Covert Misogyny 2.

Right, now back to this huge subject.... Let`s see if we can shed some more light on it:

We have looked at some reasons why some doctors practice covert misogyny and now I want to think about why such a profession permits this to happen. You might say "permits it by default", since the profession as a whole would be loath to admit that it occurs at all. I think that this denial has parallels with any individual or group that pretends that abuse isn`t really happening. For example, where there was abuse of children in the Catholic Church, denial was the biggest factor in the whole saga.

When we talk about an individual denying their guilt we see that they do so to protect themselves from punishment. Somehow "denial", they hope, protects their innocence. But why do members of a group protect each other? After all, why protect someone who might be guilty? The person protecting someone else isn`t guilty, so why trouble to shelter someone who is? How do they square this with their conscience?

Well, part of this may be to do with feeling that they cannot be sure that the person is guilty, maybe they want to believe that they are not guilty, and part of it this has to do with the connection and loyalty they feel for their colleagues.
Let`s look at this in regard to a priest: The priest may be a nice man, long serving in the church, he has many close friends...he may have done kindnesses for other clergy... This creates a loyalty and a feeling in others that they do not want to believe that he is guilty. In anycase, if they report him for suspected abuse, they may be impugning him by mistake and turn his life into a nightmare, not forgetting that to report him to the police will bring trouble for themselves: they may not be believed, their colleagues may turn against them, etc. In short, keeping shtum is the preferable option. The most important dynamic here though, is reciprocal loyalty within the group: If you protect a colleague, they will certainly protect you! Because of this,cases are rare where someone is brave enough to betray a colleague in the name of right.

This is broadly what happens in groups, it is all about group cohesion and group function and group survival. This very same mechanism will be in play in the medical profession when a doctor medically abuses a patient. Doctors simply don`t want to believe that some of their colleagues are misogynists and if they half see it, they turn a blind eye.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, where someone is guilty in regard to someone else, the compartmental conscience kicks in and there is activated a demonisation of the wounded party.(In cases of sexual abuse, this would involve making the child look guilty). The function of demonisation is to shift guilt from the abuser/ perpetrator onto the victim. This facilitates a concealment of guilt. When we observe this in regard to one-to -one relationships, the power of the guilt-shift is played out depending upon the power of the individuals concerned. That is, which one is weak, which one is strong; which one has endurance and which one doesn`t; which one is more forgiving,etc. The game-play ratchets up when one uses their own social or family group as an endorsement of their demonisation strategy. The person in this one-to-one battle, who has greater social skills, greater prowess at manipulating, will doubtless win the war when they recruit a group around them to support their position. It`s simple:a group has more power.

The same is true of doctors who medically abuse women: The surest way to hide what has happened is to demonise the woman, find concrete ways of showing that she is "mad" or "bad" and that therefore the doctor hasn`t done anything wrong at all!!! The simplest way to do this is with psychiatric diagnosis. When there is a psychiatric diagnosis attached to a female patient it becomes almost impossible for the medical abuse to be revealed. Of course, this is gross misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, but who would ever find out?

You might wonder how doctors manage their consciences, both to themselves and in regard to their colleagues.. Well, it`s our old friend the compartmental conscience !!! When a woman is medically abused and she is then demonised in order to hide what has occurred, the demonisation is the salve to the conscience. The doctor thinks, "well, this woman is an attention-seeker, or at least neurotic, and my colleague certainly has, therefore, done nothing wrong. It`s the woman`s fault." This way he shuts out the truth and carries on ethically with his other patients, with this woman-victim safely shut away in a bad box in his mind.

Misogyny in the Medical Profession.

Through the course of my blogs I want to look at why, where and how, different people and different groups become victim to others. It is important for me to understand the reasons for this victimisation as well as drawing the eye to instances of abuse that are concealed from our day to day knowledge. Today I am going to go straight into a case of out-and-out misogyny, many instances of which can be found in medical practice today and where the affects of medical malpractice are largely concealed.

My mother went to her G.P. in the mid 1970s, when she was in her middle forties, with abdominal symptoms. The doctor prescribed something for it and she came away and started taking the drug as prescribed. She did not question what the drug was, nor did she seek a diagnosis.In those days you just trusted your doctor and did what you were told to do. My mum was a happy, active person with a nice job,she had had no previous history of psychological problems at all, not even a squeak, but the drug that this doctor gave her was Valium. She went to him with physical health symptoms, no anxiety, no depression, and yet she was given a psychiatric drug without her knowledge. Well, of course, some doctors are misogynists, it`s a fact of life: They see a middle aged women complaining of abdominal problems and they think, "this is just a neurotic female", but as to why they do this and how they are able to pursue these beliefs within their profession as doctors, we shall come back to examine in a subsequent blog.

This abuse of my mother by this G.P. caused a catastrophe of desperate and tragic proportions. My mother began to suffer a devastating reaction to valium ..and remember she did not even know that she was taking a psychiatric drug.....and she became a terrified, almost catatonic wreck. When it was obvious that valium had made her very ill, the G.P became nasty, the only way that he could off-load his guilt was to be nasty to us. My mother`s life, now destroyed, was horrendous. My sister and I had no mother, in fact, and the medics really didn`t know what to do. The best that they could come up with was ECT. So a lovely, happy mum, duped into taking a psychiatric drug by an abusive doctor, ended up having repeated ECT. She came out of this a virtual zombie with huge areas of memory loss and really hardly a person at all. The suffering caused to her and to us was fantastic. Days of endless agony with no hope and a sort of grief for a mother that had gone away somewhere into mental illness, never wholly to return. And the pain of knowing that she had been the victim of a male doctor in this way was unbearable.

There was never an apology. Years later when she developed heart failure, it even came to light that she probably had a heart attack when having the ECT, but nobody noticed. They didn`t even notice.

So we have to understand WHY this kind of thing happens....Let`s think of it as our mission to find out, so that we can know why some people hurt others and how they come to square it with their own conscience and with the people around them. In my next blog I want to try to examine why women become victims and why there can be professional abuse of women that is largely unchecked.