Abstract
Introduction: The birth of modern medicine dates back to the seventeenth century and is marked by an approximation between the clinic and scientific thinking, setting up a new way of discussing about disease and intervention on it. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we witnessed a growing expansion of this model, seen by undeniable advances in the control and elimination of various pathologies. However, all this progress would not happen without charging a price. Benzodiazepines arise in this context as a substance designed to treat anxiety disorders, due to the effects of sedation, decreasing anxiety, and muscle relaxing. However, several studies developed in the last decades have pointed to the incidence of abuse and misuse of these drugs, especially among women. Our proposal in this chapter is to discuss the problem of the benzodiazepine abuse among women, based on the concepts of femininity and angst, as proposed by psychoanalysis.
Main Body: The market of benzodiazepine drugs took place in the early 1960s, to replace barbiturates, drugs that caused some serious side effects. The consequences of using these drugs can indiscriminately bring more harm than benefits.
Discussion: The association of benzodiazepine properties with scientific medicine and the capitalist way of production opened the space for an epidemic of addiction quite unique, not only socially accepted but also stimulated. We assume that drug use does include not only the chemical dimension but also a symbolic one therefore culturally elaborated, as a way of dealing with the “discontent of civilization”.
Implications: Women’s health policies must enquire about this epidemic abuse of benzodiazepines on its unspoken meanings: Who benefits from this indiscriminate drug prescription? Which sufferings and anguishes are being medicated? Why are women so vulnerable to this issue? It is also important to improve the education of health professionals, so they can give a more accurately listening to the issues that they receive and think about other ways of dealing with them.
Response: Zenilda Rodrigues offers a poem on women’s anguish and its treatment.
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Notes
- 1.
It is noteworthy that the pharmaceutical industry has already been sensing this symbolic nuance of the drug for a while. The invention of the name allows for a propagation and acceptance of the drug by the market, having an effect of an embedded action in the commercial name, creating consequences of significance: “Tranxilium” (referring to tranquility), “Serenid” (to serenity), “Librium” (to liberty). Patients often even refuse to have a different commercial name for the same substance, claiming that it would not have the same action.
- 2.
Freud refers to the Greek tragedy “Oedipus the King” to give a name to this experience by which every subject has once desired to sleep with his mother and to kill his father, repeating in their fantasies the story of the tragic Sophoclean hero.
- 3.
The definition of “enjoyment” or “jouissance” is outlined from the concept that psychism is not ruled only by the seeking of pleasure. What Freud realizes from his clinical experience is that the subject is situated from a repetition, and that what is repeated is not the experiences that give people pleasure, but a certain position that is articulated with a certain suffering (beyond plain pleasure). Lacan returns to those Freudian elaborations to formulate the concept of “jouissance”. To Lacan, we can only talk about enjoyment from a speaking subject, because it is the fact that we enter the field of language that conditions enjoyment to its two aspects: to one side, the “phallic enjoyment”, which is determined from the “language ciphering of the body enjoyment, which takes place on an unconscious level” (Vallas, 2001, p. 59). This ciphering process finds its limit on the body, where an impossible-to-be-named enjoyment lies. This is why on the other aspect of enjoyment, we have what Lacan called “other enjoyment”, which is the jouissance of the body, from a body that enjoys itself, ruling out any possibility of language articulation (Vallas, 2001, p. 46). Thus, the concept of enjoyment in psychoanalysis takes us to a repetition (of significance, of ways of naming) but also repetition of a body experience that cannot be named. In this repetition, there is something that ties an extraction of satisfaction from the subject, at the same time that it brings to the present something from its suffering. Thus, talking about “an enjoyment position” for each subject as something that makes him/her unique.
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Zenilda Rodrigues She is a singer and a popular poet of Canindé, a city in Ceará, Brazil (Besides being a woman in love!)
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My Struggle Against Anxiety
Control your anxiety,
And your impulsive side.
Don’t exaggerate on pills,
Like anti-depressives.
Avoid going to doctors,
And some palliatives.
Forget the DIENPAX,
And also DIAZEPAN.
Valium of 5 or 10,
Nor at night, or in the sun.
Exercise you mind,
And you may have fun.
Whenever the angst or sadness arrives,
Send them both away.
This will make you feel better,
Take this advice to you,
And to anyone you can say.
Do your party, always look for joy
You may have some.
Sadness gives you none.
Walk safe by all the way.
For life is not a life,
If she rushes another day.
Medicines are not the treatment,
To fight against depression.
Your “directions” are in yourself,
Read them with attention.
Be strong, conquer your fear,
Control the situation.
Try to keep you mind engaged,
Say no to harmful ideas.
Don’t let yourself be fooled,
Take your decision, Maria.
No anxiolytic in your life,
Be a person very alive.
Make something different sometimes.
Change the place of the furniture
If you don’t have what to do,
You can make up your case.
Make you hair,
Look at your pretty face.
Don’t let melancholia,
Trespass upon you heart.
Defeat it anyway,
Be the lord of your own mind,
Do the things your own way.
Medicines make you sleepy and fat.
I’m a living proof of that.
Never more I’ve taken any pill,
In this abstinence, I insist.
Faith in God was my strongest drill.
It wasn’t easy to me,
Getting out of this nightmare.
I fought with both my hands,
With my soul, I had some care.
Today I’m a happy woman,
A woman quite rare.
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Silveira, L.C., Martins, I.C., Rodrigues, Z. (2015). Women’s Benzodiazepine Abuse: A Psychoanalytic Approach. In: Khanlou, N., Pilkington, F. (eds) Women's Mental Health. Advances in Mental Health and Addiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17326-9_9
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