Long-term users of psychotropic drugs: embodying masculinized stress and feminized nerves

This article examines long-term users of psychotropic drugs (43 men and 57 women) and their views on women's and men's reasons for using these drugs. The data came from written statements (N= 56) given on open-ended questions from a survey of users and from taped interviews with 10 respondents. Men's accounts expressed a notion of men as experiencing external pressures which created "masculinized stress." On the one hand, this stress could be handled with alcohol, while, on the other hand, the use of psychotropic drugs indicated a loss of men's assumed self-regulatory power and autonomy. Women related the reasons for their psychotropic drug use to their experience of emotional labor. Nevertheless, they did not tend to identify the psychological consequences of their experience as related to work. Rather, they labelled these as health consequences--women being more "emotional" than men and suffering from "nerves." These lay accounts reflect the representations of gender-specific psychological distinctions and the effort to construct gender-specific etiologies.