People used to make poppy tonic as a pain killer, and poppies are easy to grow and process. Willow bark is a precursor to aspirin, but dosage can be really hard to figure out because there’s so much variance in plant strength. Willow is especially dangerous because the LD50 of aspirin is one of the lowest (the lowest?) of modern medicines.
Psychedelics are excellent for treating depression, addiction, and PTSD. Marijuana has been claimed to fix everything but realistically it’s a good sleep aid and can also help treat PTSD. Both of these are pretty easy to grow and may be legal depending on where you’re at and if you have a prescription.
Ginger and marijuana both are good for treating nausea, and you should be able to grow ginger indoors in colder climates too.
St John’s Wart is good for depression. Valerian is a sleep aid. Kava is also a sleep aid and good for anxiety.
There are a lot of indigenous medicines derived from plants (many of which were processed or synthesized in to the drugs you can be prescribed today). This would be a good place to start (while being a bit critical and realizing that you should also research efficacy outside of folk wisdom).
Just thinking about this in order of importance, what we really need are antibiotics. This is a lot harder to make. I know penicillin is just mold, but it’s heavily refined and only good for a short time.
You can do a lot without a lab, but if you want to really get serious you need to make sure you’re working with folks who have chemistry degrees because it can get really complicated and really dangerous really quickly.
It’s gas lighting, like a lot of the posts in response. Being socialized as a man sucks. You’re both measured by your partners and expected to not need anyone or express any emotions. So basically you get shit like you described where men end up having no self esteem so they are desperate for women to validate them but they also feel smothered and confused by the completely normal and human need for emotional connection that woman have been allowed to keep.
Patriarchy is a machine that turns normal humans in to abusers, and it takes a lot of work to deprogram from this… Especially when it’s constantly being reinforced all around you (like a lot of the guys who responded).