In a sobering indictment of the medical misogyny that pervades our lives – the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) has found that a fifth of women report being called ‘dramatic’ when they have sought help for their mental health.
The study – which spoke to 2,000 women about their experiences talking about mental health crises – also found that over a quarter (27%) of respondents had their concerns undermined by being told their issues could be hormonal: 20% were asked at the time if they were on their period.
33% reported being asked if they were “overthinking things”, while 19% of those aged 18-34 admit that they have felt ignored or invisible when speaking up about mental health crisis. Heartbreakingly, 22% feared being viewed as “attention seeking”.
This is unacceptable, and serves as a huge explanation as to why medical misogyny remains so powerful in modern society, if women don’t believe they can be taken seriously when talking about panic attacks and manic depression. It not only clouds the judgment of those who might be able to help, it can also delay sufferers from getting the treatment they need if they don’t feel that they deserve it.
According to CALM’s CEO Simon Gunning, the study shows that “damaging preconceptions are leaving young women unheard and unsupported and lives are at risk like never before.”
A 2022 study published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia also found that women are less likely to receive potentially lifesaving medication, increasing their risk of death. The study looked at data from 216,000 trauma patients in England and Wales to assess whether equal treatment was given, and found that women were half as likely to be given tranexamic acid (TXA), which reduces the risk of death from excessive bleeding by up to 30 per cent.
The findings came just months after another study published in the medical journal JAMA Surgery revealed that women are more likely to die after an operation by a male surgeon. Women are also 15% more likely to experience a negative outcome including complications and readmission to hospital when a man performs the procedure, compared to when a woman performs the procedure on a female patient.
The JAMA Surgery study, which assessed 1.3 million patients, and nearly 3,000 surgeons, was co-authored by Dr Angela Jerath, an associate professor and clinical epidemiologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, who commented that the results had “real-world medical consequences for female patients and manifests itself in more complications, readmissions to hospital and death for females compared with males”.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only instance where women have been treated as second class citizens by modern medicine. A few years ago, there was a clinical trial of the male contraceptive injection. The results showed that although the injection had a 98.4% efficacy rate at pregnancy prevention (making it more effective than condoms) the side effects that the men experienced were too severe. These side effects included acne (45%) and mood swings (20%). Um…
Then there’s the research on heart attacks. The majority of data comes from research performed on men due to the fact that women have historically been excluded from clinical trials and biomedical research. Even now, only one third of cardiovascular clinical trial subjects are female. It was only recently (in the past decade) that scientists and doctors realised that women present with different symptoms to men when they’re having a heart attack. This particular gender bias has resulted in women who suffer a heart attack being 50% more likely than men to be given a wrong initial diagnosis and further research has estimated that over ten years, more than 8,000 women in England and Wales could have been saved if they received equal heart attack care to men. Not cool.