’50s to ’60s
by Dr Michael J. Leach.
use of new psychotropics
soars in both genders
Psychotropic drugs act on the central nervous system to elicit a range of therapeutic effects, such as improved sleep and anxiety relief.
Barbiturate psychotropics are older medicines with narrow therapeutic indices, meaning that there is little difference between beneficial and harmful doses. Actress Judy Garland is one of many people who has tragically died from a barbiturate overdose.
Non-barbiturate psychotropics such as benzodiazepines, meanwhile, are newer and safer alternatives to barbiturates for the treatment of psychological disorders. An example of a psychotropic that is widely used in modern society is the benzodiazepine diazepam, which was first marketed under the brand name Valium.
Historically, the Psychopharmacological Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s saw the introduction of a wide range of non-barbiturate psychotropics onto a growing global pharmaceutical market. There has been little research into the gender-specific, community-level use of psychotropic drugs over the Psychopharmacological Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.
In order to shed light on the origins of Australia’s relatively high modern-day consumption of psychotropics, my colleague and I conducted a study to explore gender-specific volumes of psychotropic dispensing at a Melbourne pharmacy during the 1950s and 1960s. This original research has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Pharmaceutical Historian.
In this study, I sourced data on the name of medicine dispensed, dispensing date during 1954 or 1961, and patient gender from a set of old prescription books that were kept at a community pharmacy in the inner Melbourne suburb of Toorak. I cross-referenced the dataset with historical pharmacy reference books to classify each medicine into one of the following mutually exclusive categories: barbiturate psychotropics, non-barbiturate psychotropics, and non-psychotropic medicines. After collecting data and classifying each medicine, I calculated the number of prescriptions dispensed in each year and adjusted for the size of the population residing in the surrounding local government area.
The study results indicated that twice and 1.7 times as many medicines were dispensed to females than to males during 1954 and 1961, respectively. Such gender differences were evident across all three categories of dispensed medicines: barbiturate psychotropics, non-barbiturate psychotropics, and non-psychotropic medicines. There was also a pronounced shift in psychotropic dispensing from the older, more dangerous barbiturates (77% in 1954; 38% in 1961) to newer, safer non-barbiturate psychotropics (23% in 1954; 62% in 1961). The extent of this shift over time to newer, safer psychotropics was similar in both genders.
Original research: Gender differences in psychotropic medicine dispensing at a pharmacy in Melbourne, Australia, 1954 and 1961 by Michael J. Leach and Rebecca Kippen.
Michael Leach (@m_jleach) is an Australian health researcher, biostatistician, and poet with a PhD in Pharmacoepidemiology and a passion for health humanities. Examples of his science poems are online here: https://imagesofhealth.wordpress.com/.
If you enjoyed this sciku, check out Michael’s other sciku ‘Quality of Life at Seven Years Post-Stroke‘ and ‘Drug-Induced Hip Fractures‘, ‘The Core Correlate of Covid-19 Vaccine Acceptance’, ‘The Early Impacts of COVID-19 on Australian General Practice‘, ‘The Burden of Bushfire Smoke‘, and ‘Australian Science Poetry‘ with science communicator Rachel Rayner.