Miltown was the brand name of "meprobamate," which was, yes, a major tranquilizer, available by prescription. But if all you needed was an occasional calm-down, you could always reach for com-poz, "Compoz, the little blue pill." (pronounced "compose"), which was over-the-counter. I think that one was a mild barbiturate. Mix either with alcohol and you could die, as I'm sure many a suicide did by intention.
In one of the most ironic name-ironies of all time, the great proponent of frontal lobotomies was a Dr. Freeman, whose patients were anything but free men or women when he was done with them. It finally took Kesey's novel _Cukoo's Nest_ to drive home the point that lobotomies were a form of soul-murder.
For treatment of depression, electroshock therapy was recommended. Now in fact it actually does work, BUT so does a tiny electrical current passed through earclips at a level that not only doesn't cause a convulsion, but doesn't have any noticeable overt affect at all... just the alleviation of the depression! The latter point would take another three decades to discover, and in the meantime, legions of depressed women (and to a lesser extent, men) would end up going through something that resembled a trip to the electric chair except they got to come back.
What I do not understand is why there was such a high prevalence of anxiety disorders in particular, at a time when things were the most secure and prosperous they had been in the past three decades.
Or perhaps what we were seeing at that time was what today would be recognized as a pandemic of post-traumatic stress syndrome, with its origins in the Depression and WW2.
