Writing this capstone has made me gain a deeper understanding of how gender can truly affect psychiatric procedures. Specifically, the knowledge I’ve gained from this analysis has changed the way I approach certain things at work. I work in a local psych hospital, however, I work with children with developmental differences. A lot of the children I work with have limited verbal capabilities. Professional psychiatrists and psychologists assess their ability to communicate and decide what level of assistance they need for various tasks. I also work with children who are pretty high functioning on the autism spectrum and have immense verbal capability. For the most part, the psychologist and psychiatrists are able to ask them some of their preferences when designing their plan. Most notably, we will allocate staffing to certain patients based on how aggressive they are towards certain staff of certain genders. This means that if patients are more aggressive towards female staff, sometimes we’ll only put them with male staff. There are a variety of reasons for this, but it’s mostly to keep staff safe. However, for children who are nonverbal, we’ll sometimes honor this as a therapeutic choice— they are not yet ready to work with female/male staff and so we’ll put them with the opposite staff. Or, if there are nonbinary staff working, they can also work with that child. However, we don’t have a good way to interpret how gender affects behavioral analysis care (which is very different from the traditional psychiatry depicted in The Bell Jar). Now, when I work, I’m much more aware of the nonverbal cues that aren’t aggression so I can tell if a patient might be uncomfortable with being staffed by myself (a woman) and then I’ll try to advocate for them in behavior team and to nursing staff. At times, this switch isn’t possible because of low staff censuses in the hospital. However, when it is possible, I’ve noticed a positive difference in the level of trust I have been building with the patients I work with. Ultimately, I think it’s important to consider the implications of gender in psychiatric care across the spectrum, as, at times, it can be neglected as a less important issue. However, as depicted in The Bell Jar, gender of staff could be a large roadblock in healing.
