Book shines a light on women’s mental health experiences
Lori Hanson, associate professor of Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan, has teamed up with Ottawa family doctor Nili Kaplan Myrth to edit Much Madness, Divinest Sense, a book of Canadian women’s mental health stories named after an Emily Dickinson poem.
Hanson spoke at the College of Medicine’s mental health week; the book will have a Saskatoon release today.
The issue:
“Like many women everywhere, I’ve had a number of personal experiences and professional experiences with people suffering from mental health issues,” Hanson said. The topic didn’t seem to be adequately covered in what she was reading, she said.
Why focus on women:
“The people who have decided what is madness and what is sense are historically men,” Kaplan Myrth said. “If you go back to the 17th century, they would lock up young women who were deviant. They’d lock up prostitutes, unmarried pregnant women, poor women, they were all locked away in asylums.”
Things have progressed since then, but women are more likely to be described as mentally unstable due to hormones, and more likely to be diagnosed and medicated for anxiety or depression, she said. What they learned:
The stories show that mental health services are inadequate, piecemeal and prohibitive, Hanson said. Systemic issues such as poverty or single parenthood can
MUCH MADNESS, DIVINEST SENSE When: 7 p.m. Friday, May 5 Where: McNally Robinson, 3130 Eighth St. East Free admission
make treatment inaccessible. Even when a medication is the correct course of action, it’s not reviewed often enough and women find themselves in spirals of difficulty with the system.
“You learn a lot of things by doing a book, where a lot more questions, in a lot of ways, are raised than answers are provided,” she said.