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A good deep dive into this whole issue is an episode of You're Wrong About, specifically the summer book club ep on The Stepford Wives ( Here on Buzzsprout ) which gets into the 1950s era notion of housewife as appliance that if your wife wasn't performing like a Maytag then the doctor would be happy to help with a Librium prescription. (Valium came later after Librium had too much of a body count.)

While the story has the science fiction element of replacing wives with mechanical robots, the culture at the time of drugging our wives to obedience was comparable enough.

Anyhow the process hasn't slowed down. While the US still is going through a mental health crisis we still approach it with a medical model. That is, we give people drugs and treatment without considering the ubiquitous toxic conditions that are literally driving everyone mad.