I have mental illness, generalized anxiety to be exact, which means that sometimes my heart rate races, my stomach churns, and my mind is rendered incoherent out of some terror that is impossible to name. Other times, my anxiety manifests itself in muscle tension throughout my body, sporadic insomnia that throws off my sleep schedule or in overwhelming difficulty with starting or doing something that makes me nervous, like writing this Editor’s Note. More often than not, I consider myself functional, healthy and happy, but I am mindful of the ways in which my mental illness influences how I operate in the world—what hesitations consume me, what joys I disallow myself.
I struggled whether to be open about my anxiety because to be open about having mental illness is to give others the ammunition to invalidate anything I say by reducing the complexity of my experience and my emotions to a diagnosis—“that’s just your anxiety speaking.”
Historically, women have been dismissed as crazy, hysterical or irrational, regardless of whether they had mental illness or not—just think of the Salem Witch trials or the modern trope of the “angry black woman.” Now that we as women have more opportunities to publicly share our experiences, it can be daunting to be open about anything that could potentially threaten the validity of our voice. As such, we are caught in a catch-22 when we talk about mental health: women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with mental illness than men, but to talk openly about mental illness is to reaffirm certain stereotypes that women lack control over their emotions.
My mom, who is a mental health professional and has bipolar disorder herself, discouraged me from sharing my mental illness because it would stigmatize me. She told me that the first person she told at church about her mental illness laughed and asked, “So, are you going to kill me?” Even though my mom is open about her bipolar disorder, she is still cautious in how she tells people, fearing that they may assume she is someone she is not.
Misconstrued conceptions, like assuming that individuals with bipolar are dangerous to others, are largely a product of a popular culture that dramatizes and misrepresents mental illness. For men in popular culture, mental illness is a superpower: the television show Monk and the movie A Beautiful Mind are perfect examples of the way in which the madness of men is transformed into genius. It is less of a struggle and more of a sixth sense. But, for women in popular culture, mental illness is a spectacle: the religious fanatic mother in Carrie chasing her daughter, the fictionalized Joan Crawford shouting “NO WIRE HANGERS” while throwing clothes around or even “Crazy Eyes” Suzanne peeing in Piper’s jail cell in Orange is the New Black. These misconstrued conceptions extend past fictional representations and seep into real life perceptions. When Amanda Bynes began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness through her erratic behavior, she became the butt of multiple jokes. Her mental illness became a performance, rather than a cause for concern.
In pursuing a career in the arts, particularly in writing, I worry that being honest about my anxiety means that everything I write will be reduced to it. It is rare to find a class that discusses Sylvia Plath’s work without also discussing the role of her depression in producing it, but it is entirely common to discuss the work of David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway without any reference to their depression.
Gendered notions of mental health not only afflict women but men as well. Expectations of masculinity that discourage emotional expression and encourage stoicism keep many men from evaluating their own mental well-being and seeking medical advice. But, the overwhelming narrative is that men have mental illness, while women become their mental illness.
The stigma surrounding mental illness is destructive to all genders, but I think it is especially difficult for women who already have to fight to own their emotions and experiences. I already have to prove that my menstrual cycle or the phases of the moon don’t usurp my agency, but now I also have to verify that my mental illness doesn’t either.
I feel as if I am caught between two competing ideas of my mental illness: I want to acknowledge that anxiety can be difficult sometimes, but I also don’t want to reduce my identity to a disorder. Increasingly, this is less for the benefit of others and more for the benefit of myself. I’ve realized that part of fighting the stigma of mental illness and advocating for a better understanding means allowing myself to be complex, imperfect and human. Hopefully, by creating that space for myself, I can create it for others as well.
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