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A cartoon depicting a mother doing dishes with her daughter beside her.
Daughter: Grandma said, in her day, she did 3 times the work you do today.
Mother: In Grandma’s day, they had cocaine in the sodas.
A cartoon depicting a mother doing dishes with her daughter beside her.
Daughter: Grandma said, in her day, she did 3 times the work you do today.
Mother: In Grandma’s day, they had cocaine in the sodas.
A good deep dive into this whole issue is an episode of You’re Wrong About, specifically the summer book club ep on The Stepford Wives ( Here on Buzzsprout ) which gets into the 1950s era notion of housewife as appliance that if your wife wasn’t performing like a Maytag then the doctor would be happy to help with a Librium prescription. (Valium came later after Librium had too much of a body count.)
While the story has the science fiction element of replacing wives with mechanical robots, the culture at the time of drugging our wives to obedience was comparable enough.
Anyhow the process hasn’t slowed down. While the US still is going through a mental health crisis we still approach it with a medical model. That is, we give people drugs and treatment without considering the ubiquitous toxic conditions that are literally driving everyone mad.
How ridiculous, to drug people into compliance. Now if you’ll just give me a second, I need to go get a Xanax to take the edge off the Adderall I took so that I could spend 14 hours today arranging the pattern of lights on this little rectangle on my desk. If I don’t, the police will tell me I have “excited delirium” and fill me full of ketamine until I die.