Doctor please, some more of these

You know I love these things. Love them for their fascinating portrayal of womanhood in the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond - some of these are from the '70s). This fascinating little gem is an ad for speed - you know, as in "speed kills", one of the better-known slogans of the '60s. "The selective cerebral action of Norodin is useful in dispelling the shadows of mild mental depression. . . Norodin can be used to advantage in achieving the sense of wellbeing essential to effective patient management in functional and organic disturbances. In obesity, Norodin is useful in reducing the desire for food and counteracting the low spirits associated with the rigors of an enforced diet." And oh boy, can she vacuum! It's all she does, when she's not walking rapidly back and forth on the ceiling. This peculiarly sedative-sounding drug, described as a "psychomotor stimulant and anti-depressant", is nothing but methamphetamine hydrochloride. Cooked up in a lab somewhere, no doubt. They don't tell you that if you come back in ten years, she will have lost all her teeth.

"She's anxious, tense, irritable. She's felt this way for months.

Beset by the seemingly insurmountable problems of raising a young family, and confined to the home most of the time, her symptoms reflect a sense of inadequacy and isolation. Your reassurance and guidance may have helped some, but not enough.

Serax (oxazepam) cannot change her environment, of course. But it can help relieve anxiety, tension, agitation and irritability, thus strengthening her ability cope with day-to-day problems." Just swallow this, dear, and while all your responsibilities and worries and your isolation and loneliness will still be there, guess what? YOU WON'T GIVE A FUCK because you'll be stoned out of your little mind!

"When 'change of life' seems the end of life. . . " Marplan. Not marzipan, not Martian, not maple, or Marple. . . No, this is something to chemically/hormonally jack you out of that deathpit, that slagheap of rotting femininity, menopause. "With the advancing years, woman's vulnerability to depression often becomes intense. The future looms insecure; menopausal dysfunctions spark somatic concerns. And as she faces losing a symbol of femininity, even suicidal panic may supervene.

"Menopausal depression has been lifted by Marplan - even when withdrawal and loss of affect were severe." There is also a brag that Marplan doesn't seem to cause hepatitis, or at least they don't think so. And maybe now that her hormones are juiced-up again and her husband once more wants to fuck her, she won't be holding on to that TV antenna to keep herself from jumping off the roof.

Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah. blah. This is what doctors hear when some middle-aged fat lady comes in and tells them they can't lose weight. "Oh, dear, this diet is getting me down!"

"If she thinks it's getting her down what's it doing to physicians who have to listen to such explanations every day? This is especially true for the doctor who hasn't prescribed Efroxine Hydrochloride. . . It is more likely to produce cerebral stimulation with relatively few side effects." Cerebral stimulation. WTF??? This is a diet pill! What are the implications here? With your metabolism revved up to an unnatural level, the weight will drop off, but eventually, so will your sanity. But then, it's time for. . .

A woman just about my age loses a beloved relative to cancer, then starts having alarming abdominal symptoms. Doctor hands her Thorazine and tells her to go home and be quiet. It takes care of her cancerphobia, all right - so well that she doesn't go to the doctor and dies three months later from a tumor on her ovary. Case closed! Another success story from Thorazine, the wizard of antipsychotics.

Are YOU suffering from: 

sadness, 

crying, 

anorexia,

listlessness, 

irritability, 

rumination, and 

insomnia? 

Take this stuff, then. We don't know what's in it, and you shouldn't know either, or at least you shouldn't want to know. Don't you trust your doctor? Now get out of my office.

Oh but this one is good. Yet another ad for speed, which seems to be a cure-all that can obliterate menopausal dysphoria, snap a woman out of her deathward mood and make her thin while she's at it.

"Many women in the climacteric period develop a true reactive depression characterized by apathy, psychomotor retardation and despondency." Oh! What to do? Take bennies, just like the truck drivers do! Aaaahhhhh. . .  (headlights bearing down. . . crrrasshhh!) No, but listen to this. "Benzedrine Sulfate helps to reawaken mental alertness and optimism, and to restore the savor and zest of life - especially when administered in conjunction with such fundamental measures as ELECTRIC SHOCK (emphasis mine) and estrogenic therapy."

So if a woman comes into the doctor's office with "menopausal" depression, she's likely to get juiced up with a few thousand volts - but not before being stuffed full of bennies. Just what you need to restore the savor and zest of life.

Now this woman really looks psycho. If I saw that looking back at me in the mirror, I think I'd shoot myself. But it might be better than what happens to this lady: her menopausal symptoms, viewed and treated as a disease no less deadly than cancer, are "managed" by the miracle of Thorazine. That sense of "well-being" and "a sense of belonging" are miraculously restored - wha - ? Sense of belonging. Let's analyze this. She's menopausal, so believes she has become obsolete and her carcass has been thrown to the crows. Take a little Thorazine, lady, and you'll "belong" once again. We won't say where. The truth is, you'll be so oblivious to everything and everyone that you won't care if you belong or not.

Now here's a good one! Nembutal for little girls who are terrified of invasive medical procedures. Yes. That's right. These guys don't even wait until you're a grown woman. If you're female, you're a potential victim. The little girl with the zombie-looking doll is about to be zonked out, but good. "When little patients balk at scary, disquieting examinations (before you've begun). . . When they're frightened and tense (and growing more fearful by the minute). . . When they need prompt sedation (and the oral route isn't feasible). . . try

NEMBUTAL  Sodium Suppositories

With short-acting Nembutal, the dosage required is small and the margin of safety is wide. And - since the drug is quickly and completely destroyed in the body - there is little tendency toward morning-after hangover. Keep a supply of all four sizes of NEMBUTAL suppositories on hand. Be ready for the frightened ones before their fears begin."

I am reminded of women who have only the haziest memories of being sexually abused by doctors when they were children. "I don't know why my memory isn't clearer, it was so awful. It seems to just fade in and out. And I'm sure he was sticking something into me, some sort of drug. . . "

But I've saved the best 'til last. This is a truly incredible Valium ad from the 1970s. It's so good I've split it into two and blown it up so you can see it better (and I won't have to transcribe the bloody thing - arrrrggghh!)

At this point in time, Valium was a cure-all given to women mainly to get them out of the doctor's office FAST, and it worked. I never took it, but I heard it was better than alcohol for getting pleasantly, fuzzily stoned. Trouble was, it was about the most addictive drug that has ever been prescribed for anything. The use of Valium for romantic despondency and an inability to wear a vinyl mini-skirt convincingly was actually a misuse, or at very least an off-label use for Valium, which was originally a muscle relaxant. Think of it. It relaxes more than your muscles, I think. Most especially, it relaxes that muscle between your ears, the pesky one that keeps telling you you're alone, all washed up and will never relate meaningfully to another human being again for as long as you live.

But that's not the good part. This little photo album tells us the sad story of Jan's decline, from a young(ish) and attractive(ish), viable sexual object to a dried-up little old lady of 31.

Doctor, please. . .

The photo album which charts Jan's sad decline. Let's see, we have:

Jan and Dad on the tennis court, 1955
Tom, Jan, Ruth and Steve at the hop, 1957 (like something out of an Archie comic)
Joey (?), 1959 - her first lover, perhaps
Jan and Ted (can't make out the background, almost looks like a bunch of Mickey Mouse ears), 1961
Jan and Dad (again), 1962
Jan and Charlie, 1964 (my, isn't Jan getting tawdry with all these boy friends, and
not married yet!)
Jan and BUNNY (emphasis mine - looks like a drunken middle-aged Shriner), 1966
Jan and Dad (a-gain), 1969 (old-maidenhood being marked by an abnormal attachment to one's father), and then. . . oh my God.

Jan. Alone. On a cruise. In 1970. In a tan car coat and a dated hairdo! Why doesn't she just jump overboard?

POST-SCRIPT. I just figured out something. This ad must have been made on the cheap. Joey and Charlie are the same person. Even his shirt is the same. In the beach shot it isn't tucked in and he has donned a pair of sunglasses, but other than that they're the same. Maybe this is Jan's pathetic way of making it look as if she has had more than one boy friend. And that Ted fellow? I don't know. I think maybe Jan is his beard. He seems a little too skinny, a little too pallid to be a Real Man. Like Max Bialystock in The Producers, he's wearing a cardboard belt. I don't know if the shot of her looking miserable as the leering Shriner gets his hooks into her is meant to be humorous or not, but her story isn't. It's sad. The ad is sad. The mentality behind it is disgusting, and created untold misery for thousands of people who became addicted to this stuff.

Do you ever get tempted to feel that the women's movement hasn't really made any difference, that we shouldn't have bothered? Just look at these.

Good grief, I nearly forgot the most important drug of all: Mornidine! As the copy says, "this is a new drug with specific effectiveness in nausea and vomiting of pregnancy. Mornadine eliminates the ordeal of morning sickness. With its selective action on the vomiting center, or the medullary chemoreceptor 'trigger zone', Mornidine possesses the advantages of the phenothiazine drugs without unwanted tranquilizing activity." Oh yes. That means she can race around and cook breakfast and get the house clean nearly as lightning-fast as when she was on benzedrine, even though she's 9 months pregnant and should probably be lying down.

One thing they forgot to tell you, though. . . 

IT'S THALIDOMIDE.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Mother's Little Helpers (or: "doctor please, some more of these")

The text reads:

ANOTHER STRIKING TRIBUTE TO PHOSFERINE TONIC WINE

"I take Phosferine Tonic Wine at 11 a.m. and at 3 p.m., also as a nightcap, and believe me, I derive from it wonderful nights of sleep. I get up very fresh in the morning, having lost that tired feeling and after taking a couple of bottles I am now a different woman. Phosferine Tonic Wine stimulates, energizes and tones the whole system, and is a wonderful nightcap."

(Signed) Mrs. D. Islwyn Lewis

(I note in the fine print that this woman hails from Swansea,Wales, Dylan Thomas' home town. That explains a lot.)

And how about this. . .

Yes, for superior vacuuming skills, it's DEXIES!


"BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!"

Text reads: 35, single and psychoneurotic. The purser on her cruise ship took the last snapshot of Jan. You probably see many such Jans in your practice. The unmarrieds with low self-esteem. Jan never found a man to measure up to her father. Now she realizes she's in a losing pattern - and that she may never marry.

Valium (diazepam) can be a useful adjunct in the therapy of the tense, over-anxious patient who has a neurotic sense of failure, guilt or loss. Over the years, Valium has proven its value in the relief of psychoneurotic states - anxiety, apprehension, agitation, alone or with depressive symptoms.

Valium 10 mg. tablets help relieve the emotional "storms" of psychoneurotic tension and the depressive symptoms that can go hand-in-hand with it. Valium 2-mg. or 5-mg. tablets are usually sufficient for milder tension and anxiety states. An h. s. dose added to the t. i. d. dose often facilitates a good night's rest.

Oh how I wish I could see those photos more clearly, as I think they demonstrate the sad downward spiral of Jan's life as she dates men who are lower and lower on the social totem pole. At the end, she's taking handfuls of Valium with some drunken and probably gay purser. But hey, if it helps her sleep. . .

Yes, I can just make out some of the captions: Jan and Dad, 1955. Tom, Jan, Ruth and Steve, 1957. Joey, 1959. Jan and Ted, 1961. Jan and Dad, 1962. Jan and Charlie, 19(?). Jan and Danny/Benny, 1966. Jan and Dad, 1969. Jan, 1970.

Whoawww now! This is saying even more than I thought it was! This is a little girl who is hung up on her Daddy. So obviously she needs to be chock full 'o Valium in order to cope, if not survive. Yes, there was a time when her life looked hopeful, when she had lots of friends and even boy friends, but say, didn't she seem to go through an awful LOT of boy friends? Did this mean she was a raving slut, or a pussy-zippered prude? The ad implies that none of these nice young fellers was quite good enough for her - shame on her for being so picky, or could it be - could it be there is actually "something wrong" with Jan, something so awful we dare not speak its name?

I'm just thinking, TEN milligrams? I've been told that drugs that end in "pam" are all in the same family and do more-or-less the same thing. If you were swallowing tens regularly, it wouldn't be long until you were an emotional zombie. I have to take clonazepam for leg cramps at night, and the prescription is HALF A MILLIGRAM. That's right. I have never taken more than that because it wouldn't do me any earthly good, and because I don't want to feel groggy and out-of-it in the morning. I WANT my emotional storms, thank you very much.

But just think of all the women who were addicted, who were lost. It hasn't changed enough to suit me. Women in the psychiatric system are still patronized and treated with more disdain and disrespectfulness than men with similar disorders. They're wrongly or over-medicated, with a cookie cutter approach: just throw this at her, or that. Seroquel seems popular now, but you wait, it'll be another flavor in a year or so.

And nowhere does it mention the possibility that real relief of her "symptoms" will only come by breaking through to a more courageous, more authentic life. Which generally means telling the doctors to go piss up a rope. Because they don't know anything about us anyway, do they?

For more absolutely insane ads that patronize women and paint them as screamimg meemies with no legitimate cause to complain, just click on the magic link, below!

http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/medshow/fem.html

(And sorry about that Mornidine. It's another name for Thalidomide.)

Those dancing feet

Gosh-damn, what do you write about on a Monday?

A Monday after a particularly choice grandmother weekend, making videos of old ads (for 7-year-old Caitlin loves watching vintage commercials for Chatty Cathy and Tiny Tears, then staging her own demented versions), plunging into cookie dough up to our elbows (or should I say "cookie DO", in keeping with the newly acceptable and even universal spelling of "donut"), and general chasing around. It was good, it was exhausting, they're home now, and I have the Mondays again.

But that's OK. Because there's always something to write about, isn't there?

If anybody follows this blog, they'll catch on to the fact that I like to probe the layers of my collection of old books like an archaelogical dig. Yellowed paperbacks are my favorite, because for some reason I seem to remember more about them, even books I read decades ago.

This one was published, gulp, thirty years ago. I couldn't believe it came out in 1979, but there it was. It has the strange title of I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, a memoir of Valium addiction, withdrawal and "psychiatric triumph". Oh, sign me up!

It's even more interesting to note that I marked up this book plenty with marginal comments and underlines, and highlighter so old you can barely see it any more. It sort of soaked through to the other side and marks passages that aren't relevant at

all.

At the time of the Valium disaster, Barbara Gordon was a successful (read: Emmy-winning) TV documentary producer with a wonderful life. Wonderful enough to inspire this description of her marvelous live-in lover, Eric:

"Eric made love like no man I had ever known. He was strong, tender and totally uninhibited. He touched, he felt, he laughed, he talked. As I fell asleep in his arms, I silently thanked my guardian angel for all my happiness, for the richness of my life."

Right. At the same time that she's rhapsodizing about how swell everything is, she's experiencing sweating, hammering panic attacks every day that force her to swallow copious quantities of Valium. Eric's little flaws (total financial dependency, no friends at all, two mentally ill ex-wives and a child he is forbidden to see) just sort of blur by her.

And yet, even consuming an astonishing 30 milligrams of Valium a day, she is able to function so well at work that she wins national awards.

This is a curious memoir, and I was only to find out later that Gordon took huge liberties with the facts, moving events around in time and changing a lot of what she calls "details". When she goes cold turkey on the Valium, her doctor reassuring her it isn't addictive, she describes violent spasms of withdrawal:

"My scalp started to burn as if I had hot coals under my hair. Then I began to experience funny little twitches, spasms, a jerk of a leg, a flying arm, tiny tremors that soon turned into convulsions."

Still she insists she doesn't need to taper off. She wants to do this, womanfully, in one go. Eric cheers her on and feeds and supports her and listens to her endless weepy monologues about her unhappy childhood.

At first. And then. . . and then, inexplicably, things change. More to the point, Eric changes - into something unrecognizable.

This hideous metamorphasis into monsterhood happens after five years of cohabiting in apparent bliss. Barbara describes him as "nearly six feet tall, with a head of thick black hair, graying slightly at the temples, a gentle smile, a marvelous mixture of man and boy." Well, maybe this woman was more drugged-out than she thought, because (according to her book) this marvelous man-boy would soon be verbally slicing her into pieces, cutting her off from her friends, tying her to chairs and punching her in the face.

The rest of the memoir deals with Barbara's rescue, in the nick of time, by two of the dozens of wonderful friends she has (though they do seem to disappear in her times of greatest need). She ends up in a series of mental hospitals while doctors try to figure out what is wrong with her. They look right at the Valium and don't see it. Then, as now, that's the way psychiatry works.

Or doesn't work. What happens with Eric is even more disturbing: he wages a hate campaign against her, telling her friends blatant lies designed to throw them off-balance and poison them against Barbara.

Eventually she finds a wonderful, understanding therapist and spends months pouring out her childhood woes in true Freudian analytical fashion. More interestingly, she falls in love with a 25-year-old psych ward burnout with a prison record (involuntary manslaughter) from Riker's Island. My my, how this woman picks them!

All this is leading up to something I saw in a library in the early '80s: a book called Prince Valium, written by one Anton Holden. This was "the other side of Barbara Gordon's million-selling memoir", Holden's attempt to set the record straight. Instead, it ends up more twisted than ever.

Turns out Barbara's boyish boy friend "Eric" isn't a failed lawyer at all, but a film producer working in the same medium as Barbara. He's moderately successful, mainly for the Vixens in Chains kind of movies that drip creepiness. But he's smooth enough to hide his icy sociopathic core, especially from someone as infantile and utterly dependent as Barbara.

Holden insists that the dates in her memoir conflict wildly with reality, with a year passing between certain episodes instead of days. He paints himself as her would-be saviour, completely defeated by her narcissism and impossible demands. It becomes apparent pretty quickly that what this guy really wants is a piece of the action: he'd like to rake in some cash and fame of his own, while whitewashing what really happened between them.

But what really happened between them?

I wasn't there, but I can't see how a forty-year-old successful career woman could fall for a brute with a shiny surface, a man so parasitic he reduces his partner to voraciously chewing pills to deal with her anxiety: without her even knowing it. This is the thing that rattles my teeth.

Until her kindly saviour/psychologist enlightens her about it, she seems to have no idea at all that "Eric" is sucking the life out of her. He's so practiced a user, so smooth that she thinks she's happy.

I've never known a person consuming 30 milligrams of Valium a day who is happy.

Or even alive.

OK, so more is known about Valium withdrawal now, and many say it's because of Barbara Gordon's book. I won't say much more about Prince Valium now, though I may be commenting more on it later (I've just ordered a used copy. It's not hard to find, though I doubt if he broke any sales records: the book is too creepy, and loyalty to Gordon too strong).

The movie version of I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, starring the then-hot Jill Clayburgh, drew only a tepid response, mainly because it lacked the edge and twisted, complex dynamics of the original. Liza Minnelli, whose then-husband Jack Haley Jr. once presented her with a gold-plated Valium tablet, eventually ended up in rehab.

Mother's Little Helpers weren't so innocuous, after all.

Gordon describes Valium not as a tranquilizer, but "a leveller". I'd say she got it wrong. This Eric/Anton/boy/man/incubus levelled her long before she ended up in a locked ward with a 20-something boy friend who had killed somebody. I wonder if she's still alive today (she'd be over 70); what happened with Anton Holden, if there were any legal ramifications; if her subsequent books made any money. One of them, Jennifer Fever, was about relationships between older men and younger women. Might as well title it, The Sky is Blue.

Contrary to what most people seem to think, the Valium didn't screw up Barbara Gordon's life. Going off the Valium didn't screw up Barbara Gordon's life. Not even Eric did. It was her own bad choices. Even addicts choose the poisons they put into themselves, and only they can choose to stop.

And nasty, brutish partners don't fall from the sky.