Psychiatrist urges women to embrace, not medicate, emotions

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

By Julie Holland, M.D.

Penguin Press. 432 pp. $27.95

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Reviewed by Evi Heilbrunn

In the 1880s, male doctors referred to it as female madness or hysteria. Symptoms ranged from having a strong sexual appetite to moodiness. Treatments ranged from being placed in an asylum to long vacations near the ocean. Some doctors even went as far as assisting their female patients in achieving orgasm.

Though the notion of female hysteria fizzed out by the 1950s, the medicalization of women's emotions persists. That idea forms the backbone of psychiatrist Julie Holland's latest book, 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.

Depression, anxiety, and how to deal with them form the foundation of Holland's argument. The book, divided into four parts, covers both the biological basis for why most women are more emotional than most men and how to maintain emotional wellness through a healthy lifestyle.

Holland writes at length about natural highs, such as getting the right amount of sleep, working out, and eating healthy foods, but also touts the benefits of cannabis use. She refers to it as an "anti-inflammatory remedy."

In a thorough appendix, Holland provides short summaries on various prescription drugs used to treat depression and anxiety.

Some have described Moody Bitches as the present-day equivalent of the 1970s classic Our Bodies, Our Selves, in the way Holland sets out to define how women's unique physiology requires understanding, not suppression.

Holland, who earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her medical degree from Temple, is not opposed to psychiatric drugs. She prescribes them in her own practice. Her point is that too many women's healthy, natural moods are being medicated.

She defines the modern equivalent of female hysteria as "excessive expression of emotion, especially vulnerabilities such as despair or panic." But rather than shun women for who they are, Holland argues that women need to embrace what makes them biologically and psychologically differ from men.

Holland believes women are using medication to suppress who they are in an effort to match less-expressive male counterparts. Women are much more likely to be prescribed antidepressants and antianxiety medications than men, particularly between ages 35 and 64. Perhaps because women are more expressive, her research also indicates they are more likely to admit they experience depressive episodes or suffer from anxiety than are men.

She argues that women have not become more emotional, but that they are trying to juggle jobs with motherhood and to excel at both. Yet men don't feel that same pressure, she writes.

"A common configuration . . . is the alpha woman working at an executive-level position married to a guy who works at home on his computer, if he works at all."

Upbeat and funny, Holland pulls back the curtain on women's biology from puberty to menopause, offering ways to make the monthly hormonal cycle work for, not against, us.

Holland's book reminds readers to embrace the differences between men and women. "We are designed by nature to be dynamic, cyclical, and, yes, moody," she writes.

As for the title - no irony intended.

"We are moody bitches," she writes, "and that is a strength - not a weakness."

As a woman, I can't disagree.