The Sexist History of Blaming Mothers for Mental Illness

<p>When it comes to psychiatry and brain science, moms haven&rsquo;t had it easy. Autism once was blamed on &ldquo;refrigerator mothers.&rdquo; Obsessive-compulsive disorder used to be blamed on mothers who got toilet training wrong. Even homosexuality, back when psychiatry considered it to be a sickness, was said to be caused by&hellip; guess who? Ever since Freud, it&rsquo;s been hard to find any emotional or mental disorder that, in one way or another, therapists haven&rsquo;t tried to plant right at the feet of your mom.</p> <p>They were wrong, of course. But it took until a raft of population studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s for many psychotherapists to cop to how wrong they were. There&rsquo;s no way that a disease like, say, schizophrenia, which affects 3% of any given population, can be blamed on parenting practices that happen in way more families than that. Or as the schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey once told me: &ldquo;If bad parenting caused any of these diseases, we&rsquo;d all be in big, big trouble.&rdquo;</p> <p><a href="https://elemental.medium.com/the-sexist-history-of-blaming-mothers-for-mental-illness-c893e31062a5"><strong>Visit Now</strong></a></p>
Tags: sexist History