In addition, the prevailing drug treatments during the 1950s and 1960s were directed at conditions considered to reflect problems of anxiety. A revolution in the treatment of mental health problems had begun in the 1950s when the development of meprobamate (Miltown) created the first mass market for treating problems of generalized stress (Healy 1997; Herzberg 2009). official website and that any information you provide is encrypted Friedan Exposed 1950s Women's Emotional Core Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" helped unravel the myth of the 1950s and 1960s housewife as completely satisfied and happy, says Stephanie Coontz in her book "A Strange Stirring." In this excerpt, Coontz shows just how Friedan did so. ITHAKA. In 2002, 51.7 million outpatient visits were for mental health care. 2005). The goal of purging etiological assumptions from the new manual was especially consequential for the anxiety disorders. More than a quarter of the population experiences enough symptoms of anxiety disorders to meet the DSM's criteria, making the group of anxiety disorders the most prevalent of any general category of mental health conditions (Kessler et al. Accessibility In: Menninger RW, Nemiah JC, editors. The boundaries between depression and anxiety are permeable enough that the same drugs can easily be marketed as responses to anxiety rather than to depressive disorders. Network television shows, national newsmagazines, and best-selling books widely featured the SSRIs as antidepressant medications. People could qualify for a diagnosis of melancholy, which required symptoms of greater severity in the morning, early-morning awakening, marked psychomotor retardation, weight loss, and excessive guilt, only if they already had met the criteria for MDD. Olfson M, Marcus SC, Druss B, Pincus HA. Green Tips from 1950s Housewives - Retro Housewife Goes Green According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago: Domestic service represented the leading occupation of women in Chicago and the nation Domestic work attracted few native-born women because of the long. Because GAD almost always was found together with these conditions, it was rarely diagnosed at all. During this period, the cultural conception of anxiety was not so much as a particular type of psychiatric illness as a general psychic consequence of the demands and pace of modern conditions of life. Rosenhan DL. Norepinephrine in Depressive Reactions. Melancholic depressionthe central depressive condition before the DSM-IIIbecame a subcategory of MDD (APA 1980, p. 215). Advertisements for Prozac soon began using the imagery depicted in Kramer's book, using slogans such as better than well and showing women cheerfully fulfilling both work and family roles. PDF The 1950s Cold War Housewife and Tupperware: A Vehicle for her Anxious patients were especially likely to be found in the offices of general physicians. Instead, explanations emphasized unconscious mechanisms that were manifest in a variety of overt symptom formations, and treatments used psychotherapeutic methods that were not specific to particular symptoms (Rycroft 1968). It became clear that the maintenance of psychiatric authority depended on replacing conceptions of psychoneuroses and stress, which were at the heart of the DSM-II's diagnostic system. In contrast, the diagnostic criteria for the various anxiety disorders were far more specific and centered on narrower manifestations such as intense fears of specific objects or situations, obsessions and compulsions, and posttraumatic stress. They do everything: washing dishes, cleaning, laundry, clothesline, taking care of children in the spirit of fun and smiles on their faces. Most important, the drugs used to treat depression have lost their patents. Psychiatric Patients and Treatments in 1997: Findings from the American Psychiatric Practice Research Network. Responses to common mental health problems became equated with the prescription of medication at the expense of alternative psychotherapeutic approaches. Indeed, the ubiquitous nature of anxiety made it a symbolic condition of American society, as well as of psychiatry, in the postWorld War II era. For whatever actual problems people sought mental health care, the treatment system and, in all likelihood, the patients themselves were calling them depression. For example, depression is the single most common topic of online searches for pharmaceutical and medical products, attracting nearly 3 million unique visitors over a three-month period in 2006 (Barber 2008, p. 14). Because of the extensive co-occurrence of depressive and anxious symptoms, this increased the likelihood of making depressive rather than anxiety diagnoses. For psychiatry, however, the recategorization of the nebulous conditions in the stress tradition as specific diagnostic entities had to support the specialty's ascendant position in the huge market of stress-related conditions. Moreover, depression was more likely to be associated with hospitalized patients than with clients of general physicians or outpatient psychiatrists. As an alternative, the DSM-III developed definitions of various specific conditions underscoring that each was a discrete and qualitatively distinct disease (APA 1980). Were stay at home moms and wives in the 1950s actually depressed? Raynes NV. 2000), although their labels have dramatically altered. Conclusion: Various factors combined between the 1970s and the 1990s to transform conditions that had been viewed as anxiety into depression. New interests in the twenty-first century, however, might lead to the reemergence of anxiety as the signature mental health problem of American society. 21314). Rickels K. Drug Use in Outpatient Treatment. Transformations also may move from the class of antidepressants to that of anxiolytic drugs. An official website of the United States government. In 1962, for example, anxiety was the most prevalent psychoneurotic condition: According to the National Disease and Therapeutic Index, about 12 million patients received diagnoses of anxiety reactions, compared with just 4 million with diagnoses of neurotic depression (Herzberg 2009, p. 260). Dominant theories emphasized how a variety of psychosocial stressors, especially family- and work-related problems, caused stress, nerves, and tension, all of which were manifestations of anxiety. "The American Way of Life" and women Before the 1950's, America suffered from almost twenty years of stagnation, caused by the Depression and World War II. Pincus HA, Zarin DA, Tanielian TL, Johnson JL, West JC, Pettit AR, Marcus SC, Kessler RC, McIntyre JS. But Haggetts research suggests that we should be careful to distinguish between misery at the simple fact of being a housewife and misery that stems from specific problems in how individual husbands, and society at large, treat housewives. In turn, Valium succeeded Librium as a blockbuster antianxiety drug, becoming the single most prescribed drug of any sort: 20 percent of all women and 8 percent of all men reported using a minor tranquilizer each year (Parry et al. Around the same time, family advocacy groups became a major lobbying force in the NIMH (Schooler 2007, p. 60). Since Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, a standard answer has been boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. Kessler RC, Chiu WT, Demler O, Walters EE. Moreover, at that time, most clients paid directly for their therapy, so there were no third-party payers to require specific diagnoses. In contrast, many patients reacting to stressful psychosocial contexts could meet the MDD criteria. Their third child, my aunt was born with quite a few birth defects and they were told she would never be able to walk talk or have babies. In addition, the anxiety classification was divided into phobic states, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and numerous subtypes of each (APA 1980, pp. Coming off the incredible challenges of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the 1940s housewife was faced with a whole new challenge: wartime life. Thats where search filters come in. 2005). You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message. Before the 1970s, a broad conception of mental health problems, with stress and anxiety at its core, dominated mental health treatment, research, and policy. In the 1960s, reports historian Laura Hirshbein, there were three times as many articles about anxiety as there were about depression (2009, p. 59). The capacious MDD criteria thus could cover a heterogeneous group of people ranging from irritable adolescents who constantly sleep, eat little, are uninterested in school, and do not concentrate on their schoolwork to morose elderly people who cannot sleep, overeat, are fatigued, and feel worthless (Murphy 2006, p. 329). Major depressive disorder (MDD) was the only significant category of nonpsychotic depression among the affective disorders. The stress condition's variable and fluctuating mixture of psychic distress, somatic problems, and life difficulties (i.e., problems of living) lacked the diagnostic specificity needed to give disease entities medical legitimacy. A Day in the Life of a 1950s Housewife - LetterPile Parry H, Balter MM, Mellinger G, Cisin I, Manheimer D. National Patterns of Psychotherapeutic Drug Use. In contrast to the many particular anxiety disorders of the DSM-III, the unification of depression around the MDD criteria put depression in the best position to encompass the amorphous symptoms of the stress tradition. The DSM-III's treatment of depression sharply contrasted with the division of the anxiety disorders into many distinct conditions. Valium: Why The "Mother's Little Helper" Story is Wrong Cooperstock R, Lennard H. Some Social Meanings of Tranquillizer Use. By 2000, antidepressants were the best-selling category of drugs of any sort in the United States; fully 10 percent of the U.S. population was using an antidepressant (Mojtabai 2008). document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); JSTOR Daily provides context for current events using scholarship found in JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and other material.
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