Crazy Women and Hysterical Mothers: The Gendered Use of Mental-Health Labels in Custody Disputes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research studies the use of gendered mental-health labels, such as “crazy,” “hysterical,” “insane,” and “emotionally unstable,” in Canadian custody cases decided between 2000 and 2016. Building on Judith Mosoff’s work on gender and mental health stigma in custody proceedings, it maps how these “pop-psychology” labels impact custody litigation. This investigation reveals that mental-health labels serve to discredit the mother, attack her parenting abilities, and distract from her allegations of violence by the father. The article also explores fathers’, mental health experts’, and judges’ roles in framing the mother’s credibility and parental capacity with regard to her alleged mental instability. It observes how the unjustified use of mental-health labels can backfire against the father, and how mothers can link out-of-court mental-health insults to legal arguments supporting their claim for custody. Although producing varied consequences, mental-health labels often reinforce gender biases and myths regarding domestic violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".