Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

narration. Women’s stories were pierced, wounded by the stories of others:
medical professionals, lawyers, priests and new philanthropists including social
workers. During the times of their silence some of them internalised a moral
knowledge of themselves and others tried to resist their positioning within the
frame of dependency. Even psychoanalysis, which was, as Foucault pointed
out, “established in opposition to a certain kind of psychiatry, the psychiatry
of degeneracy, eugenics and heredity”, 45 appropriated women’s narratives
while giving them the opportunity to talk. The beginnings of psychoanalysis
are marked by an ambiguity that is never solved: while discovering the “talking
cure”, it freezes the stories of women in the ice-blocks of envy and castration.
Women’s stories remained wounded stories.
Therefore, it is important in cognitive terms that social work students
internalise the historical and gender perspective as they deal with mental
health and that they understand that women and men express their everyday
distress in gender-specific ways. They also need to understand that social
work and medical professionals often interpret service-users’ stories and nonverbal
behaviour within a traditional gender matrix, which ascribes a certain
“emotional world” to men and another one to “women”. 46 In addition, social
work students should understand that these are the major reasons why many
professionals continue to speak about “female” and “male” diagnosis and that,
statistically, many more women than men are diagnosed as depressed and more
women than men are dependent on legal drugs, especially antidepressants.
They need to understand that while hysteria as a diagnosis disappeared,
“depression” has become, in the last fifty years, the typical diagnosis and gendered
response of professionals towards women’s emotional pain. Further, it has also
become a gendered response of women towards everyday distress. Teaching
gender through diagnosis shows that differences in diagnosis and help-seeking
behaviour should not be accepted as biological facts, which are innate and get
transmitted through the “archetypes that lie in every man and woman”, as a
Slovenian psychiatrist recently claimed. They also do not represent an objective
truth of medical science, but are socially produced and historically transmitted
and therefore need to be constantly reflected upon.
45
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (London: Pantheon,
1980), 60.
46
Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan 2005).
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