Medicalizing Maternity

In “Psychiatric Gaslighting: The Surveillance of Mental Illness during Pregnancy,” published in Social Problems, authors Charlotte Abel and Stefan Timmermans grapple with a critical issue: the heightened surveillance and social regulation faced by pregnant women with mental health symptoms.

Coupling two years of ethnographic observations with 17 interviews, the researchers found that psychiatrists often treated pregnant women with mental health symptoms as objects of control rather than people deserving support. As patients actively sought autonomy over their pregnancies by managing their use of psychotropic medications, medical practitioners invalidated their concerns regarding their own and their babies’ health by linking “good mothering” with increased medication use. This approach created an imbalance between resistant pregnant patients, who were often viewed as noncompliant and sicker when they pushed back against prescriptions, and compliant pregnant patients, who more willingly accepted the influence of practitioners’ medicalization of their mental health challenges.Charlotte Abel and Stefan Timmermans grapple with a critical issue: the heightened surveillance and social regulation faced by pregnant women with mental health symptoms.

Women’s bodies are too often treated as sites of control. In “Psychiatric Gaslighting,” Abel and Timmermans make clear that some psychiatrists leverage their practice to dominate rather than care for pregnant women.