Over tea the other day a friend and I were musing aloud, as older women tend to do over afternoon tea, about the sorry state of the world and what might be done about it, when she suggested, “Why don’t the women of the world just band together and fight the system?!” Of course we both knew this was like saying, “Why can’t there be peace on earth?” – pie-in-the-sky talk. 

Nevertheless, I recklessly responded with, “Oh, I have some theories about why women don’t!  Maybe up to half of them are married and comfortably in the system and don’t see the need to change it,” I said. “Plus, nearly one quarter of older women are on antidepressants that might be blunting their senses and causing them to be apathetic about the overall situation. That leaves the rest of us, many of us divorcees, either too timid, too exhausted, too broke, or too powerless to fight back.”

This wild theorizing steered our sedate teatime conversation (Who would guess that two sweet little octogenarians would be wannabe revolutionaries?) into why so many older women are on antidepressants. As I wrote in my last controversial WOW post, “What Could Be Good About Feeling Bad?,” “the antidepressant drug industry in the U.S. is big, big business. It earned $6.19 billion in 2024, with a projected rise to $8.67 billion by 2034.

“And white women are the largest users. According to a CDC (Centers for Disease Control) 2020 data brief, ‘Nearly one-quarter of American women aged 60 and over take antidepressants.’  

“‘Why, I wonder,’ I wrote in that blogpost, ‘do so many grown women need to be subdued in this way?  Could it be that we older women would pose a threat to the prevailing order of things if we were freer to think and act and feel to the fullest?’ (https://blog.bonnieleeblack.com/what-could-be-good-about-feeling-bad/ ).”

I know there are systems and there are systems – like wheels within wheels. But in this context I see “the system” as “the prevailing order of things” mentioned above. It’s what we older women had been raised to believe unquestioningly is “normal” – a “man’s world” – a world predominately run by straight white men, for whom all other groups are subordinate. 

First, I must make clear I’m not condemning the women who take antidepressants. For many people psychotropic drugs are life savers, which is of course a good thing. My purpose is to dig deeper to try to uncover some of the possible systemic causes of their depression. Why are so many women given antidepressants in the first place? Why are so many white American women over 60 so depressed?

Here’s my main theory: They feel they’ve been discarded.

I’ve lived in Africa for a total of nine years – in three different countries for three years each – and I observed that by and large older African women are revered. They are honored. Especially in Mali, I saw, they are treated like queens. These women are not depressed. On the contrary, after a lifetime of catering to others, they are now happy to be sitting in thronelike armchairs, giving orders to and being catered to by everyone younger.

Similarly, here in Mexico, where I’ve lived for ten years now, abuelas (grandmothers) are highly regarded. It’s a beautiful, enviable thing to see, and I see it every day. We older gringas, too, are the beneficiaries of this general respect for older women.

Perhaps, I sometimes think, it’s only very old cultures that appreciate the intrisic value of older women?

Sadly, in the still-young U.S.A, which places inordinate and unreasonable value on youth and beauty, postmenopausal women are has-beens. If you’re no longer young and beautiful, and you can no longer bear children (preferably white children, which only white women can bear), then you’re sidelined. You’ve become invisible, discardable. 

This is indeed depresssing!

(Stock image of an “ideal” family in this “man’s world”)

To illustrate, let’s imagine Abigail and Chuck, a nice white couple from the Midwestern U.S., who met in college, fell in love and married soon after graduation. Abigail taught kindergarten for a few years, but when their children arrived, she stayed home to care for them while Chuck’s career advanced.

They became a happy little suburban family, and all was well. As the years passed, however, and as Chuck traveled more and more on business and the kids went off to college and beyond, Abigail felt increasingly isolated, abandoned, and old. She went through a difficult menopause, and her hair turned prematurely gray. She and Chuck no longer made love.

Then Chuck, a successful business executive by now, announced to her that he wanted a divorce. He confessed he was involved with a younger woman and they hoped to marry. Abigail was devastated. She felt she’d done “everything right” in her life. Why was she being thrown away like this? How could she start over at nearly 60, when being a housewife and mother had been her whole life?

She went to her doctor who pronounced her “deeply depressed” and prescribed antidepressants. They helped. She stopped crying. She was no longer in pain. She no longer wished to die. In fact, she felt nothing. She certainly didn’t have the fire in her belly needed to become a revolutionary for change.

 No, it took all the energy she had left just to try to pick herself up and get back into the system – lose weight, die her hair, buy new clothes, read self-help books, relearn how to date (Chuck had been the only boy she’d ever dated), and find a new husband, a good man, who would love her and provide for her “until death do us part.” She knew she couldn’t support herself; she had to have a financially secure man. Because this is still a man’s world.

Multiply Abigail’s story by hundreds of thousands (or maybe more – approximately 3.4 million American women 65 and older were divorced in 2021, I just discovered), and you’ll begin to see why women can’t “just band together and fight the system,” as my friend suggested over tea. Teatime talk is one thing; action is quite another. But we must begin somewhere.

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For much more on this subject, read: https://wilewomen.com/blogs/journal/why-are-mostly-white-american-women-over-40-the-biggest-antidepressant-market-on-earth-and-why-are-we-ok-with-it