Depression and consumption: psychopharmaceuticals, branding, and new identity practices.
As pharmaceuticals are moving from private patient-doctor conversations to public television and print advertisements, best-selling books, and top TV shows, as well as into everyday conversations around risk and illness, how people understand health, sickness, and their own identity is also changing. This paper explores some of these changes by unpacking some of the social, political, and personal layers that are complicating the production and marketing of prescription drugs, and that are transforming the identity practices around contested illness. I focus on Sarafem and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (the illness Sarafem was marketed for) as a case study.
Greenslit
Nathan
N
Program in Science, Technology and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. npg@mit.edu
D000328:Adult; D001294:Attitude to Health; D003863:Depression / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D005473:Fluoxetine / Q000627:therapeutic use; D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011293:Premenstrual Syndrome / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000523:psychology*; D017367:Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors / Q000627:therapeutic use
D005473:Fluoxetine; D017367:Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors