Word: miltown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...something about our particular historical moment. Culturally speaking, every age has its signature crack-up illness. In the 1950s, an era of postwar trauma, nuclear fear and the self-medicating three-martini lunch, it was anxiety. (In 1956, 1 in 50 Americans was regularly taking mood-numbing tranquilizers like Miltown - a chemical blunderbuss compared with today's sleep aids and antianxiety meds.) During the '60s and '70s, an age of suspicion and Watergate, schizophrenics of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sort captured the imagination - mental patients as paranoid heroes. Many mental institutions were emptied...
...accidental discovery in the 1950s of the first synthetic tranquilizer, chlorpromazine (Thorazine), ushered in a gentler age of psychopharmacology. As other feel-good pills followed--Tofranil (imipramine) for depression, Miltown and Equanil (meprobamate) for psychosis, Valium (diazepam) for severe anxiety and lithium for manias--no mental illness seemed beyond their reach. Governments began emptying mental wards on the assumption that madness could be medicated--ignoring the fact that thousands of former inmates ended up living, and suffering, in the streets...