Tag: Trauma

By Larissa Bottomley

Mental health issues seem to be everywhere these days. If I had a dollar for every time someone said they have anxiety or depression, I’d be able to buy all the medication to cure said mental health issues. Unfortunately, I’ve heard of many victims of abuse diagnosed with mental health issues too. Schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, anxiety, the list goes on. But is diagnosing victims of abuse helping them, or harming them?

Hopefully after reading this, you might agree that actually, it’s just another form of victim-blaming.

Firstly, let’s talk about victim blaming.

This is when blame and responsibility of the abusive incident is placed on the person who was abused, and not the person who did the abusing. Most of the time, we think of victims blaming as things like “she shouldn’t have been out that late at night” or “she was wearing a very short skirt when she was assaulted”. If you need any other examples of victim blaming, you can find them here by Suzzanah Wiess, 2016.

Now let’s talk about mental health and psychiatric disorders.

The DSM (Diagnostic statistical manual for mental health disorders) is full of disorders that many victims of abuse are diagnosed with. Jessica Eaton, a forensic psychologist who specializes in gender-based violence, talks in her webinar about how every diagnosis in the DSM is strongly correlated with trauma. Therefore, one could argue that mental health disorders may be caused or exacerbated by traumatic events. Yet, instead of saying “actually, the way you are behaving is completely normal given what’s happened to you”, we tend to diagnose the victim and place the problem on her. She is no longer behaving in this way because of the trauma inflicted up on her, but because of her own internal issues that need to be treated and medicated.

So we’ve talked about how diagnosing places the problem on the victim, which internalizes and stigmatizes the trauma instead of normalizing it. If you’re still on the edge about calling pathologizing a form of victim blaming, then we should talk about abusers using the diagnosis against their victims. Will Bratt, a trauma therapist, discusses in his blog how abusers will often blame their behaviour on the victim’s mental health issues. Statements like “her anxiety made me angry and want to punch something” or “she knows her paranoid schizophrenia pushes all my buttons” is all too common, and is a means for the abusers to justify their heinous acts toward the victim. Imagine going through a traumatizing event, then being told your reaction to it means you have a problem and this needs to be medicated, then to top it off, your partner uses it against you as a reason to get angry and further revictimize you.

I want to lastly talk about how the court process is the last step in the pathologization of victim blaming. I’m sure we’ve all heard the stereotypes around mental health issues. For example, if I were to say “schizophrenia”, what would you think? Hearing and seeing things that aren’t there? Paranoia? Their reality is different to ours? Or what about personality disorders. Overly emotional? Manipulative? Impulsive and reckless? I’m sure we have stereotypes for many mental health disorders. And unfortunately, the courts aren’t much different. In a blog I read about this, ‘The system is broken’ it was highlighted that police see victims when they are hysterical and acting emotively, while the offender is often very calm and confident, leading ill-informed police to side with the abuser, and believe the victim’s mental health diagnosis is the cause of the incident, when in fact this is a natural response to a highly stressful and traumatic event. This gets worse as victims attempt to testify in court against the abuser, as people with mental health issues are often seen as not credible or reliable in court. This makes court processes often favour the abuser, and most victims with mental health diagnoses lose their court battle due to the pathology being used against them.

Mental health disorders do more harm than good for victims of abuse. We need to stop pathologizing victims and start calling their behaviours and reactions for what they are; responses to a trauma that was forced upon them.