{"id":71819,"date":"2020-05-06T17:24:10","date_gmt":"2020-05-06T21:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/archives\/71819"},"modified":"2020-05-06T17:24:10","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T21:24:10","slug":"prozac-on-the-couch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/archives\/71819","title":{"rendered":"Prozac on the Couch"},"content":{"rendered":"Pills replaced the couch; neuroscience took the place of talk therapy; and as psychoanalysis faded from the scene, so did the castrating mothers and hysteric spinsters of Freudian theory. Or so the story goes. In Prozac on the Couch, psychiatrist Jonathan Michel Metzl boldly challenges recent psychiatric history, showing that there\u2019s a lot of Dr. Freud encapsulated in late-twentieth-century psychotropic medications. Providing a cultural history of treatments for depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses through a look at the professional and popular reception of three \u201cwonder drugs\u201d\u2014Miltown, Valium, and Prozac\u2014Metzl explains the surprising ways Freudian gender categories and popular gender roles have shaped understandings of these drugs. Prozac on the Couch traces the notion of \u201cpills for everyday worries\u201d from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century, through psychiatric and medical journals, popular magazine articles, pharmaceutical advertisements, and popular autobiographical “Prozac narratives.\u201d Metzl shows how clinical and popular talk about these medications often reproduces all the cultural and social baggage associated with psychoanalytic paradigms\u2014whether in a 1956 Cosmopolitan article about research into tranquilizers to \u201ccure\u201d frigid women; a 1970s American Journal of Psychiatry ad introducing Jan, a lesbian who \u201cneeds\u201d Valium to find a man; or Peter Kramer\u2019s description of how his patient \u201cMrs. Prozac\u201d meets her husband after beginning treatment. Prozac on the Couch locates the origins of psychiatry\u2019s \u201cbiological revolution\u201d not in the Valiumania of the 1970s but in American popular culture of the 1950s. It was in the 1950s, Metzl points out, that traditional psychoanalysis had the most sway over the American imagination. As the number of Miltown prescriptions soared (reaching 35 million, or nearly one per second, in 1957), advertisements featuring uncertain brides and unfaithful wives miraculously cured by the \u201cnew\u201d psychiatric medicines filled popular magazines. Metzl writes without nostalgia for the bygone days of Freudian psychoanalysis and without contempt for psychotropic drugs, which he himself regularly prescribes to his patients. What he urges is an increased self-awareness within the psychiatric community of the ways that Freudian ideas about gender are entangled in Prozac and each new generation of wonder drugs. He encourages, too, an understanding of how ideas about psychotropic medications have suffused popular culture and profoundly altered the relationship between doctors and patients.

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Pills replaced the couch; neuroscience took the place of talk therapy; and as psychoanalysis faded from the scene, so did the castrating mothers and hysteric spinsters of Freudian theory. Or so the story goes. In Prozac on the Couch, psychiatrist Jonathan Michel Metzl boldly challenges recent psychiatric history, showing that there\u2019s a lot of Dr. … Continue reading Prozac on the Couch<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[409],"tags":[696,38143,19,37653,16121,37655,38145,38146,37654,35251,34389,36104,38148,38149,38150,38151,38152,38156,38153,38154,38157,38158,38159,38147,37010,38155,38161,34828,38144,37518,38160],"class_list":["post-71819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","tag-anxiety","tag-anxiety-and-stress","tag-anxiety-attack","tag-anxiety-books-free","tag-anxiety-disorder","tag-anxiety-games","tag-anxiety-panic-attack","tag-anxiety-panic-disorder","tag-anxiety-relief-games","tag-anxiety-treatment","tag-chronic-stress","tag-coping-with-stress","tag-cure-for-anxiety","tag-cures-for-anxiety","tag-drugs-for-anxiety","tag-help-for-anxiety","tag-herbs-for-anxiety","tag-natural-cure-for-anxiety","tag-natural-cures-for-anxiety","tag-natural-remedies-for-anxiety","tag-natural-remedy-for-anxiety","tag-natural-treatment-for-anxiety","tag-natural-treatments-for-anxiety","tag-panic-attack-treatment","tag-panic-disorder","tag-remedies-for-anxiety","tag-social-anxiety-disorder","tag-stress-anxiety","tag-symptoms-of-a-panic-attack","tag-treatment-for-anxiety-disorder","tag-treatments-for-anxiety"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71819\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}