Work

Antidepressants and advertising: psychopharmaceuticals in crisis.

Year: 2012

Type: article

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.

Source: Europe PMC (PubMed Central)

Authors: Nathan P Greenslit, Ted J Kaptchuk

Institution: Harvard University

Language: English

Topic: Pharmaceutical industry and healthcare

Subfield: Issues, ethics and legal aspects

Field: Nursing

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health

Award: Mentoring and Research in Placebo Studies, Asian Medicine, and CAM