Janice Wood Wetzel

Women and mental health A global perspective

This article is based upon the author’s presentation at the UN Third Annual World Mental Health Day, the first Day to be devoted to women and mental health. The author argues that the psychosocial conditions commonly shared by women throughout the world result in their universally high rates of mental illness and emotional distress. Solutions are global in origin, based upon a comprehensive personal, social and economic model for the prevention of mental illness and the promotion of mental health.

The mental health of rural women: an international analysis

condition. The three initial themes were equality, development and peace, later amended by the sub-themes employment, health and education. This paperl addresses an aspect of the Health component, mental health, which is catalysed or impeded by the possibilities and conditions of women’s lives. Most of the world’s women live in rural areas, a fact acknowledged by the Decade. Mental health, however, has been virtually ignored, even though the United Nations has recognized the higher rates of mental illness among women throughout the world (Women’s International Network, 1985). The purpose of this paper, then, is two-fold: (1) to provide an internationally relevant, conceptual framework for analysing rural mental health and attendant personal development, and (2) to assert that equality, development and peace are grounded in conditions

Anti-Discrimination and Pro-Equality Measures

The three main objectives of the Decade of Women, equality, development, and peace, were followed by employment, education, and health, added later as the Decade progressed and was evaluated. The objectives are broad, interrelated, and mutually reinforcing, so that the achievement of one contributes to the achievement of another. Equality, the first and most basic objective, is interpreted as meaning not only legal equality (the elimination of de jure discrimination), but also equality of rights, responsibilities and opportunities for the participation of women in development, both as active agents and as beneficiaries.

The Politics of Oppression and Action

The problems of women will not become visible if they are not sustained over time on local and national agendas. But women’s issues will continue to be fragmented as individual, local, and single issues if an international human rights perspective is not added to the political agenda. Separation of local and global politics on behalf of women is possible only in a geographical sense. In large measure, the essence of the political agenda is astonishingly similar; only the details differ with the locality. Agenda setting is the means by which issues are selected and adopted for governmental consideration and solution.

Education for the 21st Century

The challenge of contemporary higher education is in its changing role, its involvement in the affairs and problems of the community, the nation and the world. Education must be involved with personal and social development and services, while maintaining its classical role, the cultivation of the mind, and the promotion of fundamental research in natural and social sciences and the arts. Confronted by serious social, economic, and political issues, a university cannot remain an ivory tower. It must become an “intellectual powerhouse for development and an instrument for social transformation” (Narayanan, 1988, 14). While we need to pursue the material advantages of science and technology, we need also a value-based society with human beings who are not insensitive automotons. We need well-rounded, integrated individuals who combine “the qualities of the heart and soul with those of the head and stomach” (16).

A Global Challenge: Human Rights and Women

The United Nations, more than any other institution, has provided the foundation upon which human hopes and aspirations rest. In 1948, under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt, the General Assembly of the United Nations presented to the world the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document recognizes in its Preamble the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. And it reaffirms “their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women … ”

Women at Risk/Women in Action

The United Nations Forward-Looking Strategies (1985) highlight the fact that there are populations of women whose vulnerabilities are compounded by particular characteristics of age, socio-economic condition, political pressures, minority status, geography, circumstances, and combinations of these factors. Many of the issues have been discussed in earlier chapters to greater and lesser degrees, but all deserve special attention because of their seriousness. The problems vary widely from country to country, as do the diverse groups of women involved. While strategies will need to be shaped to fit these multiplicities, all require fundamental changes in the economic situation of women which produces deprivation, and all require upgrading women’s low status which accounts for their extreme vulnerability to poverty. Emergency assistance measures should be taken at the individual and group level. At the same time, broader efforts should be directed towards the reallocation of resources and decision-making power, and towards the elimination of inequality and injustice.

A World Health Mandate

Primary health care is neither easily accessible for the majority of the world’s people, nor are there services on which to depend. Despite the fact that the World Health Organization proposed a goal of “Health for All by the Year 2000,” which virtually every provider of health care in the world espoused, the closer we come to the target date, global statistics and trends do not give much cause for hope. Malnutrition is increasing, rather than decreasing throughout the world, safe water is not available to seventy-two percent of the lowest income countries, and the mortality rates are staggering in many African, Asian, and Latin American nations.

Equality, the Family, and the Law

Limitations on the rights of women cannot be adequately challenged without due process and equality of access and resources. The law is one of the many instruments that women can utilize in their efforts to gain justice in an unjust society. But laws that are not founded on reality are more likely to be abusive. Major parts of our lives are dominated by assumptions which are based on tradition and the notions of bygone eras which no longer hold within them the ring of truth. Outworn assumptions weigh heavily on each of us, and on humanity as a whole. Unless we find the courage and integrity to tap our own raw experience, rather than ready made preparations, we fall victim to a crime that is never taken up in a book of law — the crime of thoughtlessness. This was the message of Clara Wichmann, a Dutch lawyer and women’s advocate of the early 1900s (van Walsum, 1989). It remains the challenge of the world of women and their families as we approach the 21st century.

From Sex Roles to Sex Industries

It has been recognized for some time that sex role identification is a universal aspect of human development. Three aspects are involved in the process: (1) sex role preference, the desirability of one sex over another (2) sex role adoption, sex-related behaviors, and (3) sex role identification, the incorporation into one’ s personality of characteristic sex role responses (Lynn, 1959). Despite years of intensive research, it is impossible to assert that behaviors are intrinsically female or male. What has become clear is the fact that the environment is a major factor in sex role stereotyping, regardless of the tendencies of a person of either gender.