What it really means to be "mental"

As a part of our second group presentation of the semester, my classmates and I discussed Carol Thomas’s “The baby and the bath water: disabled women and motherhood in social context.” The article attempts to explore the relationship between motherhood and disabilities, and the unique experiences that disabled mothers have, utilizing a poorly designed, qualitative, observational study of seventeen disabled women. The study, centered around semi-structured interviews with the participants, is flawed in several ways, including lack of representation of marginalized communities such as people of color and LGBTQ mothers, poor sampling design, and the most notable being insufficient representation of mothers with mental disabilities. Only one of the seventeen participants were mentally disabled.

While mothers with physical disabilities face additional hardships specific to them, mentally disabled mothers are confronted with the difficulties of motherhood, managing their disability, as well as the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Motherhood is extremely demanding, even for typical mothers. Although the role of the mother is shifting, it appears that mothers often are tasked with taking on most of the responsibilities regarding the child, including taking them to school, making sure that they are well fed, and attending PTA meetings and school plays. When a mother says that she is going out of town and leaving the children with their father, it is often met by a half-joking “Wow, hope daddy can handle it!”

Treatment of mental illness often involves psychoactive drugs, including depressants, anti-depressants, stimulants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, and mood stabilizers. Although these drugs are extremely effective in treating mental disorders and safe when used correctly, psychoactive drugs are often regarded negatively, as they are categorized with illicit drugs such as cocaine and psychedelics, and alter the user’s perception, mood, consciousness, or behavior.

People with mental disabilities are often seen as unstable, and the use of psychoactive drugs as medical treatment furthers the idea that the behavior of the mentally ill is volatile, and that the mentally disabled are unfit to be mothers.

There are several intersections to be addressed when discussing disabled mothers. Though the experiences of all disabled mothers may be similar in some ways, it is important to note the differences in the experiences of all of the different types of disabled mothers, including, but not limited to people of color, people of various socioeconomic statuses, LGBTQ mothers, immigrant mothers, single mothers, and mothers with a mental disability. Failing to expand on the intersections and unique experiences of mentally disabled mothers makes this study fundamentally flawed, and distorts the reader’s idea of motherhood for disabled people.