Health, women live longer but in worse conditions

In episode 11 of the “Parents” podcast, edited by Francesca Barra for storielibere.fm, the philosopher specializing in Newborn Mental Health Cecilia Antolini states: «Maybe the point is to stop saying that when you’re not well ‘it’s normal’. We teach this to our daughters from their first menstruation. Do you have a headache? It’s normal. Do you have a stomach ache? It’s normal. No! There is nothing normal regarding feeling very bad. It is normal to go through challenges, it is normal in those challenges to seek help, but we cannot expect women to learn to ask for help when all their lives they have learned that that help should not be asked for.”

The idea of ​​sacrifice and bearing all pain has been inherent in women for generations, due to a purely cultural and not biological factor. All the more accentuated and evident when there is also a responsibility for care on the woman. Let’s take the case of family caregivers, those that the Istituto Superiore di Sanità defines as «people who assist and take care of, continuously and free of charge, a family member who is not self-sufficient or has chronic disabling pathologies». Almost three million people, largely women and especially mothers. The bureaucracy and the burden of care work that weighs on them, in addition to severely limiting access to work, very often forces them to neglect not only their social life, but also their health.

«There is a lack of disaggregated data that allow us to delve into the health conditions of mothers once removed from the perinatal phase» write Monica D’Ascenzo and Manuela Perrone in “Mamme d’Italia”, ed. Sole24Ore. «We cannot know exactly how they are doing, whether they are sicker and from what compared to women without children. We know that they often seem to have inexhaustible physical energy, but several studies have underlined how different stress factors and, ultimately, the burden of caring for others have an impact. Taking care of yourself, when the myth of motherhood is so strong, seems to disappear from the priorities.”

Difficult access to medical care

To all the cultural interpretations of the lack of access to care for women, we also add the alarming data of the latest Censis report “Hospitals and health”, promoted by Aiop, the Italian Association of hospital and territorial healthcare companies and social-social companies. residential and territorial health services under private law. The report shows the fragility of a system incapable of containing the times for booking services. For 53.5% of Italians the wait is excessively long compared to the urgency of their clinical condition, while 37.4% report the presence of blocked or closed lists, despite them being formally prohibited.

Users are increasingly turning to paid healthcare in order to be able to count on faster services: we are talking regarding 34.4% of the lowest incomes, 40.2% of the medium-low incomes, 43.6% of the medium-income -alti turns to paid healthcare. But in fact, a portion of the population often ends up procrastinating or giving up treatment. If in the Lombardy region an eye examination requires approximately 11 months of waiting, a mother without help must hope that on that very day her son or daughter does not develop a fever or some other ailment. Certainly, those who pay the costs of an inefficient system are always the weakest and most exposed categories: by wealth, by gender, by care burden.