title: Antidepressants and advertising: psychopharmaceuticals in crisis.
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.
authors.affiliation: History of Science Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. npg@media.mit.edu
authors.forename: Nathan P
authors.initials: NP
authors.lastname: Greenslit
authors.forename: Ted J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Kaptchuk
mesh_terms: D000329:Advertising; D000928:Antidepressive Agents / Q000191:economics* / Q000266:history / Q000494:pharmacology*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D011057:Politics; D011619:Psychotropic Drugs / Q000191:economics* / Q000494:pharmacology*
chemical_list: D000928:Antidepressive Agents; D011619:Psychotropic Drugs