This International Women’s Day, let’s stop telling women they need more coping skills.
Every year, International Women’s Day invites us to talk about empowerment, equality, and progress in women’s health. Conversations about women’s mental health often focus on coping strategies, resilience, and self-care. Far less attention is paid to the conditions that make so many women feel chronically overwhelmed in the first place.
If we want to truly support and uplift women, mental health has to be part of the discussion. Research consistently shows that women are significantly more likely to experience anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and trauma-related symptoms. These statistics are often framed as individual mental health problems. Yet when you look more closely, it becomes clear that these struggles rarely develop in a vacuum.
They take shape in environments where women are often expected to carry more emotional labor, manage the invisible workload at home, remain agreeable, tolerate disrespect, and keep functioning no matter how depleted they feel.
In my work as a therapist, I sit with women who are deeply thoughtful, immensely capable, and profoundly self-aware. To other people in their lives, they appear “high functioning” and successful. Many are accomplished professionals, caregivers, and partners who seem to be managing their lives well.
Internally, however, a different experience is unfolding. So many of my clients describe relentless self-criticism, chronic overthinking, exhaustion, and a nervous system that rarely feels settled enough to truly rest. Many are living in a constant state of pressure to perform, please, and keep everything running smoothly for everyone around them.
These patterns are often framed as personal issues women need to fix with better boundaries, more resilience, or stronger coping skills. And while those tools can certainly help, the reality is more complex.
The burnout and mental health disparities women face are deeply shaped by the inequitable social conditions they are living in, (not to mention woefully inadequate healthcare and structural supports).
When women are expected to carry the bulk of the emotional and relational labor for their families and partners, the resulting imbalance does not just strain relationships; it becomes a significant driver of women’s distress, resentment, chronic health issues, and burnout. Patriarchal norms also play a role by socializing boys and men to rely on women for emotional support and relationship maintenance that they were rarely encouraged to develop or practice themselves.
Protecting women’s mental health requires addressing the systems that quietly erode it. Gender-based violence, inequities in pay and career opportunity, the lack of affordable childcare, barriers to reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare, and cultural expectations that women should endlessly accommodate others all take a measurable toll on psychological well-being.
And these pressures are not experienced equally. An intersectional lens reminds us that women’s mental health is also shaped by race, class, and access to care. Women of color, particularly Black and Indigenous women, often face the compounded effects of racism, economic inequality, and well-documented disparities in healthcare and mental health treatment, which can intensify chronic stress, trauma exposure, and barriers to receiving adequate support.
When these conditions go unexamined, women often internalize the impact as some kind of personal failure. I can attest to this as a clinician specializing in women’s wellness; it’s not uncommon for my clients to blame themselves for feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or exhausted, (rather than recognizing the broader forces shaping their experience).
The good news is that when those conditions begin to shift, something powerful happens. Women do not simply function better. They begin to feel safer in their bodies, more supported in their lives, and more able to live as their full selves.
Women’s mental health has always been tied to equality. International Women’s Day is a reminder that the two cannot be separated.
If you’re interested in thoughtful conversations about women’s mental health that take systemic inequality, nervous system healing, and feminist psychology seriously, you can follow along on Instagram at @TriciaRyanCounseling. I share perspectives and tools designed to help women better understand their experiences and begin reclaiming a sense of steadiness, self-trust, and emotional freedom.