Women – all women – perform these psychological tricks to cope with harassment from people like Harvey Weinstein every day

Film producer Harry Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment of young women was reportedly an open secret in Hollywood. Weinstein is one of a number of celebrities who have been outed for sexual harassment in recent years, as public awareness grows. Sexual harassment is part of everyday life for many, if not most, girls and women. Yet there has been little consideration of the effects of this on mental health.

Being female in a culture that sexually objectifies the female body has effects. Girls and women are socialised into internalising the outside view of their bodies. This means that they are more likely to habitually monitor the body and check social space for potential danger. The costs of this are huge. There is a financial burden of course – taking that taxi at night, and so on. But there is also a psychological and physical cost.

Women are far more likely to experience mental health problems in general, especially certain conditions such as anxiety. Anxiety often takes the form of experiencing a constant generalised worry, and finding it difficult to leave the safety of home. These experiences are labelled as mental disorders – generalised anxiety disorder and agoraphobia in these two examples – as if they can be clearly situated as pathologies in the individual rather than products of the environment.

Yet chronic low-level environmental stress, always gendered, has demonstrable long-term effects on the body and mind. The need to see sexual harassment as a mental health problem becomes clear if we look at the experiences of trans men in public space. Suddenly, there is a sense of an increased safety, a right to be able to stretch out – an experience of being less subject to sexual scrutiny.

Girls and women are also far more likely to self-harm, the most widespread forms of which are denying the body adequate nourishment (anorexia) or cutting the skin. Though there are many causes of this, attacking the body in these ways all too often enacts a societal hatred of, and confusion about, the female body and sexual maturity.

It is no accident, surely, that most mental health problems start on the cusp of puberty, when the sexualised gaze becomes suddenly acute, and when so many girls are suddenly subject to confusing reactions from far older men.

Women’s position as objects of an unrelenting gaze is especially confusing at this point in history. One is both supposed to both be a desiring, thinking, engaged subject, revelling in the benefits of fourth-wave feminism, and the ultimate, marketable Instagram object filtered to perfection. This ambiguity about female agency, which of course gets internalised, is crystallised in the diagnostic category of “borderline personality disorder” (75 per cent of diagnoses are for women).

Women in this category are pathologised for being too good at being chameleon-like figures adapting to the desires of whoever is front of one, and too angry for also refusing this insistence. Is it really right to consider these women to have a disordered sense of self, rather than view it as a symptom of society which sends out wildly contradictory messages of what it means to perform socially acceptable femininity?

All this does not take away from the fact gendered experience f***s men up too. Toxic masculinity, after all, is an important factor behind elevated rates of suicide in men. What it does mean, though, is that we need to start thinking seriously about how gendered experiences and the ubiquity of sexual violence affect mental health.

At present, mental health services often fail to ask even the most basic questions about sexual violence, let alone attend with any seriousness to the sexual harassment experienced by so many patients on psychiatric wards and sometimes even at the hands of staff members.

Society used to be better at this. In the sixties and seventies, second-wave feminism placed gender and mental health firmly on the same page. Seminal books like Chesler’s Women and Madness helped fuel the feminist consciousness-raising movement. This was hardly perfect, of course, not least in neglecting how gender and madness intersect with racism, ableism and class privilege.

But it was perhaps more sophisticated than our current thinking where mental health campaigning is split off from fourth-wave feminism, and where treatment manuals for conditions that are experienced overwhelmingly by women fail to consider gender, or indeed sexual violence, at all.

Sexual harassment, the sudden presence of the sexual gaze at puberty, and indeed its disappearance in midlife, are central to understanding women’s “madness”. We must celebrate the women brave enough to speak out now, and use their experiences to carve out more nuanced understandings of the pressures women face which cause so much suffering – a suffering so easily misconstrued to be a sign of mental illness.

Dr Jay Watts is a consultant clinical psychologist / psychotherapist