When Misty Pratt was 17 years old, she suffered a nervous breakdown marked by panic attacks, insomnia, and debilitating digestive issues. After a battery of scans and scopes came back clear, she was referred to a mental health practitioner and diagnosed with depression. She seemed to recover after being treated with medication and therapy, but would go on to relapse over and over again, including a serious bout of postpartum anxiety and depression after her first daughter’s birth. Her attempt to seek treatment for her postpartum mood disorders was at odds with what she’d experienced as a teen – then, she’d felt supported and cared for. After her daughter’s birth, she felt alone and unheard.

Eventually, Pratt would come to view her brain as somehow defective or faulty, the result of an irreparable chemical imbalance. Doctors reinforced this perception, telling her that she needed to take medication the same way a diabetic needs to take insulin. She began to make self-limiting life choices based on the belief that she would never be well. Then one day, she heard an interview with the Irish poet John O’Donohue, who asked listeners, “What if I told you that you’re not broken?”

“I found that so freeing, and I thought to myself, if there’s this piece of me inside that’s not broken, that’s not been touched by all of this, can I tap into that somehow,” says Pratt. O’Donohue’s question had shifted her perspective, not just in regards to her own mental health, but also the mental health–care system. That seed, once planted, would eventually bloom into Pratt’s first book, All In Her Head: How Gender Bias Harms Women’s Mental Health, published this month by Greystone Books.

All In Her Head is wide in scope, touching on many ways that patriarchal systems have impacted both women’s mental health and the ways that the mental-health system treats women. Pratt explores everything from the gender gap between men and women in both diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses, to female-specific barriers to care, to how societal expectations of women cause stress, overload, and burnout. In her book, Pratt gives equal weight to interviews with experts and first-person accounts – including her own.

“I love blended memoir,” says Pratt, “because I love having the personal stories and the anecdotes and the side of lived experience, being able to understand what someone’s going through. But then I also like to approach it from the other side, to look at the expert opinion of people who are trying to make a difference.”

Pratt knows that other side – the side of facts and figures – all too well. She worked in the field of health research for 10 years, specifically in systematic reviews: scholarly summaries of current scientific research. But eventually she began to find her work troubling: she had the raw data, but was missing the human side of what that data represented.

“I remember one time working on a project about multiple sclerosis,” says Pratt. “And I was marking down deaths in numbers, and there were deaths by suicide. I was writing all these in a spreadsheet, and it just all of the sudden hit me that I’m writing about a person’s life, what they’ve experienced, and these numbers can’t tell me anything.”

Pratt spends much of All In Her Head challenging conventional beliefs about women and mental health – beliefs about hormones, moods, and the utility of common treatment methods. She does worry about pushback from readers, particularly when it comes to her chapter about medication.

Pratt’s research showed that there are disparities between the medications prescribed for men and women experiencing the same symptoms, and she was curious about that gap. Her own experience with taking antidepressants was not good, and she felt unsupported by the medical community when she wanted to stop taking them. On the other hand, Pratt says that she has friends and family who have found medication to be extraordinarily helpful, and she doesn’t want to add to the “shame and stigma” surrounding it. In her writing, she tries to offer a balanced perspective – her own story, as well as first-person accounts from women who have benefited from psychiatric medication. Still, she is fairly critical of a health-care system that can sometimes be pushy or even coercive when it comes to mental health and medication.

Pratt hopes that her research and writing could be helpful for a range of people – women like her, of course, who have been dismissed, misdiagnosed, or generally mistreated by a health-care system that often sees them as less-than. She also believes that her book could give health-care providers a new perspective on patients who have been through the system. But mainly, she says, she wrote the book for her younger self, trying to imagine what would have helped her at a time when she felt so painfully alone.