Problematizing Mental Disorders From a Gender Perspective in Guatemala

• In Event: 14.036 - Decolonizing Dis/ability Categories of Mental Health at Their Intersections: A Collaborative Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

This ethnographic study brings forward the testimonios of two Ladina women having been diagnosed with bipolarity and institutionalized in the psychiatric system of Guatemala City. After three years of ethnographic work which includes observation of the national mental health hospital Federico Mora, interviews with mental health professionals and testimonios, it becomes apparent that the system of mental health care victimizes women in the form of care. Thus, the experiences of Silvia and Teresa problematizes the labels of mental illness by contextualizing them in the history of gender violence of the country. In so doing, the author calls for a localized, psycho-social understanding of mental health, one that brings forward the social determinants of health crucial to the experience of Guatemalans everyday life.
Contrarily to the literature on mental health stigma, that suggest that stigma is the impediment to accessing mental health services (Corrigan, 2005; Corrigan et. al 2012), this study shows that in Guatemala mental health care providers are overwhelmed and oversaturated with the demand for their services. Yet, Guatemala invest the least on mental health care and education, and when it does, it does so from an imported American model that understand disorders to happen within adults brains and not in the circumstances that might cause distress, such as the history of genocide and terror. Although middle class Ladina women have access to mental health services these services do not take into consideration their everyday experience of gender violence, invalidating their experiences which in turn can become re-victimazing. Since the few but available mental health resources do not adequately account for the experiences of guatemalan women, whose bodies have historically been used as a site of state terror, the mental health system further becomes implicated in normalizing gender violence through a medicalization of “disorder.” Through a problematization of the individualized and medicalized categories of mental illness, the author calls on educational and developmental agencies to center their pedagogies on the construction of wellbeing. In particular, in post-conflict societies like the Guatemalan, where gender violence has been systematically used as a tool of war, deep understandings of gender violence need to become a priority in the training and education of the mental health professionals of the country in order to efficiently care for the wellbeing of women. Through the voices of Silvia and Teresa, the author calls for mental health professionals to focus on gender and violence prevention training in order to account for the context of gender violence in mental health practice.

Author

• Chantal Figueroa, University of California - Los Angeles