The Sexist History of Blaming Mothers for Mental Illness
Who came up with the most damaging theory of why mothers were to blame for mental illness? A man, of course.
When it comes to psychiatry and brain science, moms haven’t had it easy. Autism once was blamed on “refrigerator mothers.” Obsessive-compulsive disorder used to be blamed on mothers who got toilet training wrong. Even homosexuality, back when psychiatry considered it to be a sickness, was said to be caused by… guess who? Ever since Freud, it’s been hard to find any emotional or mental disorder that, in one way or another, therapists haven’t tried to plant right at the feet of your mom.
They were wrong, of course. But it took until a raft of population studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s for many psychotherapists to cop to how wrong they were. There’s no way that a disease like, say, schizophrenia, which affects 3% of any given population, can be blamed on parenting practices that happen in way more families than that. Or as the schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey once told me: “If bad parenting caused any of these diseases, we’d all be in big, big trouble.”
