One Should Not Be Heavily Medicated to Smooth Out Moods

choi

Leonore Tiefer, Going off the Pills. One in four American women takes psychiatric medication. Are we ill, or are we treating emotions like a disease? Wall Street Journal, Mar 26, 2015
www.wsj.com/articles/book-review ... land-m-d-1427324825
(book review on Julie Holland, Moody Bitches; The TRUTH about the drugs you're taking, the sleep you're missing, the sex you're not having and what's really making you crazy. Penguin, 2015)

Quote:

"One in four American women takes psychiatric medication, compared with one in seven men. Julie Holland, a New York psychiatrist, thinks that’s 'insane.'  In 'Moody Bitches,' she advises women to accept the wisdom of their hormone fluctuations and not medicate their moods away with drugs like Prozac or Xanax. She argues that “women’s emotionality is normal. It is a sign of health, not disease, and it is our single biggest asset.” Her authority for this claim is not science, but feminine spirituality.

"In the field of sexuality, the one with which I am most familiar, hormonal studies are often contradictory. For every paper showing a positive relationship between testosterone and sex drive, for example, you can find one claiming the opposite. The differences result from technical issues involving diverse forms of the hormone (not all forms of testosterone are the same) and different definitions of sexual drive. But you wouldn’t know this from 'Moody Bitches.' Dr Holland insists at various points that 'the most likely culprit if your libido has tanked is testosterone,' that 'even flirting seems to have some basis in testosterone' and that 'testosterone makes us horny.'

My comment:
(a) The "pills" in the title is not contraceptives, but medication.
(b) Both the book author and the reviewer are women.
(c) At the bottom of the book review is an introduction to the reviewer: "Ms Tiefer is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine."
(d) There is no need to read the rest of the review, which is inane. Whether it is due to the book or the review, I do not know.
(e) Little is known for sure about human sexuality, because few governments in the world are willing to fund scientific studies on sex.