| Summary: | Self-poisoning - the deliberate, non-fatal ingestion of
medicinal
agents in excess of the recommended dose - is
characterised wherever it occurs in Western
society by a
predominance of women - usually in the order of 2:1, and
in over 60% of cases
psychotropic medication is employed.
Despite this the largely female nature of the phenomenon
and its
relationship to the 2:1 excess of women among
the
recipients of psychotropics generally has been
virtually ignored in the literature. For many years
self-poisoning was regarded as 'failed suicide' and
consequently theoretical approaches to it have been
dominated
by the assumption of pathology - justifiable,
perhaps in relation to completed suicide, as there is
evidence of
significant psychopathology among its
perpetrators, but less so among self-poisoners where
there is little such evidence.
This thesis
proposes that not only is the 'pathology
paradigm' at odds with the known facts of self-poisoning
but that the
emphasis on psychopathology has discouraged
the
development of any convincing theory of female
self-poisoning.An alternative
account, based not upon pathology but upon
processes of normative socialisation, suggests that the
sex role
system promotes a stereotypic view of women as
helpless, dependent and emotionally unstable. This
stereotype, when shared by physicians and their female
patients, contributes to the excess prescription of
psychotropic medication to women who have social, rather
than
psychopathological problems. Additionally, the sex
role
system and the social relations based upon
it, fosters a 'female' cognitive style - particularly
among those women who predominate among self-poisoners
i.e.
young, working class women with a history of
family breakdown. This leads them to attribute the cause
of adverse events
internally to enduring, and
irremediable
personal inadequacy rather than
-
to others or misfortune. Such an "attributional
style"
externally
renders these women vulnerable to "learned
helplessness"
in such circumstances - to the
debilitating belief that
their actions will be ineffective in
resolving their
difficulties.
Female
self-poisoning is interpretted, not as symptomatic
of
psychopathology, but as both consequence and
expression of this socialised helplessness. The
attributional
style of male and female self-poisoners is
compared in a pilot study with that of other patients
and
non-patients and support is found for an
attributional
approach to female self-poisoning.
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