Katiera Sordjan | Think like a woman

The Melting Pot | Dialogue about women on campus and mental health need to overlap

By Katiera Sordjan 03/16/15 11:48pm

March is Women’s History Month, and International Women’s Day was during spring break, on March 8. On campus, we had the first Women’s Week in two years at the end of February, hosted by the Penn Consortium of Undergraduate Women, among other groups.

Just as the conversations about women are trying to integrate previously overlooked perspectives, such as those of women of color, of queer women and of poor women, we need to use the opportunity to address women’s well-being that goes beyond the OB/GYN.

We are no strangers to the fact that as a University and community, we are still wrestling with how to address mental health. The fact that we are having more open dialogue and discussion about the topic is a step in the right direction, but unfortunately, health care is often reactive to crisis, rather than proactive and preventative.

In order to unpack this issue properly, we need to look at more factors than just attending a stressful Ivy League school. Addressing mental health extends much farther than our campus.

We are familiar with the challengeable, but still prevalent stereotypes about gender. This is just the way things are, we are taught, with “biology” being thrown around as a casual and vague explanation. Might we have overlooked understanding true mental illness because of dismissals like these?

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, depression affects women at nearly twice the rate it affects men. Data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also shows that while more men are successful at committing suicide, three times as many women will attempt it. Other illnesses, like eating disorders, also affect women much more prevalently than men. And we cannot simply blame photoshopped models — eating disorders are by no means new phenomena, and they are born out of traumas and/or other illnesses. These too are dismissed as superficial hang-ups and media brainwashing.

To understand — and treat — mental illness, we need to recognize gender disparities like these. We need not only to recognize them, but to ask why they exist. Physical illness is easy for us to grasp. And too easily, we dismiss difference as merely nature, without questioning what we can do about it.

We know that in general, bodily changes such as puberty and reproductive cycles can affect mental health. But being a woman also still carries certain societal expectations and social statuses. The social role expected of a woman in her family, for example, can affect her mental well-being. This goes even beyond motherhood and/or being a wife. It affects daughterhood as well. In her book “The Way They Were,” Brooke Lea Foster explains how young women are more depressed following parental divorce than daughters of married couples at a rate not seen in young men. “Daughters are often turned to for mediation,” she writes. Women from a young age may learn that they are the peacemakers of the house, and it can cost them their own wellness.

There are of course valuable resources on campus. Counseling and Psychological Services offers group therapy for women of color, assault survivors and female graduate students. Some of the CAPS staff also specialize in women’s issues. There is also the very prominent Penn Women’s Center, as well as the lesser known Penn Center for Women’s Behavioral Wellness, which provides clinical care and conducts research.

But as we debate about the role of women at Penn and beyond, we must also use our resources to make mental health discussions just as integral. This is not a call to overlook the health issues of men, as well as the social gender factors that may compromise their well-being. When maleness is the default, it is easy to see female conversations as exclusionary. Rather, we must acknowledge that mental health and illness is not one size fits all. We cannot limit ourselves by only blaming “Penn culture.”

KATIERA SORDJAN is a College junior from New York studying communications. Her email address is skati@sas.upenn.edu. “The Melting Pot” appears every other Tuesday.

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