The New Age of Media-Encouraged Depression
Photo Credit: creativecommons.org
April 19, 2010
Angelia Tran, Budget Manager
Filed under Opinions, Top Stories, Uncategorized
Turn on the TV and you’ll probably see some trademark commercials before fifteen minutes have even passed. The red and white of Target commercials, the 80’s background music of cruise line ads…and then the probing questions of antidepressant commercials.
“Are you feeling sad?”
“Have you lost interest in your hobbies?”
“Is it hard for you to get out of bed in the morning?”
Striving to sell their products, pharmaceutical companies no longer just simply ask these questions like a personal in-house psychologist located in your TV. They have learned to present depression in various ways over the years. A woman vaguely describes the symptoms while a purple wind-up doll metaphorically demonstrates her descriptions. A depressed rock dejectedly hops through sunless days. Them BAM! A pill solves it all and suddenly life is bursting with enlightening sunlight and cheerful smiles. It seems like Harry Potter’s Felix Felicis magic potion is not fictional at all anymore. Ordinary Muggle scientists have created happiness in a simple, prescribed pill – yours, of course, for a price.
Still,happiness, as the commercials have led us to believe, is more easily attainable than ever. It is so attainable that it almost seems that something is suddenly terribly wrong when you feel sad. Since, as the commercials have described it, if you’ve lost interest in your daily activities, have little energy and feel worthless, you have depression. Following that reasoning, we all need antidepressants. Who hasn’t had little energy after a night of cramming? Who hasn’t felt dejected after a breakup? Who hasn’t felt worthless when rejected?
That type of depression is normal. The ordinary low moments of life help us to acknowledge and appreciate the good stuff about our lives. Yet the commercials do not clearly draw a line between this ordinary sadness – that will pass, don’t you worry – from the serious, even fatal clinical depression. The distinction is critical, yet is not present with either the purple-wind-up doll or the dejected rock. It leads ordinary people having a bad day or week to diagnose themselves with a serious mental illness. It not only degrades and trivializes the seriousness of those clinically depressed but also endangers those giving themselves these self-diagnoses.
“Clinical depression needs to be professionally diagnosed as it very individualized. The dose for one person can be very different from another,” explains Diane Azevedo, a licensed marriage and family therapist. She adds further warning. “Individuals also react differently to the medication and need to be under supervision by a professional; otherwise they might not even know that it’s their medication that is causing the [medical] problem.”
The complications Azevedo mentions are alarmingly absent from those 30-second commercials we have all become so accustomed to seeing. Instead, as Azevedo describes them, “The commercials are way too generalized. The description can describe just about anybody, including those not clinically depressed. They are poorly designed and not appropriate.”
A 2005 study by PLoS Medicine, a scientific journal, not only reiterates Azevedo’s sentiments, but also provides further physiological explanations. As many of us are used to hearing, pharmaceutical companies explain they can solve our sad days by balancing out our chemical imbalances with their antidepressant pills. If we are depressed, we are simply lacking enough serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate our moods. However, in this study, researchers from the United States to the United Kingdom point out that the relation between serotonin and depression is not scientifically established. The relation is so intangible that the Irish Medicines Board, the Irish equivalent to our FDA, has banned a company from advertising such a chemical imbalance.
However, without regulation from the FDA in the United States, pharmaceutical companies – such as Eli Lilly and Pfizer – continue to advertise their magical balancing skills. In fact, as a study by Reuters found in 2007, the companies spend about $30 billion a year on their commercials and other ads.
With the lack of adequate information from these antidepressant commercials and the dangers of self-diagnosis, doctors will prescribe the medication three out of four times if a patient mentions an antidepressant while describing mild, but not severe, depression symptoms, according to an article from U.S News and World Report. Azevedo adds more alarming news. She says, “Any doctor can write the prescription [for the antidepressants]. So people don’t deal with the real problem that is causing their depression.”
Not only is it troubling for it to be seriously wrong for you to be sad, it is more disturbing to see that the 30-second commercials of a wound-up doll and a dejected rock can influence your medical prescription – and not in your best interests either. It simplifies clinical depression, a serious mental illness, to something as inconsequential as the common cold and one that should be treated as such. It is in fact much more complicated, as junior Catherine Mote can attest.
Mote began seeing a therapist after someone close to her died a few months ago. As time passed, she and her therapist noticed that she had trouble adjusting to the normal routines of life. She had difficulty concentrating and sleeping, and adopted unusual eating habits. Along with the physical signs, Mote noted that she often became emotional over nothing and had a pessimistic outlook on life. Her therapist diagnosed her with clinical depression after months of therapy and has prescribed her antidepressants.
“A couple of days after I started taking them I could feel a difference and had a more positive outlook on life, instead of being pessimistic all the time,” Mote says of her experience. She adds, “If any one feels they are so depressed that they will take their own life, they should really go see a doctor or talk to their parents.They are gambling with their life because it [depression] changes your perception of the events that are happening to you in life. I know people who have committed suicide because they were afraid to ask for the help that they needed. So my advice to people: be open and do not be afraid to tell someone how you really feel because it can ultimately save your life.”
As Mote advises, depression isn’t about popping a pill. It is your grandmother dying. It is your parents divorcing. It is bullying in school or online. Depression – even ordinary sadness – involves more than a simple “Yes” or “No” answer to the question, “Are you feeling sad?” Check with anyone who has experience asking such questions. A truthful answer will often involve tears, hugs, and much more – offering the comfort and care that no pill provides. It is something pharmaceutical companies should consider as they list the possible medical side-effects at the end of their 30-second commercials. Until they can take depression more seriously, they should be regulated and the disbursal of pills should be limited to licensed psychotherapists – and that includes the wind-up doll and the dejected rock.
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