Empowered or Powerless?

You probably would never read my blog and think I'm a feminist. But I do find feminist thought to be enlightening and helpful. Feminist theory seeks to understand how contextual factors shape our experiences. Issues of power and disenfranchisement play into how we view the world and ourselves. But I read an article recently (Gammell & Stoppard, 1999) that helped me be more critical of some of the underlying principles of feminism. The study looked at how women can feel disempowered when they are prescribed drugs for mental illness, such as depression. The authors worked from a standpoint grounded in feminist theory. The authors correctly identified that some of the participants felt like they had little or no control over their mental illness. Yet I disagreed with how they made the argument that feeling like one does not have control over situations is necessarily a bad thing.

Rather than seeing depression as something which they have power over, women (and the same is probably true for men as well) can feel like they have no control over their depression. Being informed that your mood problems arise out of an imbalance in brain chemicals can lead to such a conclusion. If someone sees this as another indicator that they cannot change anything, this is psychologically harmful. But isn't it possible that disempowerment can actually be a feeling of powerlessness. The difference between disempowerment and powerlessness, in my mind, is that powerlessness is a much more neutral term that describes the state rather than the emotions. While I think that people ought to feel like they have control over their life, it is nevertheless important to properly assess the reality of our powerlessness in certain situations. I therefore do not think that powerlessness is inherently bad.

The truth is that there are many issues in life that are beyond our control. That includes mental illness. Realizing one's powerlessness does not mean that a person should feel like less of a person. Instead, as my pastor puts it, we can try to be "life size" - neither bigger nor smaller than we really are. The article continued to label the feeling that one cannot control one's mental health as disempowerment - a term with clearly negative connotations - when I feel that powerless is a better way to describe it. I also thought that powerlessness better described the way the participants saw their situations. Sometimes we have to face up with the fact that we have limits.