Women and Medication Use to Cope: The Quiet Chaos Behind the Pharmacy Counter

A Strategic Response to Pressure: Women and Medication Use to Cope

For many women, substance use doesn’t begin in a nightclub, it begins in a clinic, a family WhatsApp group, or a whispered tip from an older cousin: “Take this pill, your period will skip.” Their relationship with substances, especially pharmaceuticals, is rarely about escape. It’s about coping, conforming, and getting through the day without falling apart.

Coping, Not Escaping: The Strategic Use of Medication

From anti-anxiety meds to diet pills and hormonal contraceptives used far beyond their intended scope, women’s medication use is complex, not reckless, but strategic. Often, it’s an act of quiet endurance, shaped by the relentless pressure to appear “normal” in a world where that definition is built around male norms. The medical system, too, has long played a central role by overmedicating emotional distress while underdiagnosing genuine illness. Chronic pain? Imagined. Anxiety? Hormonal. Depression? Here’s a sedative. Instead of care, women often receive prescriptions that restore composure, not health, because a “functional” woman is a good woman.

These dynamics are most visible not in clinics, but in the quiet spaces of our homes. Many of us have seen our mothers pop pills at the kitchen counter in between cooking, caregiving, and managing everything else. These acts aren’t called substance use; they’re framed as a necessity. A painkiller for a headache. A hormone tablet for irregular periods. A sleeping pill after a day of unseen labour. The kitchen becomes a pharmacy, the woman at its centre being a silent pharmacist of her own survival.

Period Suppression as a Cultural Expectation

Things grow more complex when reproductive health enters the picture. Oral contraceptives, developed for birth control, are routinely used to delay menstruation to attend religious events, weddings, exams, or fasts. This isn’t medically guided, but socially mandated. The menstrual cycle becomes a liability, something to hide, defer, or erase to ensure uninterrupted participation in public life.

The Normalization of Menstrual Manipulation

This quiet normalization of menstrual suppression is encouraged by family, peers, or even religious figures, and it escapes scrutiny. Despite potential health risks, these practices are praised as responsible, mature, and respectable.

From a feminist perspective, this reveals the politics of bodily discipline. Instead of creating space for menstrual dignity through infrastructure, education, or cultural change, women are taught to make their bodies invisible, to adapt to a world that refuses to adapt to them. The burden of accommodation is theirs alone.

Beyond Pills: The Cultural Gaslighting of Women’s Health

This is not just about pills or periods. It is about a culture that gaslights women into silence, pathologizes their bodies, and dismisses their coping mechanisms. The issue lies not in pharmaceutical use itself, but in the gendered structures that make such use necessary and then stigmatize it. What we call “normal” is, in truth, a quiet compliance, a medicated survival scripted by systems that demand women hold it all together, no matter the cost.

Want to support menstrual dignity and gender-inclusive healthcare? Explore Spriha Society’s work and get involved.