When women complain about our lives are told we are ‘out of our minds’. That can mean three things. Written off as merely ‘crazy’ anyway and wasting others’ time. Simply driven to that point by the ways in which we are treated. Or our reaction on discovering that our mental health problems are apparently less important. We are NOT crazy when we need talk about the kinds of pain, suffering, abuse, violence and fear that women experience. Women continue to be oppressed in a multitude of different ways and this causes suffering. However, women also develop mental illnesses too and to deny that is to gaslight the women who are suffering. Women need expert help from professionals who also understand what oppression is and the trauma it causes. Our mental health problems are deemed less important by society so receive less investment. Feminism should not only be challenging the oppression of women but fighting for better treatment for mental illness which is real and not all caused by ‘trauma’. We need much better evidence about women’s mental health and illness, which has been chronically underfunded. We need to speak out about the need for more compassionate, women-centred care.

In the past women who were deemed to be ‘difficult’ were called ‘hysterical’ and their ‘odd’ behaviour even exhibited in lecture theatres, for entertainment, to doctors in training. But today, even after decades of feminism, are women still being dismissed as ‘out of our minds’ when we complain? The focus of the last two decades has been on men’s mental health because of their higher suicide rate. However, women are suffering significantly too in many ways and still disproportionately, losing out in mental health care. Gender plays a key role in how we experience our mental health but is paid insufficient attention. What has gone wrong for women and girls? Why are we still ‘out of our minds’ and what can we do about it?