Women's mental health and wellbeing A psychosocial study

Abstract Present research work intended to study the mental health, well-being, stress and coping of women. Being a women, certain standard of behaviors are expected which often contrast with the mentally healthy individual as it puts some limitation for "being women" whereas "Be a Man" denotes something to achieve or add. There is lack of gender perspective in the conception of positive mental health. Comparisons were made in the context of women's employment and Homemaker status in both rural and urban setting of two states U.P. and Delhi. The data of employed women are collected from schools and Employed women are school teachers and homemakers are those women who are not having any source of income. Total sample size was 240. To discern the variables mental health inventory by Jagdish Srivastava, wellbeing by Verma and Verma, stress by Brantely & Jones and coping strategies scale by A.K. Srivastava, were employed on overall sample. Besides semi structured interview is conducted to cognize the psychosocial barriers for experiencing mental health. Analysis of variance was applied to perceive the group differences, association among variables were obtained and predictive value of stress and coping was explored for the mental health and well-being through regression analysis. Results depicts that there is significant differences among the groups on the few dimensions of variables mental health, well-being, stress and coping. Cognitive stressors and Approach coping was found to be positive predictor of mental health whereas avoidance coping was negative predictor of mental health. Further content Analysis of interviews reveals that mental health experiences are closely related with women secondary/lower social position. Emotion focused coping, Learned dependency, conditional security and regard, legalized discrimination, despised self, multiples role, relational identity, gendered beliefs and attitude, social pressure and power relation are dominant themes that emerged from qualitative data. From the findings it can be suggested that achieving fundamental equality is necessary for promoting women's mental health.