Maybe you’ve seen the ads on TV or the banners on the internet. There’s a new drug out there, and it’s called SARAFEMâ„¢. And if there’s a new drug being marketed on TV, then there simply must be a new disease. They call it PMDD, and most of us know it as “really bad PMS.” You’re crabby, you feel fat, maybe you’re get weepy: whatever. It happens to many of us woman, and some of us more severely than others. Some of us cope by taking a little time to ourselves, others cope by taking a little pill.

If you do a search on Yahoo for PMDD, the first page that pops up is the SARAFEMâ„¢ site. But if you stubbornly ignore that the medication pops up before any information about the disease, and go to www.PMDD.com, you’ll see a nice new webpage, freshly designed, ready to tell you about your new disease. Of course, if you click on any linking pages, you’ll end up back at the SARAFEMâ„¢ site, where you can learn all about this new drug for your new disease. The two walk hand-in-hand: the disease and the drug, because PMDD is a marketing disease, and SARAFEMâ„¢ is the product.

But wait, how “new” of a drug is SARAFEMâ„¢? If you look carefully on the SARAFEMâ„¢page, you’ll see that the active ingrediant in the drug is fluoxetine hydrochloride. For those of you who don’t recognize the name, that’s Prozac®. In fact, SARAFEMâ„¢ is made by Lilly, the makers of Prozac®.

The name “Sarafem” is a contraction of serotonin (a biochemical neurotransmitter that controls functions as learning, sleep, and control of mood) and feminine. The website explains that “SARAFEMâ„¢ taken daily helps to correct the imbalance of serotonin that many physicians believe contributes to PMDD.” In other words, this drug, which supposedly “treats” PMDD, is nothing but a standard antidepressant in pink packaging.

Here’s what gets me: woman have an “average six day duration of [PMDD] symptoms” Yet, Sarafem is a pill you take every day. Women, if you’re depressed all month then maybe you need antidepressant. That’s fine: do it. But if you’re having symptoms six days a month, don’t take SARAFEMâ„¢ for 30 days a month. It doesn’t make sense on any other level than making Lilly more money.

I do not write this to minimize or negate the problems of women who suffere extreme PMS, rather to illustrate that treatment should be better suited than just taking an antidepressant. Until there is a medication that does more than make you too happy to notice you’re suffering, women everywhere are being shammed by the pharmaceutic industry.