Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2059

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Goldman R, Montagne M.
Marketing 'mind mechanics': decoding antidepressant drug advertisements.
Soc Sci Med 1986; 22:(10):1047-58

Abstract:

Advertisers have adopted the use of highly abstract visual metaphors and symbols in addressing physicians about antidepressant drugs. Campaigns built around an abstract visual aesthetics are designed to generate cognitive connections between named drug entities and the meaning of abstract visual images: these connections are called ‘carry-over symbols’. In this study we critically dismantle and analyze the encoding practices used in two recent ad campaigns for antidepressants. In addition to asking what the ads mean, we ask how they mean it. This analysis is joined to a comparison of the information provided by these ads with the pharmacological and therapeutic properties of the drugs themselves. Our analysis suggests this style of drug advertising produces, as a social side-effect, a reified and medicalized account of psychiatric illness (depression). It also poses an obstacle to scientific discourse and understanding; privileges certain types of social knowledge concerning mental illness, psychiatric patients, and drug taking; and discourages professional d debate regarding therapeutic approaches to treating illness. These ads reflect a positivistic conceptualization of mental illness and doctoring as mind mechanics.

Keywords:
MeSH Terms: Advertising/methods* Antidepressive Agents* Communication Drug Industry* Humans Maprotiline Pharmaceutical Services Physicians/psychology Symbolism Trazodone Substances: Antidepressive Agents Maprotiline Trazodone *analysis/journal advertisements/psychotropic drugs/images in ads/metaphors/depression/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/IMAGES IN PROMOTION: METHAPHORS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: MEDICALIZATION OF PROBLEMS/PROMOTION IN SPECIFIC THERAPEUTIC AREAS: PSYCHIATRIC DISEASES Advertising/methods* Antidepressive Agents* Communication Drug Industry* Humans Maprotiline Pharmaceutical Services Physicians/psychology Symbolism Trazodone

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909