3
antidepressants on adolescents and young children indicates a number of assumptions
embraced in policy and in culture regarding mental health. These include: an unproven
assumption that behavioral disorders are under-diagnosed, that diagnosis is the correct
manner to achieve normal behavior, that poor female minorities constitute a large
percentage of the undiagnosed and that psychiatric drugs are the first, cheapest
2
and least
cumbersome method of therapy is psychotherapeutic drugs. These in turn indicate an
increasing cultural comfort with anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs, many of which
not tested on children or for long-term use. Finally, the deliberate, unproblematic
expansion of depression diagnoses from middle and upper middle class white women to a
broad female population that includes poor black girls, indicates a certain energy in the
promotion of behavioral disorders to women across State, industry and cultural spheres.
The ease of the transition indicates a culture that—one hundred years after la belle epoch
of hysteria—still assumes women to be mood- defunct and behaviorally- flawed.
Hysteria and Beyond
Though the demographics of behavioral diagnosis have expanded, recovery
technologies have transformed (from physically coercive and traumatic remedies to an
age of psychopharmaceuticals), and illness labels have changed, diagnosed symptoms
have largely remained constant since the 19
th
century hysteria epidemic. Today, a variety
of diagnoses name, discipline and treat behavioral “illnesses” composed of strikingly
similar symptoms, with similar drug treatments: anti-depressants and anti-anxiety agents.
2
Susan Stefan (1996) argues that drugs are the most popular treatments for all types of mental illness
because they are cheaper than other types of therapy, despite that they are short-sighted and in the long run,
damaging to women as they mask the causes of their pain.
Convention