Out of Her Mind
How We Are Failing Women's Mental Health and What Must Change

Despite advances in mental healthcare, women and girls remain disproportionately disadvantaged. Gask explains what must change and why.

Linda Gask (Author)

9781009382465, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 October 2024

312 pages
22.4 x 14.9 x 2.4 cm, 0.54 kg

'Gask demands better data and research, more humane care, truly informed consent, and especially listening to women's stories to obtain the full picture of their lives and needs … Recommended.' D. L. Loers, Choice

For centuries so called 'difficult women' have been labelled as 'hysterical' and 'out of their minds'. Today they wait longer for health diagnoses, often being told it's 'all in their heads'. Although healthcare systems are overburdened, why are women the first to feel the effects of this? Why is it so hard for women to find the kind of help they need? Why is no one listening to them? And why have so many lost faith in mental healthcare? Drawing on the lived experiences of women, alongside expert commentators, recent history, current events, and her own personal and professional experience, Dr Linda Gask explores women's mental healthcare today. In doing so she confronts her role as a psychiatrist, recalling experiences treating women and as a woman who has received mental healthcare, illustrating the dire need for more change, faster. Women can't all be out of their minds.

Introduction: Are We Out of Our Minds?
1. Growing up a Girl
2. Family Life
3. The Art of Starvation
4. The Costs of Fertility
5. Women's Work
6. Unheard, Ignored, Entrapped?
7. Where Gender, Sex and Mental Health Collide
8. Survivors of Male Violence
9. Locked Away
10. Borderline
11. Failed by Mental Health Care
12. Written Off Too Soon
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Clinical psychology [MMJ]