Healthy Skepticism Library item: 663

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

Nikelly AG.
Drug advertisements and the medicalization of unipolar depression in women.
Health Care Women Int 1995 May-Jun; 16:(3):229-42

Abstract:

Unipolar depression occurs twice as frequently among women as among men, and the pharmacological industry maintains a massive advertising campaign that encourages psychiatric professionals to rely on antidepressant medication as the solution to this problem. The pictorial content of drug advertisements shows women as victims of depression. The social problems and situational stresses associated with unipolar depression are never shown, and depression is assumed to be a personal and biological illness, its etiology decontextualized. In these advertisements, women are not offered a choice between medical and nonmedical treatment and are not empowered to become more active participants in their health decisions. Therapists are urged to become alert to this oversimplification.

Keywords:
*analysis images in ads women psychotropic drugs depression EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS IMAGES IN PROMOTION: WOMEN INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: MEDICALIZATION OF PROBLEMS PROMOTION IN SPECIFIC THERAPEUTIC AREAS: PSYCHIATRIC DISEASES

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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