Antidepressants and Advertising: Psychopharmaceuticals in Crisis
View/ Open
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Greenslit, Nathan P., and Ted J. Kaptchuk. 2012. Antidepressants and advertising: psychopharmaceuticals in crisis. The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 85(1): 153-158.Abstract
As the efficacy and science of psychopharmaceuticals has become increasingly uncertain, marketing of these drugs to both physicians and consumers continues to a central part of a multi-billion dollar per year industry in the United States. We explore how such drug marketing portrays idealized scientific relationships between psychopharmaceuticals and depression; how multiple stakeholders, including scientists, regulatory agencies, and patient advocacy groups, negotiate neurobiological explanations of mental illness; and how the placebo effect has become a critical issue in these debates, including the possible role of drug advertising to influence the placebo effect directly. We argue that if and how antidepressants “work” is not a straightforward objective question, but rather a larger social contest involving scientific debate, the political history of the pharmaceutical industry, cultural discourses surrounding the role of drugs in society, and the interpretive flexibility of personal experience.Other Sources
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3313530/pdf/Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAACitable link to this page
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11729576
Collections
- FAS Scholarly Articles [18295]
Contact administrator regarding this item (to report mistakes or request changes)