By Sindhu Rajasekaran, The Swaddle, May 26, 2020
The women of today are known to be fearless and outspoken – breakers of feudal shackles of patriarchy. We are exemplars of self-love. Brazen changemakers. But we are also known to be more anxious than any previous generation. 88% of millennial women suffer from stress, while Gen Z reports various mental health problems resulting from chronic anxiety. According to research, we are prone to experiencing a wide range of conditions from depression and PTSD to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. All this leads one to wonder how it was that our foremothers endured their travails so much better when we seem to fall apart so easily? After all, like us, they too rebelled against male dominance, fought to protect their freedoms, nativities, and artforms, sought to be leaders and changemakers. Can it really be that we are the first generation of women to feel the way we do, zinging between contradictory thoughts?
The truth is, women’s history is veiled in silence. We rarely have access to women’s voices from the past. We do not know what they thought about or how they felt over these thousands of years. But we do know that society has always regulated female lives. Our foremothers were pushed into normative social roles, often without consent. Childless women were condemned, widows ostracized, the sexually deviant honour-killed. Women from marginalized communities were persecuted, raped, and deprived of a dignified livelihood. In such a society – one that demanded women be selfless, that they suffer for the sake of their clan, and always put themselves last – their silence was not a choice.
“I strongly believe that our mothers and grandmothers also had their share of psychological sufferings as do millennial women,” says Dr. Mitali Soni Loya, a leading psychiatrist from Bhopal, where she runs Vayam, a specialized clinic for women. “The difference lies in their coping strategies. As women did not have much freedom of expression in the past, psychological distress was expressed either in the form of physical symptoms like having pain at multiple sites, having a long-standing illness that does not get better with any treatment or in the form of illnesses like conversion disorder (hysteria).”
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