Here’s the text of the commercial:
You know when you feel the weight of sadness. You may feel exhausted, hopeless, and anxious. Whatever you do, you feel lonely and don’t enjoy the things you once loved. [Symptoms persist every day for at least two weeks.] Things just don’t feel like they used to. These are some symptoms of depression, a serious medical condition affecting over 20 million Americans. [Symptoms get in the way of daily life.] While the case is unknown, depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain. [Shows cartoon "dramatization" of neurotransmitters sluggishly struggling to move across a synapse.] Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance. You just shouldn’t have to feel this way any more. Only your doctor can diagnose depression. Zoloft is not for everyone. People taking MAOIs [monoamine oxidase inhibitors, another kind of antidepressant] or pimozide [an antipsychotic] shouldn’t take Zoloft. [Zoloft is approved for adults 18 and over.] Side effects may include dry mouth, insomnia, sexual side effects, diarrhea, nausea, and sleepiness. Zoloft is not habit forming. Talk to your doctor about Zoloft, the number one prescribed brand of its kind. Zoloft. When you know more about what’s wrong, you can help make it right.
In advertisements like these, it’s clear that Zoloft–like Paxil, Lexapro, Prozac, Celexa, and other SSRI antidepressants–is not marketed as a way of moving outside or beyond one’s everyday capacities. It does not offer a way of escaping oneself. As Nikolas Rose writes in The Politics of Life Itself, “The drug thus does not promise to create a false self, on the contrary, it is through the drug that the self is restored to itself. If there is one theme or promise that runs through all these promotional materials it is this: with this drug, I can get my real self back, I can feel like myself, I can feel like me again” (214). As Rose points out, these promises are especially prevalent in the United States, where direct-to-consumer advertising is not only permitted but has become a gargantuan $2.5 billion a year industry. But of course, television commercials are not the only point of contact between pharmaceutical companies and the bodies that ultimately consume and are transformed by these drugs.
PhRMA, the trade group for the pharmaceutical industry, claims that “just” 30% of doctors seek drug information from company representatives. But when 40% of people in the United States consume prescription drugs regularly, such an influence seems hardly negligible.
And, of course, people learn a lot about drugs from friends and family. As I pointed out a few days ago, the pharmaceutical industry is well aware of the extent to which an individual’s social circle influences his or her choice of pharmaceuticals.
Biomedical research, investments in pharmaceutical development, and innovations in health care policy and practice clearly seem to be giving us a lot more control over how we feel, how we understand ourselves, and how we make changes to our own lives. But how do we learn how we are supposed to feel? Where do we see the images of ourselves that we struggle to become? How do we get access to the tools we need to be the people we think we are supposed to be?
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