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Over at Mother Jones, Jen Phillips has a really great Q&A with Liz Canner, whose new documentary, Orgasm, Inc., documents Big Phrama's decade-long search for female sexual dysfunction. While some women do have serious problems having sex, Canner notes that most of what the companies are looking to treat is a nebulous "lack of desire," problem. Canner points out that a "lack of desire" is ill-defined and problematic. Is there a "normal" amount of sex to want to have? A lack of desire could just be the result of gender discrimination -- Canner points to a study that found that men who share more of the household duties have sex more often. More importantly, Canner points to how screwed up our societal messaging about sex is when it comes to women: we don't talk about sex in any realistic way but sexual images surround us.But the important part comes at the end:
[T]he whole health care debate that's been going on, one of the aspects that hasn't been fully discussed is the relationship of over-prescribing and over-medicalizing. Female sexual dysfunction is just one of many disorders that has been expanded and recently created that many people are being diagnosed with. In some cases, there are disorders like premenstrual dysmorphic disorder, this is a newer disorder, people are being prescribed massive amounts of drugs for these disorders, and in many cases they may not be diseases at all. The US is the only country other than New Zealand that allows direct-to-consumer advertising.Restless leg syndrome, anyone? But this is especially true in the mental health field. We haven't really found the right balance between recognizing illness when it exists, accepting it and not stigmatizing its sufferers, and also realizing that medication might not be the answer for everyone. This has always been an issue for me in my personal life, because I've had in my family people who were truly suffering and desperately needed medication, and those who are suffering but need something else. If you've never watched the excellent Frontline The Medicated Child, I highly recommend it.
