How Does Rebecca Shanhouse Create An Ethic Of Care For Mental Illness

Ethic of Care for “Madness”

In order to construct an appropriate ethic of care for women deemed “mad” by mental practitioners and/or family members, special heed must be paid to culture, values, and the individuality of the patient. In Rebecca Shannonhouse’s anthology, Out of Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness, Shannonhouse includes brief excerpts of writings by women who have experienced this very situation: having expressed or been determined to have an unstable mental state. Excerpts from The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen will illustrate three necessary and intimately intertwined criteria for defining a common ethic of care. The first will confront

Doubt in mental patients’ experiences due to the possible unfamiliarity of these experiences to the textbook situations with which mental practitioners are educated hinders the progression of treatment altogether. The second will address the importance of the patient before the education of the doctor. This is to say that the material or, again, textbook situations involved in the education of the mental health practitioner should be considered secondary to the specific patient’s individual experience. With the checklists that accompany the myriad of labeled mental illnesses it is easy to assign each patient with one of these illnesses and treat according to that illness rather than to the patient. The third criterion for an appropriate ethic of care is a continuation of the second: the patient’s lived experience should be as thoroughly understood as possible before an appropriate treatment can be crafted for the individual. This type of in-depth understanding before the use of symptom checklists to identify illnesses or speedy issuance of drugs can absolutely lower the risk of inappropriate diagnoses and

Because of the complexity of the mind and its ailments, it has too often been assumed that certain abnormalities in behavior can be cured with rest and/or certain foods or drinks (or lack thereof). It would be clearly absurd, by modern medical standards, to treat a broken arm with rest and lots of water alone. However, a condition that is not as visible as a broken arm, such as cold, can in fact be aided with this exact treatment. Equating mental illness with that of a cold or other easily treated sickness is the real absurdity. As stated, neither a cold nor depression is visible beyond specific symptoms; however, a cold is fleeting in most instances while depression is ongoing and in many cases terminal. Doubt in the severity of a patient’s condition, as an immediate reaction, because it is invisible or unfamiliar to the cases studied by practitioner should be eliminated from the exercise of mental treatment completely. The discussion itself of this doubt obstructs and delays true treatment of individual patients. Gilman illustrates this very hindrance in her excerpt from The Yellow Wallpaper, a piece which reflects upon her experience being held in a room as a means of treatment by her husband, a doctor who did not believe his wife to be ill. Gilman recounts that this very disbelief by her husband is the “one reason [she does] not