In 1880, a woman in Paris could be admitted to a hospital, placed on public display in front of an auditorium of male medical students, and have her symptoms of anxiety, depression, and emotional distress attributed to the wandering of her uterus. The audience would watch. The doctors would demonstrate. The woman's suffering would become a spectacle. Her diagnosis would be hysteria.
Hysteria was a catch-all diagnosis applied almost exclusively to women for more than four thousand years.
It encompassed symptoms we now recognize as anxiety, PTSD, depression, dissociation, epilepsy, and almost anything else that made a woman's behavior difficult for the men around her to explain or manage.
The name comes from the Greek word for uterus. The ancient assumption was that the womb could detach and wander through the body, causing chaos wherever it landed.
This was accepted medical theory. For millennia.
Historians and psychiatrists who have examined the documented case files of "hysterical" women across centuries consistently find the same presentations underneath the label: trauma survivors. Abuse victims. Women in profound psychological distress who had nowhere credible to take it. A 2012 review published in Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health traced hysteria from ancient Egypt through the 20th century and concluded that hysteria, across all of its historical iterations, was the primary vehicle through which women's legitimate psychological suffering was systematically misattributed, trivialized, and made socially manageable.
Yes, absolutely.
A 2024 study, analyzing real clinical decisions across emergency departments, found that female patients were consistently less likely than male patients to be prescribed pain medication for the same reported complaints. The disparity held regardless of whether the treating clinician was male or female.
A 2025 literature review reinforced the scale of it: over 56% of women reported that a healthcare provider had dismissed their pain, and nearly a third had avoided or delayed seeking care specifically because they were afraid of not being taken seriously.
A third. Of all women. Avoiding doctors because they expected to be dismissed.
It matters because the same dismissal that happens in emergency rooms happens in mental health settings, and the stakes are just as high.
Women who present with trauma symptoms, emotional dysregulation, dissociation, or self-destructive coping behaviors are still disproportionately diagnosed with personality disorders rather than trauma disorders. The implied message in a personality disorder diagnosis is that the problem is who you are. A trauma diagnosis says something different: the problem is what happened to you.
It starts with believing the presenting symptoms rather than explaining them away.
The Cove at Momentum Recovery is a gender-specific trauma treatment program built around the clinical reality that women's trauma presentations have been historically misread, underdiagnosed, and inadequately treated in co-ed settings. The clinical model treats trauma and substance use as connected rather than competing diagnoses, using evidence-based modalities designed for women specifically.
The goal of gender-specific trauma treatment is clinical. Women heal differently in environments designed around their actual neurological and psychological experience, not around a historical system that spent four thousand years getting it wrong.
The Cove at Momentum Recovery offers trauma-informed, gender-specific treatment for women in Wilmington, NC. Reach out to our team today to learn more.