April 22, 2025 • 21 mins
It wasn’t uncommon, in the 19th century, for women to be given the diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ and admitted to mental health asylums if they didn’t do what their husband said, or, if they swore, or had sex outside of marriage. But did you know that women are still being involuntarily sectioned in Australia? Today, investigative reporter Aisha Dow on what has led many women to end up in this terrifying situation, against their will. And the consequences of being misbelieved, and, often, misdiagnosed.
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S1 (00:01):
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Cylinder Morris. It's Wednesday,
April 23rd. It wasn't uncommon in the 19th century for
women to be given the diagnosis of hysteria and admitted
to mental health asylums if they didn't do what their
(00:22):
husband said, or if they swore or had sex outside
of marriage. But did you know that women are still
being involuntarily sectioned in Australia today? Investigative reporter Ayesha Dow
on what has led many women to end up in
this terrifying situation, against their will and the consequences of
being disbelieved and often misdiagnosed. So, Ayesha, you and our
(00:49):
colleague Kate Aubusson, you've spoken to many Australian women who
have been misdiagnosed with a mental illness. So let's just
start with what broadly are the sort of cases that
we're talking about. And are we actually talking about a few, frankly,
terrifying one offs, or is this sort of widespread?
S2 (01:07):
Yeah. Look, I'm going to be really frank and say
that I didn't expect that we would make some of
the findings that we made as part of this investigation.
We knew a lot going into this medical misogyny investigation
about the sort of barriers you can face in the
healthcare system or women in particular. We knew it was
common for women to report having their pain dismissed, or
(01:30):
that many face long delays getting a diagnosis, for example.
But I, I didn't expect to discover not just one,
but a few cases of women being reportedly placed in
mental health wards when they weren't mentally ill. In fact,
we heard about nine or so of these cases. I
(01:50):
found this really shocking, as I'm sure many of our
readers would too.
S1 (01:55):
Okay. So tell me about this. How are these women
being wrongfully detained in public mental health facilities.
S2 (02:02):
Yeah. So it's going to be different, I guess, for
each of those nine cases. But this investigation came about
when we heard from one particular woman. So we're calling
her Carol. That's not her real name. She told us
that she was locked up in a mental health ward
for 44 hours in 2019, when her husband allegedly falsely
(02:24):
claimed she was suicidal. Now, Carol has consistently maintained at
the time for years later, including up until this day
that she was not suicidal at all. So there was
a domestic dispute at the home on this day in 2019.
Police were called, ambulance were called. The paramedics who attended
(02:46):
the case, we got their notes afterwards and their notes
said that they found that Carol did not present with
any symptoms of acute psychosis or being an immediate risk
to herself or others. They also found that, you know,
she was sitting calmly in the lounge room, fully engaging
in conversation. But the police heard something else that, you know,
(03:09):
clearly worried them. They heard an allegation that Carol had
apparently made in front of one of her children's psychologists,
that she was going to jump off a cliff. Carol
has always argued those comments were misrepresented. She said that
she made an off hand remark about how she could
(03:31):
drive off a cliff, and her husband wouldn't care less
because of frustrations with feeling underappreciated and unsupported with parenting,
but had not made a suicide threat. So that was
one of the key things that came up in this
case that was contested. It seems like the hospital put
some weight in this allegation that she had been suicidal. Where? Carol,
(03:56):
you know, consistently maintained that that comment was taken out
of context.
S1 (04:04):
And I want to ask you about a particular woman
who was involuntarily detained and sent to a mental health
ward after she told police that she was being stalked.
So what happened there?
S2 (04:14):
Yeah, this is an absolutely shocking case. It involves a
woman who was worried about being watched and hearing noises
in her roof. According to two doctors who are familiar
with the case, the woman went to report her concerns
to police about hearing these noises. But police didn't believe her.
They thought she was delusional. As a result, she was
(04:38):
forcibly admitted to a mental health ward for multiple days
until it became apparent that she was actually competent and
she was released. The doctors who are familiar with this
case say the woman wasn't delusional at all. And down
the track, her stalking complaint was validated when food and
(04:59):
cameras were found in the roof of her home.
S1 (05:02):
I mean, that is just absolutely shocking. And you actually
spoke to this woman's GP and a psychiatrist who specializes
in trauma and family violence. So were they shocked at
what happened there?
S2 (05:12):
Yeah, I think the answer to that is sort of
yes and no. I think they were both incredibly outraged
that this could happen. They were really outraged about this
particular case where a perfectly healthy and sane woman could
spend multiple days in a mental health ward, but they
(05:32):
both have had quite a bit of experience seeing women
misdiagnosed with mental health issues. Um, so perhaps in light
of that, they weren't as surprised as you might expect.
So we spoke to Doctor Karen Williams. She's a consultant psychiatrist.
She's based in New South Wales, and she specialises in
(05:54):
trauma and family violence. And she said to me, this
is not a one off story. So she's actually heard
of other similar cases like this, where women have been
involuntarily admitted to mental health wards when, in her view,
that's not appropriate. But she also told me many stories
about women who had been told that they needed psychiatric
(06:19):
help when they didn't need psychiatric help at all. So
she is often treating women who've been referred on by
their GP's for mental health support. But then she discovers
that their symptoms aren't psychiatric. Perhaps they have thyroid issues,
perhaps they have endometriosis, maybe they have polycystic ovary syndrome
(06:41):
or chronic pain. And yet these symptoms have kind of
quickly been dismissed as something that's all in their head.
And off they go for mental health support when really
they needed treatment by that doctor.
S1 (06:54):
I mean, it really does leave you sort of with
your jaw dropped, which makes me want to ask. I mean,
how easy is it or not to be involuntarily detained
in a psychiatric facility. I mean, I think this would
be a nightmare scenario for most of us. So tell
us about this.
S2 (07:10):
Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think many
people who would have had an interaction with the mental
health system know it's actually it actually can be really
hard to get into a mental health unit, even if
you desperately need it. In my previous job as a
health journalist, I'd often report on severely ill people who
(07:30):
were having acute mental health episodes, and they were, you know,
left to languish in Ed for days because there were
there was no mental health bed available to them. And
I guess that's one of the reasons why I found
these stories so unbelievable, in a way, to begin with,
because we know that there's a huge shortage of mental
health beds. It doesn't seem to make sense that they're
(07:52):
going to people that don't need them. Uh, however, we
did speak to Matthew Large. He's a conjoint professor of
psychiatry at the University of New South Wales. And he
said these false positives. So these instances where someone is
scheduled under the Mental Health Act when they don't need
to be scheduled, he said they do happen and they
(08:13):
do happen to both men and women. And he said
that they happen because the health system is quite risk
averse when it comes to the perceived threat of suicide.
He said he'll sometimes hear doctors say things like, you know,
I don't care. They're mentally ill or not. I don't
want them to kill themselves. If that means they're in
(08:35):
hospital for a day, that's the cost. And I guess
you can kind of understand that perspective. But when I
was speaking to Carol, one of the women who was
involuntarily detained, she talked about the long term impact of
that detention on her. She developed PTSD as a result
of the time she spent in hospital. And she was
(08:56):
sort of urging people to, when they're weighing up these things,
to consider the cost of detaining someone when they don't
need to be detained.
S1 (09:08):
We'll be right back. I wanted to ask you about
something that the lawyer that you spoke to, Joanna moy.
She represented a number of the women who have been
wrongfully detained in public mental health facilities, because it seems
like she has said that a number of the women,
they were very educated, and they actually found it very
difficult to budge the perceptions of those that were treating them,
(09:30):
that they that they were mentally well, no matter how
articulate they were. Is that right?
S2 (09:34):
Yeah, absolutely. Um, Carol told us that there comes a
point where people just stop listening to you. She did
a bit of research after this happened to her, and
she came across something called Diagnosis Momentum. And that's as
soon as the patients labelled with something, it's very difficult
(09:58):
to have that removed. And the health service noted that
she had presented as teary and agitated, and became more
distressed and angry during the initial assessment. But Carol's psychiatrist,
Doctor Judith Craig argues those observations aren't necessarily in themselves
are sufficient justification for keeping someone. So, she says, if
(10:22):
you've just been assaulted by someone and sort of dragged
off by police, you know, you might actually be teary
and agitated, but it would be within that context. She
said a lot of people who obviously present to her
rooms are very tearful when they're telling you about something,
but that's not an indication for keeping them. So yeah,
(10:44):
we did hear a little bit from patients and, and
people that had worked with them that there was a
sense that no matter, you know, what these people said
once they'd sort of attracted that label, it was very
difficult to budge. In one of the cases that Sydney
family law solicitor Joanna moy saw recently there had been
(11:09):
a woman who she said was involuntarily detained in a
mental health ward, basically because she had different political views
from her husband. She was a supporter of Donald Trump
and she was anti-vaccination, apparently. So Joanna said that was
apparently enough to have this woman locked away.
S1 (11:29):
And it's hard not to hear these instances and really
be reminded of all those women that we used to
hear about, you know, from the 19th century. They were
branded hysterical and they were institutionalized. And I think back then,
it was because they were socially inconvenient in a number
of ways. So I guess tell me a bit about
what they used to be locked up for back then.
These women. And do the experts see any parallel between
(11:50):
those women in the 19th century and the women now?
S2 (11:54):
Yeah. When I first heard about these stories, I couldn't
help thinking about a television show I'd recently watched. It's
based around the goings on of a group of women
who lived in a brothel in 18th century London. And
there's an there's an episode of that series, harlots, where
one of the the older women in the series, a
(12:14):
brothel madame, she gets admitted to an asylum by her son,
even though she's not insane.
S3 (12:22):
I'm not leaving this in my house. Yeah.
S2 (12:26):
And they depict her sort of running around saying, look,
I'm not crazy. I don't I shouldn't be here. And
of course, you know, no one pays her any attention.
S4 (12:35):
I'm as sane as you please.
S2 (12:39):
So that's obviously a fictional story, but it's based on
real life events in previous centuries. This actually did happen.
And it happened quite commonly. So healthy and sane women
were admitted to asylums or madhouses by their relatives. We
know that there were women who were admitted to psychiatric
institutions because they didn't do what their husbands said, or
(13:01):
they broke social norms by having sex outside of marriage
or drinking or swearing. Um, and sometimes this wasn't actually happening.
You know, very long ago, even as recently as 1970,
a woman named Carmella was hospitalized because her husband said
she was unbearable, that she could not cope with the family,
(13:23):
that she was crying, had affairs with two men, and
she didn't like him. Yeah, so I guess it's hard
not to see the shadow of this history in these
cases that have come up in our reporting. And one
of the experts we spoke to for this story agreed.
Jane Asher, she's a professor of women's health psychology at
(13:46):
Western Sydney University. She said she felt like these modern
cases we reported on were a modern iteration of what
we have seen in the past, where difficult women were
considered mad and locked away.
S1 (14:01):
And you've written that women who are victims of family
violence are particularly at risk of receiving an incorrect mental
health diagnosis. So why?
S2 (14:09):
Yeah. That's right. You know, quite a few of the
most disturbing cases that we examined as part of this
investigation were cases where women had allegedly been the victim
of abusive, of an abusive partner. And I guess you
have to consider that these women, they might be being
told by an abusive partner, you know, you're you're crazy.
(14:31):
They might even start to believe that themselves. Or perhaps
their abuser is telling the authorities that their victim is
mentally ill and shouldn't be believed. Their story shouldn't be believed.
We spoke to Victorian psychiatrist Professor Manjula O'Connor, and she
told me that she had seen multiple cases of family
(14:53):
violence victims being misdiagnosed with chronic mental health conditions, such
as schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. And she put this
trend down to a lack of awareness about how trauma
can manifest in people.
S1 (15:10):
And I guess tell us about what the repercussions of
these misdiagnoses are for these women. I mean, I can
only imagine that this would be devastating, but what is
it actually like for them when this happens?
S2 (15:20):
Yeah, I agree, I think anyone who's spent time in a,
you know, mental health ward in a public hospital can
know that they they can be pretty hostile and scary places. Carol,
one of the women we spoke to for the series,
said she was incredibly scared. Uh, she later went on
to develop PTSD as a result of her stay. She
(15:44):
did say, and I think that this is reflected in
the in the patient notes that other patients were fighting.
She told me that her memories of this time were
burnt into her memory. I think it was the sense
of injustice that she shouldn't be there. I think that
would have been incredibly scary, perhaps not knowing how long
(16:05):
she was going to be there. So yeah, it sounded
like it was a yeah, a pretty scary place to be.
S1 (16:13):
And are women actually more likely to be disbelieved or
misdiagnosed with mental health issues?
S2 (16:18):
Yeah, this is really interesting. We do know that women
are more likely to have mental health diagnosis, but what
we know is that the studies have shown that women
are much more likely than men to receive a mental
health diagnosis, even after going to the doctors with similar symptoms.
(16:41):
So it's more likely that those symptoms will be, I guess,
attributed to a psychiatric cause. So, for example, a Spanish
review from back in 2020 found women received a higher
number of psychiatric diagnosis and prescriptions for mood altering drugs.
And that's even after controlling for those higher rates of
(17:04):
mental health conditions in the female population overall. So this
research sort of reflects what we're hearing anecdotally from the
1800 people that responded to our medical misogyny survey that
their their pain's kind of less likely to be taken seriously,
(17:24):
to be believed to be treated. And that also when
they go to the doctor with physical ailments and concerns
that I guess they're more likely to have those symptoms
very quickly written off as stress, anxiety or just, you know,
a normal part of being a woman.
S1 (17:44):
And Asia, I guess. Just to wrap up, what sort
of practical changes do you think would help stop women
from being involuntarily sectioned or incorrectly diagnosed with mental illness?
S2 (17:54):
So we know that these cases are really complex, which
means the causes and the solutions are, you know, complex too,
in terms of the women that have been detained in
mental health wards when they don't need to be detained.
That could be influenced by, you know, understaffing and strain
(18:15):
on hospitals, by insufficient training given to doctors by police,
misunderstanding family violence situations and a culture that still persists
in our society of misunderstanding women. One solution suggested by
Matthew Large is better ongoing training for doctors on scheduling
(18:37):
patients and recognizing misinformation that may be fed into patient
notes as part of this investigation. This masthead is also
backing calls for more funding for longer GP consults, so
peak doctors groups have consistently warned that the current Medicare system,
(19:00):
as it stands, incentivizes shorter appointments. So you'll get much
higher rebates Overall, if you, you know, have lots of
smaller GP appointments rather than taking your time with just
a few GP appointments. So I think, you know, many
of us would have had an experience at the GP
(19:21):
where you feel like you can only raise one issue
and that's not necessarily the GP's fault, it's just that
we know that they're pressed for time and that the
appointments only last for so long.
S1 (19:31):
Oh for sure. You're like apologetic aren't you? Yeah, exactly.
S5 (19:35):
Just like I'm so sorry.
S1 (19:36):
I've got a limb falling off. Do you mind.
S5 (19:38):
If I just. Yeah.
S2 (19:39):
So kind of what? You. As women, I think that's
something that we can really understand. Like, we have a
bit of a laundry list of things that we need
to get through, and you kind of maybe pick the
top 1 or 2. Most, most pressing. But what it
means is, you know, a woman, they might mention their headaches,
but they won't mention their period pain, they won't mention
(20:00):
their sleeplessness. And if there was time to discuss all
those things, then the GP, they would be able to
make the connections between the three and give them, I guess,
a better opportunity to come to the correct diagnosis.
S1 (20:16):
Well, thank you so much for your time.
S2 (20:19):
Thanks so much, Sam.
S1 (20:24):
Today's episode was produced by Josh Towers and Julia Carcasole.
Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom McKendrick is our
head of audio. To listen to our episodes as soon
as they drop, follow the Morning Edition on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our newsrooms are powered
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(20:46):
or smh.com.au. Subscribe and to stay up to date, sign
up to our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a summary
of the day's most important news in your inbox every morning.
Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris.
Thanks for listening.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Cylinder Morris. It's Wednesday,
April 23rd. It wasn't uncommon in the 19th century for
women to be given the diagnosis of hysteria and admitted
to mental health asylums if they didn't do what their
(00:22):
husband said, or if they swore or had sex outside
of marriage. But did you know that women are still
being involuntarily sectioned in Australia today? Investigative reporter Ayesha Dow
on what has led many women to end up in
this terrifying situation, against their will and the consequences of
being disbelieved and often misdiagnosed. So, Ayesha, you and our
(00:49):
colleague Kate Aubusson, you've spoken to many Australian women who
have been misdiagnosed with a mental illness. So let's just
start with what broadly are the sort of cases that
we're talking about. And are we actually talking about a few, frankly,
terrifying one offs, or is this sort of widespread?
S2 (01:07):
Yeah. Look, I'm going to be really frank and say
that I didn't expect that we would make some of
the findings that we made as part of this investigation.
We knew a lot going into this medical misogyny investigation
about the sort of barriers you can face in the
healthcare system or women in particular. We knew it was
common for women to report having their pain dismissed, or
(01:30):
that many face long delays getting a diagnosis, for example.
But I, I didn't expect to discover not just one,
but a few cases of women being reportedly placed in
mental health wards when they weren't mentally ill. In fact,
we heard about nine or so of these cases. I
(01:50):
found this really shocking, as I'm sure many of our
readers would too.
S1 (01:55):
Okay. So tell me about this. How are these women
being wrongfully detained in public mental health facilities.
S2 (02:02):
Yeah. So it's going to be different, I guess, for
each of those nine cases. But this investigation came about
when we heard from one particular woman. So we're calling
her Carol. That's not her real name. She told us
that she was locked up in a mental health ward
for 44 hours in 2019, when her husband allegedly falsely
(02:24):
claimed she was suicidal. Now, Carol has consistently maintained at
the time for years later, including up until this day
that she was not suicidal at all. So there was
a domestic dispute at the home on this day in 2019.
Police were called, ambulance were called. The paramedics who attended
(02:46):
the case, we got their notes afterwards and their notes
said that they found that Carol did not present with
any symptoms of acute psychosis or being an immediate risk
to herself or others. They also found that, you know,
she was sitting calmly in the lounge room, fully engaging
in conversation. But the police heard something else that, you know,
(03:09):
clearly worried them. They heard an allegation that Carol had
apparently made in front of one of her children's psychologists,
that she was going to jump off a cliff. Carol
has always argued those comments were misrepresented. She said that
she made an off hand remark about how she could
(03:31):
drive off a cliff, and her husband wouldn't care less
because of frustrations with feeling underappreciated and unsupported with parenting,
but had not made a suicide threat. So that was
one of the key things that came up in this
case that was contested. It seems like the hospital put
some weight in this allegation that she had been suicidal. Where? Carol,
(03:56):
you know, consistently maintained that that comment was taken out
of context.
S1 (04:04):
And I want to ask you about a particular woman
who was involuntarily detained and sent to a mental health
ward after she told police that she was being stalked.
So what happened there?
S2 (04:14):
Yeah, this is an absolutely shocking case. It involves a
woman who was worried about being watched and hearing noises
in her roof. According to two doctors who are familiar
with the case, the woman went to report her concerns
to police about hearing these noises. But police didn't believe her.
They thought she was delusional. As a result, she was
(04:38):
forcibly admitted to a mental health ward for multiple days
until it became apparent that she was actually competent and
she was released. The doctors who are familiar with this
case say the woman wasn't delusional at all. And down
the track, her stalking complaint was validated when food and
(04:59):
cameras were found in the roof of her home.
S1 (05:02):
I mean, that is just absolutely shocking. And you actually
spoke to this woman's GP and a psychiatrist who specializes
in trauma and family violence. So were they shocked at
what happened there?
S2 (05:12):
Yeah, I think the answer to that is sort of
yes and no. I think they were both incredibly outraged
that this could happen. They were really outraged about this
particular case where a perfectly healthy and sane woman could
spend multiple days in a mental health ward, but they
(05:32):
both have had quite a bit of experience seeing women
misdiagnosed with mental health issues. Um, so perhaps in light
of that, they weren't as surprised as you might expect.
So we spoke to Doctor Karen Williams. She's a consultant psychiatrist.
She's based in New South Wales, and she specialises in
(05:54):
trauma and family violence. And she said to me, this
is not a one off story. So she's actually heard
of other similar cases like this, where women have been
involuntarily admitted to mental health wards when, in her view,
that's not appropriate. But she also told me many stories
about women who had been told that they needed psychiatric
(06:19):
help when they didn't need psychiatric help at all. So
she is often treating women who've been referred on by
their GP's for mental health support. But then she discovers
that their symptoms aren't psychiatric. Perhaps they have thyroid issues,
perhaps they have endometriosis, maybe they have polycystic ovary syndrome
(06:41):
or chronic pain. And yet these symptoms have kind of
quickly been dismissed as something that's all in their head.
And off they go for mental health support when really
they needed treatment by that doctor.
S1 (06:54):
I mean, it really does leave you sort of with
your jaw dropped, which makes me want to ask. I mean,
how easy is it or not to be involuntarily detained
in a psychiatric facility. I mean, I think this would
be a nightmare scenario for most of us. So tell
us about this.
S2 (07:10):
Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think many
people who would have had an interaction with the mental
health system know it's actually it actually can be really
hard to get into a mental health unit, even if
you desperately need it. In my previous job as a
health journalist, I'd often report on severely ill people who
(07:30):
were having acute mental health episodes, and they were, you know,
left to languish in Ed for days because there were
there was no mental health bed available to them. And
I guess that's one of the reasons why I found
these stories so unbelievable, in a way, to begin with,
because we know that there's a huge shortage of mental
health beds. It doesn't seem to make sense that they're
(07:52):
going to people that don't need them. Uh, however, we
did speak to Matthew Large. He's a conjoint professor of
psychiatry at the University of New South Wales. And he
said these false positives. So these instances where someone is
scheduled under the Mental Health Act when they don't need
to be scheduled, he said they do happen and they
(08:13):
do happen to both men and women. And he said
that they happen because the health system is quite risk
averse when it comes to the perceived threat of suicide.
He said he'll sometimes hear doctors say things like, you know,
I don't care. They're mentally ill or not. I don't
want them to kill themselves. If that means they're in
(08:35):
hospital for a day, that's the cost. And I guess
you can kind of understand that perspective. But when I
was speaking to Carol, one of the women who was
involuntarily detained, she talked about the long term impact of
that detention on her. She developed PTSD as a result
of the time she spent in hospital. And she was
(08:56):
sort of urging people to, when they're weighing up these things,
to consider the cost of detaining someone when they don't
need to be detained.
S1 (09:08):
We'll be right back. I wanted to ask you about
something that the lawyer that you spoke to, Joanna moy.
She represented a number of the women who have been
wrongfully detained in public mental health facilities, because it seems
like she has said that a number of the women,
they were very educated, and they actually found it very
difficult to budge the perceptions of those that were treating them,
(09:30):
that they that they were mentally well, no matter how
articulate they were. Is that right?
S2 (09:34):
Yeah, absolutely. Um, Carol told us that there comes a
point where people just stop listening to you. She did
a bit of research after this happened to her, and
she came across something called Diagnosis Momentum. And that's as
soon as the patients labelled with something, it's very difficult
(09:58):
to have that removed. And the health service noted that
she had presented as teary and agitated, and became more
distressed and angry during the initial assessment. But Carol's psychiatrist,
Doctor Judith Craig argues those observations aren't necessarily in themselves
are sufficient justification for keeping someone. So, she says, if
(10:22):
you've just been assaulted by someone and sort of dragged
off by police, you know, you might actually be teary
and agitated, but it would be within that context. She
said a lot of people who obviously present to her
rooms are very tearful when they're telling you about something,
but that's not an indication for keeping them. So yeah,
(10:44):
we did hear a little bit from patients and, and
people that had worked with them that there was a
sense that no matter, you know, what these people said
once they'd sort of attracted that label, it was very
difficult to budge. In one of the cases that Sydney
family law solicitor Joanna moy saw recently there had been
(11:09):
a woman who she said was involuntarily detained in a
mental health ward, basically because she had different political views
from her husband. She was a supporter of Donald Trump
and she was anti-vaccination, apparently. So Joanna said that was
apparently enough to have this woman locked away.
S1 (11:29):
And it's hard not to hear these instances and really
be reminded of all those women that we used to
hear about, you know, from the 19th century. They were
branded hysterical and they were institutionalized. And I think back then,
it was because they were socially inconvenient in a number
of ways. So I guess tell me a bit about
what they used to be locked up for back then.
These women. And do the experts see any parallel between
(11:50):
those women in the 19th century and the women now?
S2 (11:54):
Yeah. When I first heard about these stories, I couldn't
help thinking about a television show I'd recently watched. It's
based around the goings on of a group of women
who lived in a brothel in 18th century London. And
there's an there's an episode of that series, harlots, where
one of the the older women in the series, a
(12:14):
brothel madame, she gets admitted to an asylum by her son,
even though she's not insane.
S3 (12:22):
I'm not leaving this in my house. Yeah.
S2 (12:26):
And they depict her sort of running around saying, look,
I'm not crazy. I don't I shouldn't be here. And
of course, you know, no one pays her any attention.
S4 (12:35):
I'm as sane as you please.
S2 (12:39):
So that's obviously a fictional story, but it's based on
real life events in previous centuries. This actually did happen.
And it happened quite commonly. So healthy and sane women
were admitted to asylums or madhouses by their relatives. We
know that there were women who were admitted to psychiatric
institutions because they didn't do what their husbands said, or
(13:01):
they broke social norms by having sex outside of marriage
or drinking or swearing. Um, and sometimes this wasn't actually happening.
You know, very long ago, even as recently as 1970,
a woman named Carmella was hospitalized because her husband said
she was unbearable, that she could not cope with the family,
(13:23):
that she was crying, had affairs with two men, and
she didn't like him. Yeah, so I guess it's hard
not to see the shadow of this history in these
cases that have come up in our reporting. And one
of the experts we spoke to for this story agreed.
Jane Asher, she's a professor of women's health psychology at
(13:46):
Western Sydney University. She said she felt like these modern
cases we reported on were a modern iteration of what
we have seen in the past, where difficult women were
considered mad and locked away.
S1 (14:01):
And you've written that women who are victims of family
violence are particularly at risk of receiving an incorrect mental
health diagnosis. So why?
S2 (14:09):
Yeah. That's right. You know, quite a few of the
most disturbing cases that we examined as part of this
investigation were cases where women had allegedly been the victim
of abusive, of an abusive partner. And I guess you
have to consider that these women, they might be being
told by an abusive partner, you know, you're you're crazy.
(14:31):
They might even start to believe that themselves. Or perhaps
their abuser is telling the authorities that their victim is
mentally ill and shouldn't be believed. Their story shouldn't be believed.
We spoke to Victorian psychiatrist Professor Manjula O'Connor, and she
told me that she had seen multiple cases of family
(14:53):
violence victims being misdiagnosed with chronic mental health conditions, such
as schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. And she put this
trend down to a lack of awareness about how trauma
can manifest in people.
S1 (15:10):
And I guess tell us about what the repercussions of
these misdiagnoses are for these women. I mean, I can
only imagine that this would be devastating, but what is
it actually like for them when this happens?
S2 (15:20):
Yeah, I agree, I think anyone who's spent time in a,
you know, mental health ward in a public hospital can
know that they they can be pretty hostile and scary places. Carol,
one of the women we spoke to for the series,
said she was incredibly scared. Uh, she later went on
to develop PTSD as a result of her stay. She
(15:44):
did say, and I think that this is reflected in
the in the patient notes that other patients were fighting.
She told me that her memories of this time were
burnt into her memory. I think it was the sense
of injustice that she shouldn't be there. I think that
would have been incredibly scary, perhaps not knowing how long
(16:05):
she was going to be there. So yeah, it sounded
like it was a yeah, a pretty scary place to be.
S1 (16:13):
And are women actually more likely to be disbelieved or
misdiagnosed with mental health issues?
S2 (16:18):
Yeah, this is really interesting. We do know that women
are more likely to have mental health diagnosis, but what
we know is that the studies have shown that women
are much more likely than men to receive a mental
health diagnosis, even after going to the doctors with similar symptoms.
(16:41):
So it's more likely that those symptoms will be, I guess,
attributed to a psychiatric cause. So, for example, a Spanish
review from back in 2020 found women received a higher
number of psychiatric diagnosis and prescriptions for mood altering drugs.
And that's even after controlling for those higher rates of
(17:04):
mental health conditions in the female population overall. So this
research sort of reflects what we're hearing anecdotally from the
1800 people that responded to our medical misogyny survey that
their their pain's kind of less likely to be taken seriously,
(17:24):
to be believed to be treated. And that also when
they go to the doctor with physical ailments and concerns
that I guess they're more likely to have those symptoms
very quickly written off as stress, anxiety or just, you know,
a normal part of being a woman.
S1 (17:44):
And Asia, I guess. Just to wrap up, what sort
of practical changes do you think would help stop women
from being involuntarily sectioned or incorrectly diagnosed with mental illness?
S2 (17:54):
So we know that these cases are really complex, which
means the causes and the solutions are, you know, complex too,
in terms of the women that have been detained in
mental health wards when they don't need to be detained.
That could be influenced by, you know, understaffing and strain
(18:15):
on hospitals, by insufficient training given to doctors by police,
misunderstanding family violence situations and a culture that still persists
in our society of misunderstanding women. One solution suggested by
Matthew Large is better ongoing training for doctors on scheduling
(18:37):
patients and recognizing misinformation that may be fed into patient
notes as part of this investigation. This masthead is also
backing calls for more funding for longer GP consults, so
peak doctors groups have consistently warned that the current Medicare system,
(19:00):
as it stands, incentivizes shorter appointments. So you'll get much
higher rebates Overall, if you, you know, have lots of
smaller GP appointments rather than taking your time with just
a few GP appointments. So I think, you know, many
of us would have had an experience at the GP
(19:21):
where you feel like you can only raise one issue
and that's not necessarily the GP's fault, it's just that
we know that they're pressed for time and that the
appointments only last for so long.
S1 (19:31):
Oh for sure. You're like apologetic aren't you? Yeah, exactly.
S5 (19:35):
Just like I'm so sorry.
S1 (19:36):
I've got a limb falling off. Do you mind.
S5 (19:38):
If I just. Yeah.
S2 (19:39):
So kind of what? You. As women, I think that's
something that we can really understand. Like, we have a
bit of a laundry list of things that we need
to get through, and you kind of maybe pick the
top 1 or 2. Most, most pressing. But what it
means is, you know, a woman, they might mention their headaches,
but they won't mention their period pain, they won't mention
(20:00):
their sleeplessness. And if there was time to discuss all
those things, then the GP, they would be able to
make the connections between the three and give them, I guess,
a better opportunity to come to the correct diagnosis.
S1 (20:16):
Well, thank you so much for your time.
S2 (20:19):
Thanks so much, Sam.
S1 (20:24):
Today's episode was produced by Josh Towers and Julia Carcasole.
Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom McKendrick is our
head of audio. To listen to our episodes as soon
as they drop, follow the Morning Edition on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our newsrooms are powered
by subscriptions, so to support independent journalism, visit The Age
(20:46):
or smh.com.au. Subscribe and to stay up to date, sign
up to our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a summary
of the day's most important news in your inbox every morning.
Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris.
Thanks for listening.
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