[MUSIC PLAYING] LISA GOODMAN: I think mental health is one of those specialized services that is so problematically separated from other services so that women have to divide themselves into little pieces to get—and then come to define themselves by those fragmented pieces. And especially poor women who to check off the boxes. I'm homeless, substance abuse to domestic—check off them as if they're this array of problems and that's how in an intake. That's how they have to greet the people who are supposed to help them. And then they get told to go here, here, here and—
MELANIE KATZMAN: I read an article that was written by a group of very well respected epidemiologists and psychiatrists got tremendous amounts of attention, but they basically concluded that if you have anorexia on the island of Curacao—Curacao is predominantly black that anorexia must not be culturally determined. And to their credit, they said, OK big mouth. Why don't you come to Curacao on our next visit and you can do the interviews and you can poke around, and we'll open everything up to you and see what you find. And so low and behold, what did I find? Well, actually, as soon as the women walked in the door, they all came. It's a small island.
This study had gotten lots of attention. As they literally all came in—and the picture speaks a thousand words. It was their that moment, which was not one of the women that walked through that door looked anything like a typically woman at Curacao. And these women were A, for the most part not black. If the blacks were the dominant race they had, for the most part left the island, had been exposed to alternative possibilities, and came back and had to then re-acclimate to a very different set of cultural expectations. They were better educated. They had very different views about themselves for the future. Each one of them had a story about how they used their food as a way of coping. It was an effort to get a ticket out and that there was nothing typical about them and everything cultural about them.
JOAN CHRISLER: Because everyone knew about cramps, but nobody knew about PMS. So it just wasn't something that people complained about. It was just unknown. And then in 1980, there were two trials in Great Britain where women used the defense that they had premenstrual syndrome at the time of their crimes. And this was an international sensation.
In fact, one of my early studies was called "The Media Construct a Menstrual Monster." So I'm not trying to say that there are no changes in your body that you can experience and notice across the menstrual cycle. Every woman knows that there are. The question is, how bothersome do they have to be before you say, I have a medical problem. If it's normal, it's not a medical problem. It's just premenstrual changes, or bio rhythms, whatever you'd like to call it. It's not premenstrual syndrome.
INGRID JOHNSTON-ROBLEDO: But yeah, I mean, I think starting from a really early age getting kids to really have some body literacy, it goes a really long way. So we're finding that body shame and genital shame affects sexual decision making. It affects sexual satisfaction. So I mean, if there are any opportunities through the schools, through community groups, through parents, to start in developmentally appropriate ways to start talking about embracing all facets of your body and getting more comfortable touching your body and understanding how it works, how it feels. I feel like that can go a really long way.
So I think it's about consciousness raising and education from a really young age. And getting psychologists and physicians to start talking to women about their sexuality and their bodies.
BEVERLY GREENE: What goes on out there is not relevant to what is taking place in the therapy room. That everything that goes on out there affects who your patient is. So if they're a member of a marginalized group, how that group is treated and how that affects this person and your understanding of it, and what is going on in society that marginalizes them is an important piece to bring into the work.
LAURA BROWN: I think that everything a feminist therapist does is a small act of social change. From where we situate our practice to how we set our fee to how we relate to giving clients diagnosis to how we inform our clients about what it is that therapy will be. Because by taking the stance that you the client are also the expert by disrupting the discourse of authoritative nowhere and non authoritative help seeker. We do an act of social change.
MARION FRANK: That for me, I mean, working with one person at a time is how change happens. One person at a time, that's how change happens. Which is why I like to do some reorganization work too because change also happens in a bigger way, but yet I prefer the one on one. And I think for people to understand how much when you're working one on one, sometimes the awareness of how much the environment is impacting on you. Not it's your personal history in terms of your family, but in terms of your larger network, and in terms of your sociocultural environment.
MELANIE KATZMAN: I'm very explicit with my patients about my not necessarily being the expert that together we're working on exploring alternative questions so that they can come up with new solutions to them being the ones that are doing a lot of hard work during the week. They are correcting me. I do whatever I can in terms of our interaction to be on the one hand supportive and engaging, but on a safe pair of hands. But on the other hand, extremely respectful to the fact that they're going to be the agents in their life.
NANCY BAKER: I had frankly always looked down at therapy as being passing out band aides when society needs major surgery. Because so many of the changes that I think really need to be made are at the systemic level. And therapies and a systemic activity, it's at the individual level, but I also came to realize that it was important for people not to bleed to death while we were trying to do major surgery on society.
LAURA BROWN: Feminist therapy is a theory. It's an integrative model of therapy that's about therapy with human beings in which gender and power and people's other social locations are interrogated as we make sense of people's distress. So we succeeded in getting all of our core concepts into the good stuff. Students learn do informed consent, think about gender, think about power. But they don't learn this was started by feminist therapists.
BEVERLY GREENE: Certainly in Afrocentric therapies, the importance of understanding racism was brought into the therapy. But what was missing was, how is race, gender coded? That racism is experienced differently for men than it is for women. How is sexism and that narrative component within African-Americans as a group that also undermines the status of women.
JUDY WORELL: And of course, feminist therapy was evolving. As I understood it at the time, it was acknowledging women and the personal was political. So it those early kind of consciousness raising groups that were evolving as they went and developing what is it? And what does feminism mean? What is feminist therapy? And of course, that's still evolving and changing. By now, there's not just one feminist therapy. There's many.
JANIS SANCHEZ-HUCLES: Now, I would say that my practice is majority people of color. And what that reflects is that I think people of color A, are willing to seek services beyond their family, the ministers, the community. And B, I have a lot of individuals who call me and say, I want a woman of color as a therapist. So I think there's a great deal of sophistication, and a greater sense that I can ask for what I need and get that. So I think that we have made some progress. I also think that even in the black press and the media are talking about mental health issues.
LAURA BROWN: I think the challenges are to keep renewing our understanding of what feminism is to keep expanding it so that as we understand oppression and empowerment in new ways that we don't keep on having the same definition of feminism as we did 30 years ago. I'm not the same feminist I was in 1972. That's a good thing. I don't think feminist psychologists are only women. I don't think that feminist therapy is either done for or with women only, and I did. I don't think that multiculturalism is other than central to feminist practice. That was not something I knew or understood in the 1970s. I don't think that gender is binary. And I certainly don't think it's essential.
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