Margaret Mead was part of the cultural consensus that created the tranquilizer era. Writing for the New York Times in 1956, in an article titled “One Vote for This Age of Anxiety,” Mead argued that if a society’s most pressing problems were anxiety and stress, it meant that it had escaped humanity’s traditional enemies of warfare, famine, and disease. The rising significance of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs in modern life was, she argued, not a sign of growing mental illness, but a sign of progress. It led to “a world in which no individual feels that he need be hopelessly brokenhearted, a
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