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The Rise of Prescription Drugs to Treat Everyday Stresses

In her article titled "Listening to Xanax," reporter Lisa Miller chronicles "how Americans learned to stop worrying about worry and pop its pills instead." Miller acknowledges that depression can be a "serious medical problem" that requires medication, but her article focuses on the use of drugs to deal with "low-grade anxiety" about ordinary life (or what she calls "functional anxiety"). If the '90s were the decade of Prozac, then the 2010s have become the era of Xanax.

Miller writes:

Jon Stewart has praised the "smooth, calm, pristine, mellow, sleepy feeling" of Xanax, and Bill Maher has wondered whether the president himself is a user. "He's eloquent and unflappable. He's so cool and calm." U2 and Lil Wayne have written songs about Xanax …. Coke binges are for fizzier eras; now people overdo it trying to calm down.
In these anxious times, Xanax offers a lot. It dissolves your worries, whatever they are, like a special kiss from Mommy …. In my social circle, [Xanax-type drugs] are traded with generosity and goodwill. My first [pill] was given to me three years ago by a friend, during the third of seemingly endless rounds of layoffs. "You'll know it's working when you stop spinning," she told me as she dug for the foil packet in her purse. Another friend admitted she has recently found herself playing fairy godmother with her Xanax. To friends worried about enduring a family holiday, she doles out a pill; to colleagues fearful of flying, she'll commiserate before offering a cure.
A benzo [tranquilizer-type pills like Xanax] is, plain and pure, a chill pill: You can take it when you need to without committing to months or years of talk therapy. A real-estate executive I spoke to packs anti-anxiety drugs whenever he travels to guard against the circumstance he most dreads: being stuck in a hotel room (or, as he was recently, on a family camping trip), unable to sleep and worrying about not sleeping. "It's just one of my little neuroses," he says. He finds that as long as he has the pills on hand, he rarely has to use them. "Just knowing they're there makes me feel better."

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