Amber Heard and Britney Spears Highlight the Stigma of Women’s Mental Illness

The mental health of prominent women has been in the news a lot. Millions of online viewers watched the defamation trial betweenAmber Heard and Johnny Depp. The trial was used as fodder in social media posts that sought to portray Heard as "unstable" and it included speculation about her mental health by a forensic psychologist. The outcome was not important. If a woman is stigmatized because of her mental illness, the costs and damage to her career can't be mitigated.

Discrimination, bias, and unrealistic expectations are still faced by women. They need to be seen as being in charge of everything. They need to succeed in their careers, maintain likability, serve as doting mothers, and so on, while doing their jobs with more modesty than their male counterparts. The burden of societal prescriptions to be sexy and innocent is carried by female actors and singers. The mental health costs of having to negotiate this bind are enormous.

Heard shows how society can weaponize the mental well-being of women. This scrutiny has cost some women their independence. Spears is an example of an icon. Images of a "Crazy" Spears first appeared more than 15 years ago, when she grabbed a pair of clippers at a beauty salon. She was accused of no longer performing her job, being a parent or managing her own finances. She had lost her capacity for thinking. A judge freed her from a hold on her assets in late 2021, after she was placed into a conservatorship by her father. The idea that a multimillionaire professional at age 40 could not manage her personal affairs is ridiculous.

Female celebrities have been criticized for their mental health issues. The media mocked Selena Gomez after she shared her depression and panic attacks. Lady Gaga said that coming out about her mental health issues was a controversial experience that exposed her to the public. Even though severe clinical disorders are common, and many people recover or manage them successfully, mental health diagnoses are still heavily laden with deeply ingrained stigma.

The way men are depicted in the media is vastly different to the way women are portrayed. Jim Carrey has suffered from depression, but no judge placed him into a care facility. Such men have been praised for how their mental illness made them stand out from the crowd. Mental illnesses of male painters, novelists and composers, from Ernest Hemingway to David Foster Wallace, have been glamorized in pop culture. The unrealistic expectations of being compassionate and competitive must be met by female celebrities. Mental health can be damaged by internalization. The Triple Bind was written by one of us.

Sensationalizing mental health difficulties in a high-profile woman perpetuates the idea that she is inadequate and incompetent. She is stigmatized and devalues by it. Women are viewed as unreliable reporters by society and courts because they are less competent and less logical than men. People with power can use mental health as a weapon.

The stigma of mental illness is still strong for women. In The Mark of Shame and Another Kind of Madness, the author argues that women are more likely to be insulted by irrational behavior than men. If unpopular or deviant behaviors are the result of a mental illness, they must be irrational and discountable.

Women who experience mental disorders are more likely to internalize the idea that they aren't deserving of treatment. The biases begin early. There is an unreasonable bind of elevated expectations for adolescents.

Rates of binge eating, depression, anxiety, attempted suicide and nonsuicidal self-injury continue to rise in teen girls and women. Over the past few years, discussions about mental health stigma have increased, and one of us started an online course to combat it. Not enough attention has been given to how this stigma affects genders. Do girls and women pay a higher price when it comes to their lives and careers? The subject of clinical and public-health concern should not be discounted as personal weakness or attention-seeking.

Society's captivation with women's mental health challenges should open our eyes to the enduring stigma and weight of mental illness for girls and women. It's time for discussions of mental health stigma to acknowledge and address this double standard so that women and girls can get the support and treatments they need without the fear that their lives will be destroyed if they do so.

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