The personal is the political

The Personal is Political
For years I accepted the diagnoses of Mental Illness. The actual diagnosis is not relevant to why the diagnosis existed. I spent years in therapy and sedated by medications to control everything my emotions to my behaviors. I write the story because the cause began at an early age for me and seems never to have an end, not in my life and not in the lives of millions more like me defined by our gender. The reason for the label is due to violence. The dichotomy of gender allowed “boy’s to be boys and girls to be faulted for what boys do.” According to the theories found in the text books and in the political arena, where we fight for our equality. The acts against me and my body left me afraid of not only the streets at night, but the home I lived in and the place I worked. Sometimes those acts were brushed off even by me as “just another idiot who did not get that I did not want his hands brushing accidently against my breasts, to outright rape not believed by my society. But the worst of these is the medical fields’ response to the violence our gender lives in every day. The people, who take the Hippocratic Oath to never do harm, often treat our gender like second class citizens.
When I was born the world was a different place, men had firm control over every aspects of women’s lives. If someone grabbed my ass it was because I wore tight jeans, if someone raped me, it was “Women can run faster with their dress up then men could run with their pants down” so I must have wanted it. Politically the laws have changed and yes attitudes have changed to some degree. Has it changed dramatically, I would soundly say NO…. The statistics still find women’s rights being trampled on, and women being injured physically, emotionally and mentally. Equality sometimes seems within our grasp, until we read another news story, or see another female politician take the blunt of the press and other politicians, than equality fades away like a dream in the night. In the medical institution we find the discrimination and sexism running rapid in the physical misdiagnosis of mentally Ill women.
I am Sue, I was born in 1959, I watched the so called sexual revolution and feminist’s movement from a child’s eyes. , I watched Gloria Steinem and others standing on a stage on a black and white television. . AS a teenager I shared my inner most thoughts with a local woman, she was the only declared feminist in my community. I blamed my mother, I blamed my father, I blamed society as a whole. But underneath it all I blamed myself; I held the shame like you would hold onto an old picture of days past. With the same silent cry of “Why” During those years I did not understand the depth of what feminists were fighting for. I did not realize that rights we did not have affected every aspect of our lives.

The place we lived, the place we worked, the legal and political arena, and even the medical arenas. The doctors I saw diagnosed me using studies done on men. Medically if it was good for men it was good for me. If I dared to question their judgment, dared to ask why , dared to complain of some undiagnosed pain, I was someone looking for attention and nothing more, they would send me home with a pat on my back and tell me the pain would go away, that was 30 years ago, I thought it had changed. But soon found that the self evident truth is that sexism has not faded into the night, but exists in the day light, undisturbed by the war for equality that has been played out on my television set.
A week ago I took a woman to the doctor, suffering from significant pain in her abdominal area and back. He took a blood test, checked for pregnancy and honest to god said to her, “its okay the pain will go away.” Just take some Tylenol and rest. Needless to say the pain did not go away, the next day another physician found the kidney stones. I thought the world had changed, but you see the women’s diagnosis that the doctor saw before he entered her door was mental illness. Those two simple words imply that everything she says is called into question. I had a psychiatrist tell me; never never tell a emergency room physician you have been diagnosed of mental health issue. I wish there was a way that I could hide our gender from the attending physician too, maybe then I would not go home and wait for the pain to subside, maybe then women would not die for undiagnosed illness because the physician saw the second line that said “female” after her name.