The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Affair with TranquilizersAnxious Americans have increasingly pursued peace of mind through pills and prescriptions. In 2006, the National Institute of Mental Health estimated that 40 million adult Americans suffer from an anxiety disorder in any given year: more than double the number thought to have such a disorder in 2001. Anti-anxiety drugs are a billion-dollar business. Yet as recently as 1955, when the first tranquilizer -- Miltown -- went on the market, pharmaceutical executives worried that there wouldn't't be interest in anxiety-relief. At mid-century, talk therapy remained the treatment of choice. But Miltown became a sensation -- the first psychotropic blockbuster in United States history. By 1957, Americans had filled 36 million prescriptions. Patients seeking made-to-order tranquility emptied drugstores, forcing pharmacists to post signs reading "more Miltown tomorrow." The drug's financial success and cultural impact revolutionized perceptions of anxiety and its treatment, inspiring the development of other lifestyle drugs including Valium and Prozac. In The Age of Anxiety, Andrea Tone draws on a broad array of original sources -- manufacturers' files, FDA reports, letters, government investigations, and interviews with inventors, physicians, patients, and activists -- to provide the first comprehensive account of the rise of America's tranquilizer culture. She transports readers from the bomb shelters of the Cold War to the scientific optimism of the Baby Boomers, to the "just say no" Puritanism of the late 1970s and 1980s. A vibrant history of America's long and turbulent affair with tranquilizers, The Age of Anxiety casts new light on what it has meant to seek synthetic solutions to everyday angst. |
Contents
1 | |
2 The Making of Miltown 27 | 27 |
3 The Fashionable Pill 53 | 53 |
4 Psychiatry in the Medicine Cabinet 69 | 69 |
5 Arsenals of the Anxious 93 | 93 |
6 Corporate Choreography and Molecular Play 117 | 117 |
7 Suffering Amid the Silence 141 | 141 |
Other editions - View all
The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers Andrea Tone No preview available - 2012 |
Common terms and phrases
addiction advertising Age of Anxiety Andrea Tone antianxiety antidepressants anxiety disorder anxiolytic Archives azepines barbiturates benzo benzodiazepines Berger Family Cambridge Carter chemical chemists clinical company’s compounds consumer country’s cultural David Healy depression disease doctors drug’s DSM-III Edward Shorter Equanil FDA History Office FDA’s Frank Berger Freud Happy Pills History of Medicine Hoffman-La Roche hospital Hoyt insomnia interview Journal of Psychiatry June Lehmann Leo Sternbach Librium Manufacturers Files mental health mental illness mephenesin meprobamate million Miltown minor tranquilizers National nerve nervous neurasthenia neurosis Newsweek Onward and Upward panic disorder patients Paxil penicillin percent pharmaceutical pharmacists pharmacological physicians political prescribed prescription drugs problems promoted Prozac psychoanalysis psychopharmacology quilizers quoted reported Roche’s Science scientific scientists Sept social SSRIs symptoms television thalidomide therapeutic therapy tion treatment trials United University Press users Valium women worried Wyeth Xanax York