Feminists

Within a family or household, the husband/father is almost always in the position of greater power from the outset.

It could be more difficult in various ways for his female partner to have him involuntarily placed in a mental health facility than for him to do it if his female partner exhibited similar symptoms, precisely because of that power imbalance.

A woman might trust her judgment less, feel less likely to be taken seriously, feel that it would violate her wifely duty of loyalty to try to have such action taken, just feel more powerless all round ...

A man might be more likely to exercise his greater power over his female partner to have her treated. However, doing that can also result in a woman who genuinely needs mental health care not getting it: Andrea Yates.

A woman would also be less likely to use involuntarily mental health placement as a way of exercising power in itself. That is certainly what many women endured in the past, and we would be hard pressed to find examples of men whose wives successfully did that to them.

And yes, we know that too often it was a way of controlling women who were not mentally ill at all, who were promiscuous girls or women with depression, for example.


My mother's aunt, born about 1895, was committed to a psychiatric hospital not long after WWI. My mum didn't even know about her until the aunt died in the 1940s. She was said to have had a breakdown from grief after her oldest brother (single and with no children) was killed in the last days of that war. I have always wondered what the real story was -- although such collapses actually were not unheard of. Her mother was dead, her father was a strange duck who was 70 years old when this happened, and she was living in the men's boarding house her father operated. One can only speculate.