Disordered Minds: Women, Men and Unreason in Thought, Emotion and Behaviour

Abstract

Psychiatric disorder — to use a broad term — has never, contrary to some suggestions (Showalter, 1987), been a distinctively female malady (Busfield, 1994), and it has been widely recognized that men, no less than women, can be diseased in mind as well as in body. None the less, there have always been important differences between male and female psychiatric disorder. First, there have been differences between men and women in the typical patterns of disorder, generating a gendered landscape of psychiatric disorder changing over time (Busfield 1996, pp. 13–30). This gendering can be seen quite clearly in Table 2.1, which sets out data from a British survey of psychiatric disorder in the community.