The opening of a “hijab removal treatment clinic” to “offer scientific and psychological treatment” for Iranian women who refuse to wear a hijab was announced in November.

There is international concern about what will happen at these centres. The news follows reports suggesting that women protesters are being tortured and forcibly medicated in state-run psychiatric services.

The moves by the Iranian authorities come shortly after student Ahou Daryaei walked onto the street in her underwear as an act of protest after being assaulted by state forces enforcing Iran’s hijab laws.

In response, the spokesperson for the university where Daryaei is studying posted on X (formerly Twitter) saying that she had a “mental disorder”, and news reports said that she had been taken to a psychiatric ward.

In Iran, the mandatory hijab law has been a contentious point of resistance ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1978. But it has become much more widespread in the past two years after the killing of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing a hijab correctly, and died in custody.

Women have been at the forefront of this resistance, engaging in protests as part of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It has called for the abolition of compulsory hijab laws and an end to gender-based oppression.

But rather than acknowledging these acts as legitimate political protests, the Iranian state has increasingly sought to frame them as symptoms of individual mental illness.

In 2023, three actresses, Afsaneh Bayegan, Azadeh Samadi and Leila Bolukat, were arrested for appearing in public without the hijab. Iranian judges labelled them as “mentally ill” and imposed a sentence which required them to attend bi-weekly psychologicalcounselling sessions.

In another instance, a protester, Roya Zakeri, was taken to a psychiatric hospital in Tabriz after footage emerged of her shouting “death to the dictator” when harassed for not wearing a hijab. After being released on bail, she posted a videoto say that “the Islamic Republic has tried to portray me as mentally ill; I am in complete physical and mental health”.

The political use of psychiatry is not uncommon, but rather part of a broader historical strategy employed by repressive states to counter dissent.

In the Soviet Union, up to a third of political dissidents were arbitrarily branded as suffering from “sluggish schizophrenia” and incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals.

And in China, political nonconformists and activists were subjected to psychological evaluations by police officers and then forcibly detained in “special” psychiatric hospitals in the 1990s. (Some suggest that these tactics continue today).

The specific misuse of psychiatry to “treat” those women who challenge the system, however, is particularly relevant. It echoes feminist concerns about how psychiatry has labelled certain behaviour by women as mental illnesses throughout history. It has also unfairly categorised them as “mad women”.

In my research, I argue that labelling women who challenge accepted ways of doing things as “mad” is a form of control. This strategy pressures women to conform to certain sets of expectations of how women “should” behave.

Iranian women are protesting the compulsory hijab by showing their hair in public. They demand the right to choose how they dress, rejecting state control over their freedom. This movement is a stand for women’s rights and autonomy in Iran. #NoToCompulsoryHijab #WomenForFreedom pic.twitter.com/tUqrA2qmtI

— Jahanzeb (@wesa_jahanzeb) November 10, 2024

Controlling women who fail to comply

In Iran, the hijab is not simply about modesty or religious observance. It is about women’s compliance to traditional roles. Women who reject the hijab are seen as rejecting these, and, by extension, rejecting the authority of the state. In response, the state reframes that rejection not as an act of civil disobedience but as a form of psychological instability.

Women’s choice to not wear a headscarf is presented to the public as a symptom of mental illness, such as an “antisocial personality disorder”, “histrionic disorder” or “bipolar disorder”.

Legal scholar Amita Dhanda describes this as “psychologising”. This is a technique through which dissent is converted from a protest against society, to a reaction that originates solely from the dissenter’s troubled mind. This shifts the underlying problem – and the legitimacy of that dissent – away from being about the institution or society to being about the individual.

Iran’s reframing of women’s protests as manifestations of mental illness is an attempt to switch focus away from the issues that prompted those acts, such as the hijab laws, portraying them instead as “mad” women in need of correction.

The implications are immense. When women’s protests are dismissed as symptoms of mental illness, it reinforces patriarchal values as well as structures and laws that seek to maintain control over women’s bodies and voices.

Framing women as “mad” and sending them to “hijab removal treatment clinics” not only attempts to undermine the power of those that protest and the legitimacy of their political and social grievances, but also perpetuates the same systems of oppression that Iranian women seek to dismantle.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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