Girl Power

Civitas, 15 January 2011

Fat days, unrequited love, stomach-churning credit card statements, hangovers and hang-ups, tumultuous friendships and obsessive-compulsive-early-morning-snooze-function-disorder.  Diagnosis: just the start of another day?

We are among ‘generations of women in crisis’ reveals a women-only mental health charity in receipt of some government funding but ‘desperately needing more’.   A closer look at Platform 51’s latest report, Women Like Me: supporting wellbeing in girls and women, suggests there’s little escaping their criteria for concern if you’ve got two pretty average X-chromosomes and managed to survive the first year or so of puberty.  Congratulations! Your mental health will ‘inevitably affect children and families’, not to mention ‘leave communities and wider society poorer.’  I thought Michel Foucault’s ship of fools had sailed; but, clearly I’ve been laboring under a misapprehension – us girls are all back in the same boat.

The resultant hysteria, fortunately confined to their 24-page report, was inevitable given that ‘mild’ and ‘moderate’ mental health problems, ranging from feeling sad and tearful, to eating disorders, had been merged.  Expanding these measures is much like squeezing into skinny jeans post-pregnancy: unless you’re Claudia Schiffer, it doesn’t yield positive results.  The range, scale and frequency of mental health problems displayed in any one individual are due collective review; but, the problem with clumping mild and moderate classifications together is that you lose sight of the serious amongst the manageable.

Similarly, in a review of women’s mental health problems, age matters.  Platform 51’s research respondents were grouped according to age (12 to 17 years, 18 to 24 years, 25 to 44 years, 45 to 54 years, 55 to 64 year and 65 years +), but this never translated into print.   Denied our development through adolescence, young adulthood and beyond, we are just ‘women’ – listless and directionless.  Taken individually, many mild mental health problems may, in light of age, be considered quite natural.  Support, either professional or personal, may be needed, but it will be within the context of ‘growing up’.  A girl whose self-image is momentarily upset upon the arrival of a couple of teenage pimples in the company of a few attractive school boys might be advised to buy a bottle of Clearasil and stick it out.   Per contra, a woman whose persistent skin problems shattered her self and social confidence may need more sustained and professional support.  In the moment of their anxiety, whether it lasts a week or many years, low self-esteem weighs heavily on both minds; yet, in reality, its management differs vastly and as such should be considered separately.  This is not to suggest mental health problems in adolescence are always fleeting, but rather, stages of development are symptomatic of recurring themes and that against this backdrop, the significance of individual mental health problems will be considered differently.

Raising the profile of good mental health is important, but we shouldn’t undermine female development in the process, nor should it come at the expense of creating new cases.