Victims highlight ‘executive wife’ disease

Press, 22 August 1978, Page 16

Victims highlight ‘executive wife’ disease

By

WILLIAM SCOBIE

in Los Angeles

Doctors are calling it one of. the most serious medical problems in the United States. If afflicts millions of American women, many of them pregnant mothers who are, unwittingly, harming their unborn children. It has no name, although some have unkindly dubbed it “the Betty Ford-Joan Kennedy syndrome." “Across the nation,” says a recent study by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (N.1.D.A.), “women are in grave trouble because of a combination of alcohol and over-prescribed, overused drugs.” More than 70 per cent of tranquillisers and anti-de-pressant pills taken in the United States are prescribed for women; more than 80 per cent of amphetamines and other diet-pills are used by women; and at least half of America’s 10 million alcoholics are women.

The problem is reaching epidemic proportions, according to the study, carried out for the Health, Education and Welfare Department. “There is no ‘cure’,” says a doctor at St Luke’s Hospital, Los Angeles, one of many Californian institutions offering rehabilitation programmes for addicts. “The only word we use here is recovery.” The cases of Betty Ford,

who was admitted to hospital last May in California for “over-dependency” on pills and drink, and last month, of Joan Kennedy, the wife of Senator Edward Kennedy, who admitted her alcoholism after a year of sobriety and work with Alcoholics Anonymous, may help the many women with drink and drug troubles. “Mrs Kennedy’s confession could do three things,” says Dr Robert DuPont, head of the N.I.D.A. “It could encourage women in the same predicament to face up' to a problem they have been denying, and persuade them to seek help. It may trigger some official action. And it should warn physicians against over-prescribing these drugs.” Why are women popping prescription pills more than men? One reason is that, in part because of child-bear-ing, they visit doctors and hospitals more frequently than men. Some psychologists argue that women are more emotionally open and willing to seek advice on nervous problems. They go to a doctor, usually male, who almost inevitably prescribes a tranquilliser. Gilda Radner, a popular United States television entertainer, recites a Housewife’s Prayer which ends, “And may the Doctor

renew my valium prescription; and may they be tens, not fives.”

Another reason is that the middle-class, middle-aged American woman, the average “executive wife,” is often abandoned to her own devices. The children leave, her husband develops new interests, she is moved, often against her will, to a new city, losing friends and relatives. Mrs Ford and Mrs Kennedy are typical examples of the difficulty. Gerald Ford has spent 30 years in politics, and he is still running. When his wife became seriously ill through over-dos-ing of valium and vodka, he had to be summoned back from a speaking tour in New York state.

And when Betty Ford left the family’s new, $600,000 Palm Springs home two weeks later, she checked in alone for treatment at a hospital in Long Beach, California. Ex-President Ford had left for another lecture tour in Alabama.

This summer, Ford will spend more than half his time on the road, speaking at Republican Party fundraising functions, at business conventions and universities. Mrs Ford, aged 60, will be alone much of the time. The Ford children have all left home to pursue their own interests.

Mrs Kennedy, like many other political and business wives, found herself often in

a similar situation. Earlier this year, she abandoned Washington to attend fulltime music courses in Boston and Cambridge, spending only her week-ends at Hyannis, the Kennedy family estate on Cape Cod. “Ted is happy I’ve found myself,” she says. Valium — the most popular tranquilliser, used by some 30 million Americans a year — can be dangerously toxic when taken with alco-

hoi. “The liquor interferes with the chemical breakdown by the liver _ of the tranquilliser,” explains Dr Basil Clyman, a Californian expert on drug and alcohol detoxification. And the combination of valium and alcohol actually creates anxiety, encouraging the patient to take even more pills. The treatment given at centres such as St Luke’s is first “detoxification” — meaning bed, plus dosage

with vitamins and magne» sium sulphate. “The booze and pills syndrome leaches the body,” says Dr Hank Klein, head of the rehabilitation centre at St Luke’s. “It sucks out minerals and vitamins and lowers the brain’s magnesium sulphate level. “The goal is abstinence and reliance not on chemical agents, but on outside activities, one’s friends, and one’s self for solace.” O.F.N.S. Copyright.