Miltown

“ . . . with the advent of Miltown, Americans consulted the doctors they were most likely to see for routine problems – family practitioners, internists, pediatricians, and obstetrician-gynecologists. . . . The biochemical revolution also fueled the diversification of psychiatric practice by transferring it from the specialist’s office to the generalist’s prescription pad. . . . By 1960, nearly three-quarters of all doctors in the United Stats prescribed meprobamate. . . . Miltown’s success, fomented by the prescription practices of nonpsychiatrists, forged a new patient-doctor relationship in which Americans increasingly came to regard mental health – first anxiety, then depression, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, and son on – as grounds for routine medical consultation and pharmacological intervention” (Tone, 90, 91). Miltown ads aimed at GPs; “in emphasizing the ubiquity of anxiety even among otherwise healthy people . . . Early Miltown ads “promoted the tranquilizer to treat ‘mental stress’ or ‘tension’ in ‘the average patient in everyday practice’ and deployed psychosomatic reasoning to suggest the drug for allergies, arthritis, asthma, and other problems. . . . the ads translated psychodynamic psychiatry’s obsession with anxiety into simple life problems that physicians confronted every day in their offices. . . If generalists could not psychoanalyze their troubled patients, they could at least ease worries with a pill . . .” (Herzberg, 34, 35).