties we’ve gained. But this is also why rolling back basic rights is so dangerous and will continue to be for so long.
When elected officials seize the means of human production i.e. our wombs, they are also playing a deadly game with our brains. Abortion has not only helped people make the right call, financially, emotionally, and physically, for themselves. It has also prevented significant mental health issues in individuals who do not want to be pregnant at this time or maybe ever. Not only does preexisting mental illness potentially spell additional poor outcomes in and around pregnancy, but the long shadow of forced birth among people with mental illness lasts for generations.
Insanity — real or perceived — among women, nonbinary folks, trans people, and other members of the Alphabet Squad has so long been used as a kind of social control that it can be. difficult to see the steps we’ve taken in reducing the stigma. But that also means that it can be difficult to see how we managed to get to this point in stigma reduction — we’re here because of rights and liberties gained. Rolling those rights back doesn’t just threaten the physical health or criminalized activities of people you’ve never met, it could have a dramatic impact on the mental health of the country. Because when people are restricted, when they are unable to build the lives they want, they either fight back or lose their minds. Or both