away.
The drugging of the predominantly female nursing home population continues in old age a pattern established with awful frequency among women: women get 60 to 80 percent of the prescriptions for mood-altering drugs (60 percent of the prescriptions for barbiturates, 67 percent for tranquilizers, and 80 percent for
amphetamines). Women are prescribed more than twice the drugs
that men are for the same psychological conditions. One study of
women in Utah, cited by Muriel Nellis in
that 69 percent of women over the age of thirty-four who were not
employed outside the home and who were members in good standing of the Mormon Church use minor tranquilizers. ”6 Such women are considered a high-risk group for addiction by the time
they are forty-five or fifty.
The dimensions of female drug addiction and dependency are
staggering. In 1977, 36 million women used tranquilizers; 16 million, sleeping pills; 12 million, amphetamines; and nearly 12 mil
lion women got prescriptions for these drugs from doctors for the
first time. As N ellis, who cites these figures, * makes clear:
Those numbers do not include whole classes of prescribed pain
killers, all of which are mood altering and addictive. Nor do
they include the billions of doses dispensed to patients directly, without a prescription, in doctors’ offices, in m ilitary, public, or private hospitals, and in clinics or nursing homes. 7
According to the Food and Drug Administration, between 1977
and 1980 Valium was the most prescribed drug in the United
States.
At best it can be said that the woman’s lot in life, the female
role, necessitates a lot of medical intervention in the form of mood-
altering drugs. At worst it must be said that these drugs are prescribed to women because they are women— and because the doctors are largely men. The male doctor’s perception of the
female patient, conditioned by his belief in his own difference from
her and superiority to her, is that she is very emotional, very upset, irrational, has no sense of proportion, cannot discern what is trivial and what is important. She has no credibility as an observer
of her own condition or even as one who can report subjective
sensations or feelings with any integrity or acuity. She is overwrought not because of any objective condition in her life but because she is a woman and women get emotional and overwrought simply because that is how women are. Doctors have prescribed
tranquilizers to women for menstrual cramps, which have a physiological cause; for battery— the battered woman is handed a prescription and sent home to the batterer; for pregnancy—a woman is chem ically helped to accept an unwanted pregnancy; for many
* Testimony in 1978 by the acting director o f the National Institute on
Drug Abuse before the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and
Control.
physiologically rooted diseases that the doctor does not care to investigate (but he would examine a man carefully, not give a tranquilizer); and for physiological and psychological conditions that result from stress caused by environmental, political, social, or
economic factors. When a man and a woman go to doctors complaining of the same symptoms, she is dismissed or handed a tranquilizer and he is examined and given tests.
womanhood. Freud is credited by some sentimentalists as a feminist because he insisted that men could be genuinely hysterical too.
He was the first to assert that hysteria could manifest in someone
without a womb. This was very liberal and rebellious, and Freud’s
was a lone voice. Medical opinion was that hysteria as a pathology
was exclusively limited to women because women had wombs and
