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PMDD was added to the widely used psychology manual called DSM in the early 1980s. This medicalization of the menstruation cycle stated that severe shifts in mood—along with common symptoms of PMS—that have had an affect on a woman’s personal life during the luteal cycle are means for PMDD diagnoses. With the backing of the medical community, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co. was able to take Prozac, change its color, packaging and name to “Sarafem” to sell as the market’s only drug for PMDD. Following the release of Sarafem was a flood of marketing techniques that came from Eli Lilly & Co. to sell the drug. Eventually other pharmaceutical companies followed Lilly’s suit and did the same with their own version of Prozac, generic or not, to create their own version of Sarafem to sell.

The first commercial marketing Sarafem depicted a female struggling to release a grocery cart from a line of others and becoming increasingly frustrated and overwhelmed by the situation. As this is happening, a male voice over explains that while this woman thinks she is simply dealing with premenstrual symptoms, she is actually suffering from PMDD. This first commercial was soon removed from air after the Food and Drug Administration deemed it to undermine the seriousness of PMDD, which had already been receiving much criticism for not being a legitimate disorder. The advertisement had at the same time been criticized by feminist scholars, and the incident has since become a niche focus within feminist studies.

The modern development of PMDD, and the more recent creation of Sarafem, has been critiqued by feminist scholars as an industry that supports the spread of enlightened sexism in recent mass culture. Enlightened sexism is the name the modern feminist movement uses to describe a resurgence of female stereotypes based on the belief that women have already gained gender equality within western society. Sarafem and PMDD are thus considered relevant to enlightened sexism because, as supported by clinical psychologist Paula J, Caplan, it advertises to women who are simply experiencing PMS that they are mentally ill and need to seek uneeded medical treatment. Other researchers such as Renay Tannar have labeled PMDD and PMS as socially constructed illnesses, meaning mock illnesses simply created by a patriarchal society in order to continue to oppress women. Past feminist critiques of the medication and illness have rested on the belief that, when women believe they have a mental illness related to the menstrual cycle, this perpetuates stigma surrounding womanhood and isolating women from positions of power in societal structures due to the belief that their nature is so different than that of men's. Such discourse has caused Sarafem, or any use of fluoxetine as a treatment for PMDD, to maintain it's controversial status as a therapeutic drug.

Response to Peer Review: The review was very helpful in pointing out our need to balance between shedding a new light on Sarafem, which, in thinking about drugs in new ways, is the point of the class, but also not going too far off topic in the social feminist history of the drug, as the wikipedia page is, after all, under the Fluoxetine page. Responding to this, we cut out a little about enlightened feminism, as the peer response suggested, and edited some other sentences to try and remain more on topic. It was also an overall reminder of our need to always write from a neutral point of view due to the sensitive nature of our topic. We also added information about medical studies conducted about Sarafem to show the medical viewpoint on the effectiveness of Sarafem. The review also pointed out our lack of a figure, which we fixed by creating a pie chart about the statistics of women with PMDD, something we think relevant to the overall Wikipedia page, not just the history section. In addition to this we created hyperlinks of concepts and words that will lead to relevant wikipedia pages. A couple of sources were added and we also got rid of the multiple references and just re-used the same reference link in the article. Since we got rid of these duplicates we added two more journal articles to total to five resources. Lastly we added a main 'History' header as well as subtitles to organize the topics that were discussed in the section.