TY - SER AU - Cooper, Chiara E. AU - Sweet, Paige L. TI - “Daddy issues” and diagnoses: gendered weaponization of mental health in intimate relationships PY - 2024/// PB - Sage, KW - COERCIVE CONTROL KW - DOMESTIC VIOLENCE KW - INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE KW - MENTAL HEALH KW - PERPETRATORS KW - PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE KW - VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE KW - WOMEN KW - INTERNATIONAL KW - UNITED STATES N1 - Violence Against Women, 2024, First published online, 2 September 2024 N2 - Through life story interviews with victims of psychological abuse, we offer new empirical evidence for a tactic of coercive control: mental health weaponization. Shaped by structural vulnerabilities, mental health weaponization involves three key features: gendered accusations that victims are “crazy” and emotionally unstable; leveraging victims' past traumas against them, particularly that they form “bad” attachments to men; mobilizing victims’ mental health diagnoses or symptoms against them to cast them as noncredible. This article enhances our understanding of controlling and abusive tactics in intimate relationships by showing how they are rooted in social inequalities at the intersection of gender and mental health status. (Authors' abstract). Record #8978 UR - https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012241277894 ER -