“Moody
Bitches” is the, apparently, marketing-driven title of a new book by NYC
psychiatrist Julie Holland. A few days ago she published an op-ed in the NYT, “Medicating
Women’s Feelings,” timed to land a few days before the book’s release. There,
she argues that evolution has designed women to be more sensitive to their
environment and to others. They are constantly taught and pressured, however,
to suppress their emotional responses – and fed medications to maintain a “new,
medicated normal … at odds with women’s dynamic biology.” This new normal may
include artificially elevated levels of serotonin – resulting in emotional
blunting and stereotypically male inperviousness, self-assurance, and
assertiveness (providing, come to think of it, a fix for the “confidence gap”
identified by TV personalities Claire Shipman and Katty Kay). While initially
it all smacks of a conspiracy theory, at some point in the article things
become more ominous.
Holland concludes that people (more often women) “who don’t really need [psychiatric] drugs are trying to medicate a normal reaction to an unnatural set of stressors: lives without nearly enough sleep, sunshine, nutrients, movement and eye contact, which is crucial to us as social primates.” So “we need to stop labeling our sadness and anxiety as uncomfortable symptoms, and to appreciate them as a healthy, adaptive part of our biology.” Which raises the obvious question: can we have healthy adaptations to the highly “unnatural set of stressors” Holland describes – or to the sensory, cognitive, and emotional overload of a large-scale, technologically saturated society (to say nothing of her and her patients’ habitat). If we are evolutionarily adapted to live in small groups under conditions of scarcity, this must impose some sensory, cognitive, emotional, and technological limit on our social functioning. And “success” in this environment may require WEIRD levels of mental and neurosomatic fitness – to be achieved either “naturally” or with the help of performance-enhancing drugs of sorts.
Holland concludes that people (more often women) “who don’t really need [psychiatric] drugs are trying to medicate a normal reaction to an unnatural set of stressors: lives without nearly enough sleep, sunshine, nutrients, movement and eye contact, which is crucial to us as social primates.” So “we need to stop labeling our sadness and anxiety as uncomfortable symptoms, and to appreciate them as a healthy, adaptive part of our biology.” Which raises the obvious question: can we have healthy adaptations to the highly “unnatural set of stressors” Holland describes – or to the sensory, cognitive, and emotional overload of a large-scale, technologically saturated society (to say nothing of her and her patients’ habitat). If we are evolutionarily adapted to live in small groups under conditions of scarcity, this must impose some sensory, cognitive, emotional, and technological limit on our social functioning. And “success” in this environment may require WEIRD levels of mental and neurosomatic fitness – to be achieved either “naturally” or with the help of performance-enhancing drugs of sorts.
