The Wrong Prescription for Women

This groundbreaking book challenges the medicalized approach to women's experiences including menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause and suggests that there are better ways for women to cope with real issues they may face. Before any woman diets, douches, botoxes, reduces, reconstructs, or fills a prescription for antidepressants, statins, hormones, menstrual suppressants, or diet pills, she should read this book. Contesting common medical practice, the book addresses the many aspects of women's lives that have been targeted as "deficient" in order to support the billion-dollar profits of the medical-pharmacological industry and suggests alternatives to these "remedies." The contributors-psychologists, sociologists, and health experts-are also gender experts and feminist scholars who recognize the ways in which gender is an important aspect of the human experience. In this eye-opening work, they challenge the marketing and "science" that increasingly render women's bodies and experiences as a series of symptoms, diseases, and dysfunctions that require treatment by medical professionals who prescribe pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. Each article in the book addresses the marketing of a specific "condition" that has been constructed in a way that convinces a woman that her body is inadequate or her experience and behavior are not good enough. Among the topics addressed are menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, post-partum adjustment, sexual desire, weight, body dissatisfaction, moodiness, depression, grief, and anxiety.

Maureen C. McHugh, PhD, teaches gender and diversity at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP).
Joan C. Chrisler, PhD, is the Class of 1943 Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College.

Series Foreword
Michele A. Paludi, Series Editor
Foreword
Paula J. Caplan
Introduction: The Medicalization of Women's Bodies and Everyday Experience
Maureen C. McHugh and Joan C. Chrisler
1. Pregnancy and Birth as a Medical Crisis
Ruthbeth D. Finerman, Adriane M. F. Sanders, and Lynda M. Sagrestano
2. (Re)Productive Disorders: The Expanding Marketplace of Infertility Medicine
Emily Breitkopf and Lisa R. Rubin
3. The Medicalization of the Menstrual Cycle: Menstruation as a Disorder
Jessica Barnack-Tavlaris
4. The Medicalization of Women's Moods: Premenstrual Syndrome and Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder
Joan C. Chrisler and Jennifer A. Gorman
5. Menopause: Deficiency Disease or Normal Reproductive Transition?
Heather Dillaway
6. Menopause and Sexuality: Resisting Representations of the Abject Asexual Woman
Jane M. Ussher, Janette Perz, and Chloe Parton
7. Women's Sexual Problems: Is There a Pill for That?
Leonore Tiefer
8. The Thin Ideal: A "Wrong Prescription" Sold to Many and Achievable by Few
Mindy J. Erchull
9. From Fat Shaming to Size Acceptance: Challenging the Medical Management of Fat Women
Ashley E. Kasardo and Maureen C. McHugh
10. Medicalizing Women's Weight: Bariatric Surgery and Weight-Loss Drugs
Julie Konik and Christine A. Smith
11. Can Women's Body Image Be "Fixed"? Women's Bodies, Well-Being, and Cosmetic Surgery
Charlotte N. Markey and Patrick M. Markey
12. Women's Loss of Self through Antidepressants: The Depression Diagnosis as a Form of Social Control
Alisha Ali
13. Mourning Matters: Women and the Medicalization of Grief
Leeat Granek
Index
About the Editors and Contributors