Pills were no longer restricted to treating major illnesses they became new panaceas for almost every imaginable form of quotidian distress, spilling out of psychiatrists’ specialized offices and the halls of asylums into patients’ common medicine cabinets.Īs the Rolling Stones put it in “Mother’s Little Helper,” in the emerging age of Valium whenever “mother needs something today to calm her down” she goes “running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper / And it helps her on her way, / gets her through her busy day.” Here the Stones are not proselytizing for the illicit, mind-bending drugs of the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll revolution, but instead they are more modestly merely chronicling the emerging psychopharmacology of everyday life, the ever-increasing proliferation of seemingly benign quotidian pharmaceuticals, especially as these medications were often gendered and prescribed specifically to sedate modern housewives. Consequently, “psychiatrists in the 1960s were faced with the alienation of everyday life in a way that no earlier generation of practitioners had been” with the result that psychotropic drugs became widely available to the masses, en masse, to treat an ever-increasing array of everyday anxieties and minor psychological disturbances for the first time (Healy 2002). Everyone can take it and seemingly for almost any everyday anxiety, from prenuptial jitters to performance anxiety at work or social anxiety at a cocktail party with the neighbors. No longer limited to treating major psychoses, Valium offered a new pill for everyday life: for the home, for the office, for the classroom, for the airplane, for the stage, for suburbia, and for public life at large. Whereas Thorazine and early antipsychotics (i.e., major tranquilizers) were used to treat seriously mentally ill patients suffering from schizophrenia and other readily identifiable psychoses, generally in asylums, a new generation of benzodiazepines or minor tranquilizers, such as Valium, began to “confuse the typical perturbations that are part of everyone’s life with true psychiatric disorder” (Frances). More importantly, it dramatically extended the reach of psychopharmacology itself. Like Thorazine before it, then, Valium is much more than just a new medication prescribed to treat another psychological illness. Quickly establishing itself as a basic “staple in medicine cabinets, as common as toothbrushes and razors,” Valium became what Andrea Tone describes as the world’s first blockbuster drug, “the first $100 million brand in pharmaceutical history, and between 19, the most widely prescribed medication in the Western world.” At its peak sales, in “1978 alone, Valium’s manufacturer, Hoffman-La Roche, sold nearly 2.3 billion tablets, enough to medicate half the globe.” Everyone from suburban housewives and aspiring celebrities to corporate men in their grey flannel suits all began to turn to Valium for an anxious fix. When Phil Potter (Burt Reynolds) has a panic attack in a furniture store, his brother asks the gathered crowd if anyone has a Valium, and the crowd immediately replies with virtually everyone pulling out their own bottle of pills to offer the panicked Phil.Īs these simple media examples demonstrate, the widespread use of Valium rapidly extended the range and scope of psychiatric medicine as pills were increasingly prescribed to treat a wide range of common everyday anxieties, thereby transforming psychotropic pills into a commonplace staple of modern American life.
This apparent ease with which Americans have come to accept Valium-along with its fellow benzodiazepines, from Librium (chlordiazepoxide) and Klonopin (clonazepam) to Ativan (lorazepam) and Xanax (alprazolam)-is comically illustrated in Alan J. Then when he responds that he has already taken one, she nonchalantly tells him to just take a second. When Mike complains to Carol that he is nervous about their impending ceremony, she immediately replies that he should just take a tranquilizer, presumably a Valium (diazepam).
While it would have been completely unthinkable for Mike and Carol Brady to light up a joint or get rip-roaring drunk on screen, the very first episode of the first season of The Brady Bunch (1969) unproblematically opens with the couple, the very paragons of middle-American morality, casually popping pills on their wedding night: taking a couple tranquilizers to calm their prenuptial jitters.
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