"anxiolytic" is a correct and usable word in written English
You can use it to describe something that has a calming or soothing effect on anxiety, such as a drug, activity, or thought. For example, "The therapist prescribed an anxiolytic medication to help the patient manage his anxiety."
Stossel tells the story well — how a Czechoslovakian émigré named Frank Berger discovered by chance a chemical, mephenesin, that relaxes the muscles, and how a company called Carter synthesized that chemical and sold it as Miltown, an anxiolytic that became the first pharmaceutical blockbuster.
An important omission was the fact that around eighty per cent of antidepressant and anxiolytic medications are prescribed by non-psychiatrists, including internists, gynecologists, family practitioners, and non-M.D.s such as physician's assistants and nurse practitioners.
In 1980, the F.D.A. required that anxiety medications carry a warning stating that "anxiety or tension associated with the stress of everyday life usually does not require treatment with an anxiolytic".
Well, taking an opioid analgesic benzo anxiolytic makes you feel very good.
In these cases, the prescription of anxiolytic drugs (benzodiazepines, buspirone) and anti-depressants (SSRIs such as escitalopram) is typical.
Let's assume that Freud used cocaine as an anxiolytic and aphrodisiac.
Medications that may be used include lithium carbonate, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, and anxiolytics (antianxiety drugs).
People on anxiolytics reported that they had never felt this well before — much like the patients Peter Kramer describes in "Listening to Prozac" (1993) who told him that they were "better than well".
Some doctors prescribe anxiolytics, like Valium, on the assumption that the real problem is anxiety.
These drugs were eclipsed in the nineteen-sixties by two other wildly popular anxiolytics (anti-anxiety drugs): Librium and Valium, introduced in 1960 and 1963.
As Tone and David Herzberg, in his cultural history of psychiatric drugs, "Happy Pills in America" (2008) — the books actually complement each other nicely — both point out, the anxiolytics were enmeshed in exactly the same scientific, financial, and ethical confusion as antidepressants today.
