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What does Anna Karenina have to do with International Women’s Day and women’s health?

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annakareninaI was instantly and totally smitten with Anna Karenina when I first started to read the novel in my mid-teens. Tolstoy’s book set in the 1870s enveloped me in a whole new world, introducing themes of hypocrisy, jealousy, faith, fidelity, family, marriage, society, progress, justice, desire and passion, and the agrarian connection to land in contrast to the lifestyles of the city. I started to see society with new eyes. Although I yearned to feel that romantic love deliciously illustrated in the book, here also were injustices that I could rebel about or help to correct in the life that lay endlessly ahead of me.

It’s fairly certain that on a global scale, most young women feel similar emotions during their teenage years.

While there are so many more freedoms today, many young (and older) women feel just as restricted and hedged in by family and societal expectations, inequity, ignorance and the accompanying feelings of limitation and hopelessness, not so unlike the heroine, Anna Karenina.

The World Health Organization acknowledges the importance of the social determinants of health and wellbeing, whether you’re living in Brisbane, India, Russia or Somalia. And they’re doing great work in educating for better models of society.

Last month, when the Social Determinants of Health Alliance was formally launched in Canberra, Australian thought leaders weighed into the discussion. Social Inclusion Minister, Mark Butler, called for political and popular support for a radical break from the status quo. He feels strongly that health care should be focussed on prevention. Minister Butler commented, “Of the $130 or $140 billion we spend on health, we currently spend about 98 per cent on treatment…. less than 1 per cent is spent on health promotion that is not immunisation programs or screening programs – quit smoking programs and so on”.

However, more information may not always lead to prevention.

An important question to ask may be: what’s informing women today? Are outdated beliefs about gender or the advertising by big pharmaceutical companies driving their self-image – about beauty, relationships, sexuality, fitness, health and wellbeing?

The Gender Agenda: Gaining Momentum, this year’s theme for International Women’s Day, points to gaining a more equitable understanding of gender as one of the most important social determinants of health and wellbeing. A YouTube clip that aims to educate girls on how the media they consume can change their lives asks them to adopt five values for success: get healthy, value yourself, be a role model, get involved, be a leader.

These behaviours are a great start to lifting young women out of a limited view of gender, a type of slavery to false notions about womanhood and manhood.

Back in the 70s, I was convinced that real beauty was achieved only by sleeping in a full head of plastic hair curlers! But as the 20-minute heated curlers took over from the slavery of the earlier version, and the 5-minute styling hair dryer has taken over from them……our understanding about what’s good for our health is evolving and may be undergoing a complete turnaround.

Teenage girls with hair in curlers

© Stock photos/Glowimages – models used for illustrative purpose

Just as pervasive as the ephemeral beauty and health tips, is the advertising propaganda that we need medication to function normally. For instance, it’s been proved that multivitamins do more harm than good. Moreover, in an interview in the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Sharpe, author of Coming of Age on Zoloft talks from her own experience about our culture of over-medicalisation: “In children, as in adults, antidepressants and medications for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are often used continuously for years. These trends have produced a novel but fast-growing group of young people who have known themselves longer on medication than off it”. She quotes clinical psychologist Dr David Ramirez, as saying, “There’s been a kind of pathologization of life itself”.

The desire to help and protect people is hard to fault in itself. This practice of looking for relief from life’s complexities in dietary supplements and medications has much earlier roots though. For instance, how poignant that Anna Karenina turned to opium in the form of morphine to dull her painful existence.

During the same period in history and living on a different continent, another woman who battled with injustice and ill health eventually learned to tackle these problems in a different way. When a new young bride and expecting her first child, her husband died from illness. Her second marriage fell apart as her itinerant and unfaithful husband eventually deserted her. She was living in poverty and debilitating illness for many years.

Like many today, she made every effort to help herself, exhausting the leading health treatments of her times. Eventually it was the recognition that there is a mental nature to health that led her on a path to recovery and wellness. With these new ideas springing from her Christian roots, she realised and proved during the remainder of her life that the essence of her real selfhood was not simply what it appeared to be, merely biophysical, but spiritual and divine.

She found a new paradigm for health based on her connection to the divine, and she became a change agent for good in the community. She discovered that spiritual thinking and actions, needed to be expressed in everyday life by being forgiving, grateful, compassionate and honest. They aided in healing physical and mental illness.

Mary Baker Eddy made her discovery of Christian Science mid-way through her long life, at a time when women could not vote and were generally barred from religious leadership and the medical profession. She continued her work until her last days. It was at age 87, responding to the tabloid news of her day, that she started the Pulitzer Prize-winning and oft quoted newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, designed “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.”

Like Mary Baker Eddy, today’s woman is empowered and healthier as she is alert to what’s influencing her. As she is aware of her spirituality and personifies the values she hopes to see in the world, she’ll be willing and able to be a leader, to mentor others, to volunteer in the community and to be a change agent in her world.

A modified version of this article appeared in the Fraser Coast Chronicle, Mackay Daily Mercury, the Logan Reporter, Toowoomba Chronicle, Warwick Daily News and the Caboolture News.


Filed under: Christian Science, Health care, Health policy, Kay's posts, Mental health, Over-diagnosis/treatment Tagged: Anna Karenina, change agent, Coming of Age on Zoloft, dietary supplements, Dr David Ramirez, International Women's Day, Katherine Sharpe, Mark Butler, Mary Baker Eddy, medication, social determinants of health, Social Inclusion Minister, Spirituality, The Christian Science Monitor, The Gender Agenda: Gaining Momentum, Tolstpoy, Women's health

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