Antianxiety Medications

1950

Frank M. Berger (1913–2008)

While trying to find a way to preserve penicillin, physician and pharmacology researcher Frank Berger noticed that a chemical he was using seemed to have a calming effect on laboratory mice. In 1950, he and chemist Bernard Ludwig synthesized the chemical and called it meprobamate; in 1955 it was first sold under the brand name Miltown. It soon became the best-selling drug introduced up to that time, with thirty-seven million prescriptions written for it in the United States alone by 1957.

In the years since the introduction of Miltown, other pharmaceutical firms developed and marketed their own antianxiety medications, including Librium, Equanil, and Valium, which are typically referred to as minor tranquilizers. Now there are multiple kinds of anxyiotic (or antianxiety) medications, from benzodiazepines (such as Xanax) to barbiturates, which provide a sedative effect. These types of drugs passed into popular culture as “mother’s little helper”; initially, however, they were more often prescribed for men, especially middle-class men who were part of the gray-flannel-suit corporate culture of that period.

Why were these drugs so popular? Anxiety is a hallmark of modern industrial and postindustrial societies. Of course people have experienced anxiety throughout history, yet in some ways, it is the quintessential emotion of modern life. Anxiety is a set of emotional and physiological responses that are part of who we are as humans, and our responses may range from the adaptive to the maladaptive.

When anxiety becomes maladaptive, it is one of the major mental illnesses. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 13 percent of adults between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four suffer from an anxiety disorder at any one time. Older adults experience anxiety disorders at higher rates than younger adults, with serious implications for health and independent functioning. Diagnostic manuals of mental illnesses in Western societies include twelve anxiety disorders. The most common are generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, specific phobias (e.g., agoraphobia and fear of snakes), and social phobias.

Antianxiety medications are often used to treat these disorders, but cognitive and behavioral therapies have proven to be just as effective.

SEE ALSO Cognitive Therapy (1955), Antidepressant Medications (1957), Systematic Desensitization (1958)

Although antianxiety medications were initially marketed to white-collar men, by the 1960s most prescriptions were being filled for “harried housewives.”