‘Margriet weet raad op nervositeit’. Medische betekenistoekenning aan ‘levensmoeilijkheden’ in het vrouwenblad Margriet 1950-1960

Abstract

Medical communication about the management of depression, anxiety and sleeplessness in the Dutch women's magazine 'Margriet' between 1930 and 1960 The reporting of health and medicine in the media played an important role in the way people perceived, defined and coped with everyday health problems in the second half of the twentieth century. It was and still is predominantly a supply-market which is dominated by the medical approach; creating a medical aura of progress and the self-evidence of a cure. Although the medical approach figured also prominently in women's magazines, the reporting of illness and health is far more a product of supply and demand with a lively interaction between readers and the editorial office by the means of topic-related letter columns. As such women's magazines not only offer a gender-specific but also a more balanced source for acquiring a better understanding of how public definitions and perceptions of illness and health changed over time. In this article we will focus on the communication about the management of health problems related to depression, anxiety and sleeplessness in the prototypical Dutch women's magazine 'Margriet' between 1950 and i960. Our guiding research question has been: How do notions about depression, anxiety and sleeplessness and about responsive health behaviour, of which psychotropic drug use is a part, change over time in the reporting of health problems in Margriet? This question is of particular interest to learn more about the historical dynamics of the culture- and gender-specific public interplay between patients and doctors in terms of conceptualising the aforementioned health problems and defining medical coping strategies. Among other things we show that although there was hardly any mention of any 'functional division of labour' between mind and body in 1950, the mind-body dichotomy started to play an important role in the way health problems were perceived in i960.