Valerie Minard’s article “Depressed? You are not a label” in the May 25th, 2015 MyCentralJersey.com brings up the issues of marketing depression and drugs to deal with it. It reminds me of an episode of the popular sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” where the character who works for a pharmaceutical company proudly announced that her company had both invented a syndrome and the cure for it. Funny in a sitcom, sobering in real life Kansas. The first few paragraphs of Valerie’s article are included here but click at the bottom to continue reading about one woman’s complete freedom from manic depression.
“Abilify can break the ball and chain and ‘aid in symptom’ improvement for women who suffer from depression.” That’s the message an ad now playing promises viewers taking this antidepressant booster.
Marketing depression — and drugs to deal with it — to women is not new. One study found that 93 percent of magazine ads for anti-depressants featured a woman as the main character. Defenders of this advertising argue women are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression than men anyway. And, statistics show American women using antidepressants 2.5 times more than men, with one out of four women taking a psychiatric drug. Some experts, however, are beginning to question if this kind of advertising is actually part of the cause rather than the effect of these statistics.
Even before our society developed a huge pharmaceutical industry, advertising diseases and their remedies had been going on for a very long time. According to health researcher and Christian healer Mary Baker Eddy, “The press unwittingly sends forth many sorrows and diseases among the human family. It does this by giving names to diseases and by printing long descriptions which mirror images of disease distinctly in thought!” That was about 150 years ago.