Just How You Like It
Just before painting this piece, I was exploring the literature on anxiety, depression, and antidepressant use, especially among women. In some respects, taking a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI (like Prozac or Paxil), might seem to be empowering. In Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer writes of women who claimed to have become more assertive, self-assured, and confident after starting an SSRI, like Prozac. A woman who was previously timid or apprehensive might, after starting Prozac, gain the confidence necessary to request a raise or promotion. Or a woman who was highly sensitive and emotional might, on Prozac, be indifferent and unemotional enough to walk away from a toxic or unfulfilling relationship. Indeed, as Kramer reports, many women (and people in general) on Prozac come to view their earlier selves as diseased, and not as their true selves.
Others (some writers, philosophers, etc.) were more cautious and concerned about widespread antidepressant use. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that, between 2015 and 2018, 13.2% of adults 18 and over were using antidepressant medication – 17.7% of women and 8.4% of men. In a provocative article written in The New York Times, Julie Holland argues that many women who do not need to take an antidepressant are pressured (or perhaps socialized) into doing so as a way of conforming to a masculine emotional style. In her view, society has pathologized women’s natural variation in mood and emotional state. While she does not deny that some people have a legitimate need for an antidepressant, and benefit from taking one, she fears that these drugs are being overprescribed, and that many normal experiences and feelings are being medicated away. In the article, and in her book on the same theme, she mentions that many women on SSRIs are unable to cry. It occurred to one woman that her SSRI use was becoming a problem when she failed to cry in response to her own mother’s death. More recently, in Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke expresses concern about the widespread use of antidepressants and our inability to experience the full range of emotional states while taking them.
Just How You Like It was inspired by this theme. The suspiciously happy 1950s-style housewife, donning a polka dotted apron, serves her brain on a platter to her spouse and family just how they like it. To be sure, the title, and the image itself, are sarcastic or biting in tone. To hand over one’s brain, or mind, to another amounts to a kind of self-annihilation. The act performed with a gleeful smile conceals a certain degree of contempt or resentment. In our relationships, and in society generally, we are encouraged to change or revise ourselves—through medication, clothing, cosmetic procedures, exercise, etc.— to accommodate the needs of others. This is not always an unfair or unreasonable request. It is often the case that we really ought to work on ourselves – to become kinder, gentler, more thoughtful, less selfish. But at times society, or those around us, can push too hard to make us what we are not, or to pathologize what is a normal variation in humanity.
Sources:
Holland, Julie, M.D. “Medicating Women’s Feelings,” The New York Times, Mar. 9, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/opinion/sunday/medicating-womens-feelings.html
Holland, Julie, M.D. 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. New York, Penguin Press, 2015.
Kramer, Peter D. Listening to Prozac: The Landmark Book about Antidepressants and the Remaking of the Self. New York, Penguin Press, 1997.
Lembke, Anna, M.D. Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. New York, Dutton, 2021.