I hope you don't mind me offering my personal and humble view because I think the more we have this conversation, the more we learn &amp; more dialogue = goodness all around!! It's not about pointing fingers or placing blame BUT it is about effecting change - one wonderful, beautiful, bipolar/hypo-thyroid/postpartum psychosis/endocrine advocate at a time! I want to be part of the change to the way women's health issues are addressed so this doesn't happen to anyone else.

My opinionated opinion: ;)
I love what @JaneWaterman said about the mental-physical feedback being a two-way street and I completely agree! Part of the problem as I see it is as soon as you have a "mental-health" symptom it is too readily chalked up to something in the DSM-whatever the current version is for Mental Disorders. I see two main problems with this: 1) women are afraid to mention their mental-health symptom because of the stigma &amp; 2) not looking further to the root cause of the symptoms. It's why you and me and Dana and the woman who wrote to Dana went for 20 years + without proper treatment. And agree or disagree, men don't get the same treatment.

Here's an excerpt from WHO's website about Gender Bias and mental health:

Gender bias
Gender bias occurs in the treatment of psychological disorders. Doctors are more likely to diagnose depression in women compared with men, even when they have similar scores on standardized measures of depression or present with identical symptoms.

Female gender is a significant predictor of being prescribed mood altering psychotropic drugs.

Gender differences exist in patterns of help seeking for psychological disorder. Women are more likely to seek help from and disclose mental health problems to their primary health care physician while men are more likely to seek specialist mental health care and are the principal users of inpatient care.

Men are more likely than women to disclose problems with alcohol use to their health care provider.

Gender stereotypes regarding proneness to emotional problems in women and alcohol problems in men, appear to reinforce social stigma and constrain help seeking along stereotypical lines. They are a barrier to the accurate identification and treatment of psychological disorder.
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So my dear Courtney, I'm sorry to put an entire blog post on your comment thread - I didn't start with that intention.