Critical perspectives on gendered mental health issues/women’s mental health

Objectives: • To publish examples of excellent interdisciplinary work on women’s mental health• To encourage conceptual frameworks for approaching women’s mental health as an interdisciplinary and intersectional problem• To contribute to new ways of tackling the gendered mental illness gap as a longstanding and life long health problem• To highlight reproductive transitional periods that are unique to women, including the perinatal period and perimenopause, as important contexts for interdisciplinary mental health researchIntroduction:Women and girls suffer excessive rates of mental illness when compared with men and boys. This gendered mental illness gap, which covers many conditions including anxiety and depression, eating and personality disorders, phobias and psychoses, has been well documented for decades and has persisted. In addition, it is well documented that experiences of mental illness as well as assessment of symptoms and diagnoses are also shaped by socioeconomic factors, experiences of racialisation and migration and that access to and quality of care is unevenly distributed. While the global rise in life expectancies over the past two centuries means that men and women enjoy longer lives, women spend a greater proportion of their lives with poor health and disability as compared with men. The World Economic Forum’s recent report underlines the enormous gains to be made by addressing the gendered health gap, not only for women’s individual quality of life and healthy ageing, but also general economic prosperity as well as promoting the principles of equity and inclusivity. Women’s poorer mental health has thus far not been addressed as an urgent public health issue, despite the persistent disadvantage across cultures and through time, nor has it been sufficiently analysed from intersectional perspectives. The complexity of the mechanisms underlying the persistent and widespread gendered mental health disadvantage warrants sustained critical, interdisciplinary and intersectional research efforts that extend beyond national borders. With the aim of furthering cutting edge interdisciplinary research on an urgent matter, this Research Topic focusses on the range of disciplinary contributions towards not only mapping and understanding the gendered mental health gap, but crucially, tackling it.Furthermore, reproductive transitions unique to women, including the perinatal period and perimenopause, remain comparatively understudied and neglected in mental health research. These periods may be associated with heightened vulnerability to mental ill health, while also presenting important opportunities for prevention, early identification, and intervention. Research focusing on women’s mental health across these transitions is therefore needed, including work on determinants and underlying mechanisms, potential interventions, and ways of improving health care and support from interdisciplinary perspectives.Contributions are welcomed from all disciplines addressing the following issues:• Key contributions to a strategic mapping of the gendered mental health gap• Intersectional analyses of women’s/gendered mental health, including how sexuality, race, class, age, and experiences of discrimination, colonisation and migration impact gendered mental health• Mapping the facilitators of the gendered mental health gap across different scales• Evidence to understand the mechanisms underpinning the gendered persistent mental health disadvantage• Means and methods of tackling the gendered mental health gap across policy, medical and social interventions, reform of social structures, cultural and behaviour change and political reform.• Critical approaches to mental illness, including, but not limited to lived and inherited effects of war, displacement, genocide, settler colonialism, slavery and forced migration • Aspects of equity and inclusivity locally, nationally and globally when addressing the gendered mental health gap• Barriers and resistance to tackling the gendered mental health gap• Access to health care and effects of structural changes in public and private forms of care• Investigating mental health across the perinatal period and perimenopause through interdisciplinary perspectives• Studies of aesthetic, artistic, and activist representations of gendered mental illness and their implications for social and cultural change• Gendered mental health gaps among researchers and students across the professional life cycle in universities Topic editors: Hannah Bradby, Ulrika Dahl, Fatih Özel Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/67716/critical-perspectives-on-gendered-mental-health-issueswomens-mental-health