{"id":3544,"date":"2010-05-04T05:06:17","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T10:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/?p=3544"},"modified":"2021-09-13T11:55:34","modified_gmt":"2021-09-13T16:55:34","slug":"women-baseball-bats-men-and-serotonin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/04\/women-baseball-bats-men-and-serotonin","title":{"rendered":"Women, Baseball Bats, Men, and Serotonin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One morning a couple weeks ago, I opened the Chicago Sun-Times to see photos of two accomplished young women who\u2019d been beaten unconscious by a man with an aluminum baseball bat. They\u2019d both been admitted to an intensive care unit. The perps were tracked down when they used one of the victim\u2019s credit cards to buy gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I imagined comments from people reading the story included something like, \u201cWell, they shouldn\u2019t have been out walking the streets at 3 AM.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given our medical practice is about 95% female, I thought again how rough life is for women and couldn\u2019t come up with one aspect of my own life that isn\u2019t easier simply because I\u2019m a guy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 I\u2019ve never been unfairly underpaid or sexually harassed, or had my career blocked by an old boys\u2019 club.
\u2022 I can go into a bar alone for a martini and nobody ever hits on me.
\u2022 I don\u2019t have to look over my shoulder walking home from a movie at night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m also not driven by cultural imperatives to obsess about my weight. \u201cIn fact,\u201d I thought, \u201cif I had to put up with what women had to put up with, day in and day out, I\u2019d go bonkers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you must know if you read my health tips regularly, stress-buffering serotonin<\/a> levels are much lower in women than in men, rendering women far more vulnerable to stress. As a direct result, women suffer disproportionately from low-serotonin disorders like depression and anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every one of these conditions is actually a series of chronic symptoms caused by physiologic manifestations of the fight-or-flight response, which should be a quick \u201con-off\u201d response, but which for many women is an \u201con\u201d button pressed down and held in place with duct tape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been conjectured that male serotonin is high due to an evolutionary phenomenon.<\/strong> My Neanderthal male forebears couldn\u2019t have a panic attack when they were out in the woods hunting, so they evolved a nice high serotonin stress buffer. Now, in the 21st century, this high serotonin serves my gender like this: We men seem to have been desensitized to the chaos we create–wars, genocides, and economic disasters. We can invade Iraq or Afghanistan in the morning and forget all about it in the afternoon while clearing sagebrush or shooting basketball with friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m convinced that had a women president been informed such an invasion would mean the deaths of thousands of innocent families, she would open a vein rather than announcing (fist-in-air gesture), \u201cLet\u2019s do it!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem isn\u2019t women\u2019s serotonin being too low. It\u2019s men having too much.<\/strong> Could this explain the bat attack? That men are overly buffered against stress and have been rendered numb, insensitive, and clueless? (\u201cNumb,\u201d by the way, is a word I frequently hear when a woman\u2019s dose of a serotonin-booster like Prozac or Lexapro is too high. She\u2019s become one of us.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And because women lack men\u2019s muscles, you\u2019re unable to give men a well-deserved punch while screaming \u201cStop your nonsense! Stop destroying the world, invading countries, killing people, stealing pension funds, and beating up women for gas money. Rather than invent new medications to raise our serotonin, find something to lower yours!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result of all this? Throttled by all this male-created stress, women become ill, as any sane person would. You go to your physician (usually male), are told you\u2019re depressed, and are handed one of the many (male-created) pharmaceuticals to raise your serotonin, so you can be more resilient, \u201ctougher,\u201d and able to endure the hostile, violent world you\u2019re forced to inhabit. Since you can\u2019t lick us, take some Prozac and join us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along the way, your totally appropriate response to our insane world will earn you the label of being \u201cmentally ill,\u201d this from a (male-written) psychiatric diagnostic guide (DSM-IV). But don\u2019t be upset–it used to be worse. Up until about 1950 or so, before the mind-controlling chemicals were invented, if you were a women who was irritated over your thankless life in a sweatshop or as unpaid labor in your home, your (male) doctor simply certified you as insane and you joined tens of thousands of your sisters in residential mega-psychiatric hospitals for the rest of your life. (I\u2019m not kidding about this.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The secret\u2019s out. With a new study showing that 70% of antidepressants were inappropriately prescribed,<\/strong> it seems that a large portion of \u201cmental illness\u201d among women just might be a male-created myth, now profitably exploited by male-dominated medical, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries. Numbing out women with drugs makes a whole lot more financial sense than long-term hospitalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Had the Neanderthal not been a hunter–but rather a farmer who never needed this perversely high stress-buffer–and everyone\u2019s serotonin was low (in other words, normal) today\u2019s men might be more intuitive, sensitive, and gentle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps they\u2019d even be ashamed to use baseball bats when they went out at night hunting for credit cards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One morning a couple weeks ago, I opened the Chicago Sun-Times to see photos of two accomplished young women who\u2019d been beaten unconscious by a man with an aluminum baseball bat. They\u2019d both been admitted to an intensive care unit. 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