All over the world on October 10th, people will celebrate World Mental Health Day, organized bythe World Health Organization (WHO), a facet of the United Nations. The purpose of the day is to raise public awareness of mental health issues. This year’s theme is Depression: A Global Crisis. Please see WHO’s website for more info.
At Nellie’s, we have developed a position paper on our analysis and understanding of mental health. We understand that women experience an intersectionality of oppressions, including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, poverty, classism, oppression based on place of origin, immigration status, age, appearance, record of offences and mental and physical dis/Abilities. We understand that these systems of oppression, including a history of violence can have differential impacts on different women. Women cope with these barriers, lack of access to resources and different forms of stigma and discrimination in various ways. Sometimes, when women survive trauma, they use different strategies to cope, in order to stay alive. Sometimes these coping strategies appear to be symptoms of mental health.
However, we work from a framework where counselling and support and an identification and understanding of the impact of different systems of oppression, along with an unraveling of the traumatic narrative through counselling are the most effective tools to support a woman. Women often come to the shelter with mental health diagnoses and we support them to understand their diagnoses from a feminist framework and provide options and support.
Miriam is a woman who lives at Nellie’s. She arrived in Canada two years ago and brought her daughter with her, but had to leave her son behind due to immigration. Although she speaks to him on the phone daily, being separated from him causes her great pain and she cries often. She will sponsor her son as soon as she can. Her daughter constantly asks her when she’s going to see “Daddy” again and Miriam finds it painful to answer, since he is the abuser and one of the main reasons why she had to flee the country. Also, Miriam grew up in a place where there was civil war and she witnessed unspeakable horrors and genocide.
She went to visit her lawyer a few weeks ago and her lawyer told her that her refugee application was denied, but that she is in the process of filing for an appeal. After hearing this news, she started to feel sick, as she feared for the lives of her children and herself, should she have to go back. Miriam felt so saddened and numb that at one point, she was unable to get out of bed or shower. She also started having flashbacks of the genocide that she witnessed as a child. So, Miriam went to her doctor at the Community Health Centre and asked to speak to a psychiatrist. She explained to the doctor how she felt but left out the part about the flashbacks, which were just too horrifying to talk about. The psychiatrist gave her a diagnosis of major depressive disorder and wrote her a prescription for anti-depressants.
She came home to Nellie’s and told the staff about her diagnosis of depression, sighed, and slumped back in her chair. “I guess there really is something wrong with me”, she said. “The doctor told me that it’s just a chemical imbalance and that these pills should make things better.” How will the pills change her immigration status?
Don’t you think that Miriam has reason to be sad? Stressed? Upset? Wouldn’t anyone feel a similar way given this scenario? The reality is that women who have experienced violence and oppression are often given mental health diagnoses due to a lack of understanding of how trauma and oppression can impact a person. This can create stigma and create barriers to understanding the effects of trauma and oppression.
Join us on World Mental Health Day in increasing awareness and understanding and decreasing stigma associated with mental health. To read our Position Paper on Women and Mental Health, click here.
