Mother’s Little Helper. Part 1

Society has never been very good at dealing with “women’s problems.” We are, after all, complicated beings, downright messy with our enigmatic emotions, insecurities, and needs. To paraphrase dissident feminist Marie Jose Ragab, “our little hearts get broken more easily.” We’re hardly less durable than men, just more sensitive, and as a result, more vulnerable to suggestions that a pretty pastel pill holds the answer to every ill. If you get tired, lonely, depressed, fat, pregnant…the antidote can be found just behind the medicine cabinet door.

As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently observed, “It isn’t only neurotic Hollywood beauties” who are hooked on the pharmaceutical industry’s wares anymore. “Now America is the Valley of the Dolls,” she writes. The recent explosion in the number of women relying on mood altering drugs, diet pills, sexual performance enhancers, and assorted other “mother’s little helpers” attests to women’s relative medical regression. It used to be Valium for bored house wives. Now women of all ages and backgrounds — from the adolescent president of the student body to the CFO of the Fortune 500 company – are swimming in a sea of Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft.

This reality was poignantly driven home to me one semester when my new college roommate – a nice East Coast prep school girl with an accomplished background and a double major in psychology and English — moved in, cleared out a whole drawer of her desk and installed a small pharmacy. Xanax prescriptions for her jittery nerves, sleeping pills to ease her to dreamland, St. John’s Wart and Melatonin to balance an unstable mood. And if this wasn’t enough, there was the high-priced therapist her divorced parents employed to guide her through unsettling life events like breaking up with her boyfriend or dealing with pent up animosity harbored toward her father’s Barbie doll girl friends.

But she was hardly an exception – just another casualty of modern medicine and its push to sublimate nasty realities. At my own alma mater, doctors at the student health center – sanitized by their clean white coats and fancy college degrees – were not much better than the street corner dealer. Depressed over a break-up, worried about an exam, unable to perform at top speed due to a paucity of sleep. If you asked, you would get it, with little consultation, explanation, or care provided.

One study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that while men and women use prescription drugs in equal numbers, women — who are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with depression — are prescribed psychotherapeutic drugs in higher numbers, and as a consequence, are more likely to abuse narcotics and anti-anxiety drugs. So the message seems to go like this: you got problems…pop a pill, see a shrink, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

…to be continued…