Excerpts from "The Imprint" about Mother Blame
Seems apropos at the moment
“From the 1940s until about the 1970s, it was a widely accepted fact in American psychiatry that bad nurturing, vis-à-vis bad mothers, caused schizophrenia (Harrington, 2016). In 1957, John Rosen used the F-scale (F for fascism) to study the personality traits of the mothers of male patients with schizophrenia (Dworin and Wyant). Rosen felt that there was no way babies could naturally be born with such a troubling ailment, that there had to be some external cause, and he hypothesized that a mother’s inability to adequately love her child was the culprit. As such, he tested whether the mothers of his patients had F-scale scores that aligned with a fascist personality.
His results showed the mothers of his patients did, in fact, score more fascist than mothers in the control group (those whose sons did not have schizophrenia). For Rosen, this was the damning evidence needed to prove that bad mothers were to blame. And this ability to name a singular cause for this particular mental illness was the medicine needed to quell the fears of the general public—a public that I suspect was all too eager to feel safe in knowing they couldn’t possibly have a child with schizophrenia. They would not be fascist mothers who hated their children.
Problem solved.
Rosen’s findings kicked off a “mother blame” that lasted almost three decades. Mothers of children with schizophrenia were labeled “rejecting, rigid, domineering, and anxious, and sometimes all of the above” (Harrington, 2016), and not just by the general public but also by the doctors who were supposed to be helping them. Worse, it allowed society as a whole to not have to care about the people who suffered as a part of the diagnosis. Families that contained a person with schizophrenia suffered emotionally, financially, and mentally, with little external support.
Bad mothers don’t deserve support, you see. They get what they deserve, the public seemed to say. Why should society give them any help at all?”
…
“As Harrington (2016) points out, it wasn’t until Seymour Kety’s adoption studies in the 1970s that there was any hope of turning the tide of damnation. His studies, thankfully, countered Rosen’s findings and showed a hereditary basis for schizophrenia. Kety found that children born to a mother with schizophrenia but raised in an adoptive home were as equally likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia as siblings raised by the biological mother, meaning the children were born with a propensity toward the disorder. Subsequent studies supported Kety’s findings, and in 1984, more than twenty-five years after the emotional assault on mothers with children diagnosed with schizophrenia had begun, the shift to a hereditary basis for the disorder was fully accepted.
…An American television program called Madness did a multipart documentary on the diagnosis. In it, clinicians finally publicly apologized on behalf of their profession for having cited bad parenting as the cause. There was, in the end, not a “shred of evidence” supporting the bad parenting hypothesis. The higher scores of the mothers in Rosen’s study had nothing to do with lack of love and more likely a condition of being a parent of a child with a severe psychological diagnosis. And though the science eventually righted its own wrong, it couldn’t undo the decades of false belief that resulted in the harassment and vilification of parents, especially mothers, of people with schizophrenia.”
…
“…when we start to look to parents as an explanation for the behaviors and other troubles of children, we get into some very risky territory. For instance, one study found that mothers of autistic children reported feeling frequently insulted or humiliated by others because of their child’s behavior and diagnosis, and consequently they had more than a 20% higher risk of suicidality (Jahan et al., 2020). When we start to look at how parents are impacting their children, we too often end up running into a blame game.
…And as we’ve already discussed, when we turn a collective gaze to trying to craft children with more “desirable” traits, we step way too quickly into the very likely chance that someone will start touting eugenics. Someone will inevitably believe that by selective breeding or getting rid of certain people/traits, we can have a better society. We’re back to that black-and-white thinking again.
What kind of tragedy would we see if every ailment, every non–socially acceptable behavior, was blamed on parents?”
…
“And let’s be honest, history has shown that most of the blame would fall on the female parent. We’ve been blaming women for societal woes since Adam and Eve. We’re just too black-and-white in our collective thinking—we have lost the realization that we live in the grey.”
