Overlooked and Undermined: The Representation of Women's Mental Health in Literature and Films

If it’s not your story, then you have no right to take the mic away from someone. Be an ally in someone’s fight without trying to take the centre stage because it’s not about you. Recently, I rewatched the latest Netflix movie, “Qala” which reaffirms this statement more than ever. The movie focuses on how women’s mental health has been neglected for a very long time and how most often, men decide to speak on their behalf without even recognising or acknowledging a woman’s mental health conditions. The movie starkly highlights the blatant dismissal of women’s mental health conditions, often being labelled as overthinking and overreacting.

When the doctor in the movie says to Qala, “Aap zyada soch rahi hain” (which loosely translates to “You are overthinking”), despite Qala constantly retaliating that she has some mental health issues that should be treated, we see a blatant dismissal of her concerns about her mental health. Moreover, Qala also becomes a victim of her mother’s perpetual ignorance, making it worse for Qala to recover. Qala is unable to get her mother’s favour even when she succeeds in making a name for herself despite all the obstacles.

She constantly asks the doctor to give her medicines and treat the issues she is facing, but the doctor keeps ignoring her opinions as if she doesn’t know what is happening to her own body and mind. This idea that women should be constantly told how they should be treated and they have no opinion about their health issues is rooted in the deep patriarchal upbringing of the men in our society.

A few months back, I read a short story titled “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which was also in similar lines where the author’s husband, who was a doctor, kept dismissing the author’s mental conditions despite her pleas and requests.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman published in 1892, is a seminal work in the field of feminist literature that sheds light on many important aspects of mental health and illnesses. Gilman’s works have always been famous for highlighting feminist issues. This particular masterpiece of Gilman predates the fight for women’s voting rights in the US. Gilman herself was a social activist and was very active in feminist movements during the first wave of feminism. Her works questioned women’s subjugation in marriages and patriarchal household setup and also their lack of agency and bodily as well as economic and social autonomy in society.

The story is a detailed account of how a woman’s mental health constantly keeps deteriorating. The story opens with the narrator describing how she and her husband, John who is also a doctor, move into a new house in the summer to help her recover from what she thinks is constant nervousness and bouts of depression post-delivery of her baby. John’s sister Jenny also accompanies the couple and is their housekeeper. The room that the narrator and her husband move into has a huge yellow wallpaper which she thinks is ugly. She is keen on changing her room, but her husband doesn’t agree so she is left with no other option but to live in that room.

However, living in that room with the hideous wallpaper only worsens her condition, and her fascination with the wallpaper keeps increasing by the day.

While the narrator has an active imagination and is a passionate writer, her husband disproves her writing and forces her to rest, believing that it would cure her condition. This highlights the ordeal that Gilman faced in her personal life. She too had faced similar mental health conditions and was made to undergo a treatment called “rest cure” where she was recommended to rest and not engage in any other activities – much like the narrator in the story.

This tale is both a haunting account of one woman’s descent into madness and a powerful symbolic discourse of the fate of creative women suffocated by a patriarchal culture.

The wallpaper is a significant literary tool for us to understand the major themes and the mindsets of the characters. It is soiled, crumpled in places, and triggers vivid imaginations in the narrator’s mind. The narrator keeps staring at the wallpaper for hours to figure out what is it that the pattern is trying to say. Gradually, the patterns feel like a woman constantly screaming and struggling to crawl out of the cages behind which she is held captive. The sub patterns further show her images of more cages that the woman is trying to break and the heads of multiple women on top of these cages. She kept feeling that this eerie sub-pattern was visible in a certain angle of light. She felt like the harder all these women tried to escape, the more strangled they got.

This is symbolic of the treatment meted out to women, be it in the family structure, society, or in the medical field. Women are treated as the second sex whose needs are always secondary in a patriarchal household and are also deprived of their rights in society. Even in the medical field, a woman’s health issues aren’t taken as seriously as men’s and are looked at with judgment and ignorance. The wallpaper, therefore, perfectly mirrors the cage called societal constructs behind which women are held captive by the men who see themselves as superior to women thus representing the trap of domestic life in which most of the women are lost and find it hard to break through this trap.

The symbolism of the wallpaper thus brings us to the main issues that the story aims to address. One of the most pertinent issues identified from the author’s way of narrating the story and describing the wallpaper is the position of women in marriage and their self-identity as well as bodily autonomy. The strict line between the “household” activities of the female and the “productive” work of the male ascertained that women remained secondary in nineteenth-century middle-class relationships which still hold relevance in the current scenario. The story shows that this gender divide kept women in a puerile state of ignorance, attempting to prevent them from fully developing. In the name of “supporting” his wife, John’s pompous assumption of his superior knowledge and maturity leads him to misjudge, disparage, and manipulate her.

The narrator is reduced to behaving like a child throwing a tantrum seeming unrealistic or uncaring. This quote brings out the narrator’s dilemma about how she is being treated, “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house”

Another important aspect that the depiction of the wallpaper brings out is the ignorance and stigma towards mental health and mental illnesses. The ill effects of “resting cure” as a treatment have been very clearly depicted by the narrator through the visions which she constantly keeps getting on staring at the wallpaper as she has nothing else to do to preoccupy her mind or distract herself from her triggering thoughts.

It’s not shocking that Gilman constructed her narration as an attack on S. Weir Mitchell’s counterproductive and insensitive “resting cure” for depressive episodes, given that she was nearly destroyed by it. When a mind already afflicted with anxiety is compelled into sedentary behaviour and precluded from doing any healthy productive work that could have otherwise kept the patient occupied and in a better state of mind, it can degrade and start to forage on itself, as depicted in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.

The author has clearly highlighted how negligence and misjudgements can push the victims of mental illnesses to the edge of self-destruction.

“If a physician of high standing, and one’s husband, assures friends and relatives that there is nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?.. So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am forbidden to “work” until I am well again. I disagree with their ideas. I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.” This quote perfectly sums up how the narrator doesn’t have agency over her treatment and mental health – a right countless women have been denied over centuries.

Ignoring women’s mental health issues by labelling them as crazy and mad is not limited to an author’s or a filmmaker’s imagination. We often see such instances in real life as well. If you try to look around you, you might be able to notice how most often, a mother’s postpartum depression is also ignored by labelling it as exhaustion and tiredness.

Moreover, I have seen my mother’s depression and anxiety being looked over when she was going through a difficult phase. She tried hard to mask it, but on days when she couldn’t, people would just be condescending towards her by saying, “As a woman, you cannot afford to be sad. You have a family to look after and a kid to bring up.”

It was as if her entire identity depended on her being a good housewife without considering her struggles with mental health. As years passed by, this started to affect her physical health as well. And that’s when everyone in the family started noticing how rapidly she was losing weight and falling sick. She had to wait to fall sick physically for people, including my father, to notice.

The feminist movement has pushed to ensure that women have the right to vote, pursue employment, and make decisions regarding their reproductive rights. Feminism, however, is much more than that. By including colour, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, class, and age in its politics, the feminist movement strives to achieve an intersectional view of identity.

So, where does mental health come into play?

Mental health is a vital aspect of feminism and is most definitely a feminist issue because of the constant medicalization of women’s mental health issues without any regard for socio-cultural, economic, and other forms of discrimination against women. Historically, women’s mental health issues had only been summed up as hysteria and this dates back to as early as 1900 BC and went on till the 1950s. At least part of the reason women have higher rates of mental illness, particularly anxiety and depression, may be linked to the oppression they face daily, which is a fight that the feminist movement has to fight. Girls are more likely than boys to report anxiety and fear symptoms. The expectation of gender roles, that is, differences in levels of masculinity and femininity, is one of the most common explanations for this difference. In India, in fact, this constant dismissal of a woman’s mental health is something that is still deeply entrenched in our society. This will not go away overnight or vanish completely unless we are willing to listen without being condescending when women speak up about their mental health.