On Maternal Mental Health Month
On the asymmetric label of mental illness, the dynamics of coercive control that produce so much of the distress the label catalogs, and the question of where the public conversation about maternal mental health is currently pointed.
This is Maternal Mental Health Month. It is remarkable how labeling a mother “mentally ill” can function as a mechanism for diminishing her credibility and restricting her rights, while labeling a male abuser “mentally ill” so often becomes an explanation for his violence and a rationale for his continued access to the family he abuses. The asymmetry is staggering.
Systems pathologize the effects of abuse in women while explaining away the exercise of abuse by men. A mother experiencing hypervigilance, exhaustion, anxiety, depression, fear, or dysregulation after prolonged coercion, stalking, or violence is often treated as unstable or unfit. The man causing the harm is framed as struggling, spiraling, mentally ill, traumatized, under stress — someone in need of understanding and continued connection to the family system.
The public conversation around Maternal Mental Health Month centers on fixing mothers and providing them services. The conversation rarely turns outward to confront the people whose conduct produces the distress.
In the United States, homicide is a leading cause of death during pregnancy and the postpartum period. Intimate partner violence and firearms drive many of those deaths. That fact should change how the public conversation about maternal mental health is framed. For many documented cases, the strain on mothers' mental health is the predictable consequence of coercive control occurring inside the home, with measurable casualties.
To reflexively assign male violence to mental illness does a profound disservice to the millions of men living with mental illness who do not abuse, terrorize, stalk, assault, or kill their partners or children. Most mentally ill men are not violent. Conflating abuse with psychiatric instability stigmatizes entire communities, obscures the actual dynamics of coercive control and entitlement, and recuses the justice system from its responsibility to recognize and intervene when predictable warning signs emerge.
Men abuse those with less structural power largely because they can, because systems have historically tolerated it, minimized it, privatized it, and too often allowed it to continue without meaningful accountability. To call this an issue of women's mental illness is to blame the victim. It is a power and accountability problem.
The justice system's responsibility, properly understood, is to confront abusive behavior with swift, consistent accountability while recognizing the mental and physical health strain abuse places on women, children, families, and entire communities. Endlessly contextualizing male violence while scrutinizing the psychological responses of the people surviving it is a failure of that responsibility.
Women are not becoming distressed in a vacuum.
Selected sources
- Campbell, J. C., Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J., Block, C., Campbell, D., Curry, M. A., et al. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089–1097.
- Metzl, J. M., & MacLeish, K. T. (2015). Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms. American Journal of Public Health, 105(2), 240–249.
- Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.
- Wallace, M. E., Gillispie-Bell, V., Cruz, K., Davis, K., & Vilda, D. (2021). Homicide during pregnancy and the postpartum period in the United States, 2018–2019. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 138(5), 762–769.
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