The Mega Marketing Of Depression

The classic definition for culture was proposed by Tylor (1871/1958) and still commonly cited: Culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and many other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (p. 1). This definition focuses on attributes that are acquired through growing up or living in a particular society, rather than through biological inheritance (Kottak, 2002). In Giger and Davidhizar’s (1991) Model for transcultural care, culture was defined as a patterned behavioral response that develops over time as a result of imprinting the mind through social and religious structures and intellectual and artistic manifestations.

I like your example about the different acceptance between Haitian and American cultures. Not only Haiti but also many cultures believe that psychological disorders are from supernatural forces. Therefore, they want to seek spiritual and herbal treatment by their traditional healers whereas, people want to meet psychiatrists in Western culture. Cultures include custom, religion and patterns their ancestors made for a long time, so their belief or behaviors are various. As a result, symptoms of psychological disorders are similar, perception and treatment for the psychological disorders can be different in every culture.

In Ethan Watters’ essay, “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan,” he has a discussion with Dr. Laurence Kirmayer regarding Kirmayer’s invitation to the International Consensus Group on Depression and Anxiety. In their discussion Kirmayer talks about how the basis of his invitation was on the notion that he as the director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill could add to the answer the large pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline was looking for. The question at hand was how culture influences the illness experience, but more specifically how depression is influenced by culture in Japan. If the conference was a success, the company would be able to enter and expand into a market worth billions of dollars. The reason that the cultural aspect of depression was very important was because in countries like Japan, the American conception of depression was taken as a more serious illness, rivaling heights of diseases like schizophrenia. The company hoped that by somehow changing the Japan’s perception of the illness from being something social or moral to the American conception where expressing the illness to others is considered being strong person rather than being a weak one, that their drug Paxil would be able to sell to the market, which is where the scientific and economic aspects of depression come into effect. The scientific and economic aspects take place due to the intentions of the company to sell the drug, and the drug’s ability to help

Culture is known to be able to shape the beliefs of a society through its language. The term “depression” for example, was not commonly used due to the impression that depression was not psychological, but rather more physical. This is because the people of Japan were able to find ways to avoid giving in to the feeling and moving on with their lives. In Ethan Watters’ “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan”, Watters looks into how pharmaceutical companies attempted to change the concept of depression in Japan in order to create a market to sell their antidepressant drugs. He discusses how the Japanese culture was influenced by the companies that were selling the drugs by imposing western beliefs on Japan, which would result in the

In this rapidly globalizing world, the jobs of the advertisers and marketers are to make sure we, the general public, have no control over our wants and desires. However, it is impossible for them to gain full control, but they do a good job of restricting what freedoms we do have. Big companies want us to believe that we have control by changing cultural norms without us realizing they did. Ethan Watters discusses how marketers plan to redesign Japanese culture for their benefit in his narrative titled “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan.” Watters makes it clear big companies, such as the drug company GlaxoSmithKline, are reshaping Japanese culture to market a pill that supposedly cures depression. Society is constantly changing and companies are able to take advantage of that by prompting the route in which society chooses to take. Large companies practice this style of marketing everywhere in the world and they are successful in influencing us, the general public. Big companies are considered big because consumers continuously buy their products, a lot of which are unnecessary. Their success brings light to the fact that we may believe that we have control, but it is just an illusion.

According to cultural anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, culture is a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” In other words, culture is a concept that social organizations practice in order to explain certain phenomena in nature whether through mythology, rituals, art, music, and language. However, as explained by Ethan Watters in “The Mega Marketing of Depression in Japan,” culture is not permanent, since it has the ability, and more than ever in the present society, to “move across boundaries of race, culture, class, and nation” (Watters 519). In addition, as demonstrated by Oliver Sacks in the articled called “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See,” it is a mistake to think that individuals are bound to behave in a way that culture told them to behave. Instead, individuals are free to create his or her own unique experience of interpreting the world. We might consider the “reality” that we live in to be fiction to the extent that we are willing to use different faculties and analyze what we are witnessing; this gives us the power, as individuals, to think and search for each of us’s unique interpretation of reality. .

The market can often face influences and change from numerous companies all at once. Companies aiming to introduce a product to a new population face the hurdle of influencing the market to create a need for their product, if there is not one already. In Ethan Watters’ essay, The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan, Watters addresses the methods with which GlaxoSmithKline introduces and changes the very culture of the Japanese in order to create a need for their antidepressant drug, Paxil. Though GlaxoSmithKline’s efforts to create a need for their drug, a cultural shift occurred, one in which changed the very way of life for the Japanese. As stated in Watters’ essay, the executives did not present themselves as people only driven by profits

Predetermined realities are realities that people blindly accept and inhabit as their own. These false realities constrict the expression of life by clouding an individual’s purpose and guiding them to live systematically. Too often individuals neglect to navigate their lives around their own wants, beliefs and values. Instead of making independent decisions, decisions are made based on the opinions or pressures from others, suppressing one’s authentic reality with societal norms. These norms and expectations set forth by authorities inadvertently transform an individual’s reality into an unoriginal, predetermined reality. In other words, there is an infinite number of aesthetically eccentric views, but we are given binoculars to only focus on what others want us to see. Unfortunately, these societal interferences are nearly unavoidable. Cathy Davidson’s essay, “Project Classroom Makeover,” presents how the enforcement of mundane standardization in American education systems leads to the decrease of original talents and creativity. Similarly, Ethan Watters’ essay, “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan,” portrays the ways in which pharmaceutical companies attempt to standardize depression, shifting the reality of an entire culture, for the sake of their profit. Lastly, in “The Mind’s Eye,” Oliver Sacks illustrates how reality differs between individuals by using stories from individuals with blindness. Evidently, reality is in the

In ‘The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan”, Ethan Watters exemplifies a unique phenomenon in his work on the idea of cultural change in Japan. Watters essay discusses how a nation was altered for the benefit of industry through the use of marketing. The stance that Watters takes in his essay makes abundantly clear the implications of marketing and its techniques which can be used to change the thinking of an entire country. Karen Ho’s essay “Biographies of Hegemony” focuses on how the leaders of investment bankers market the ‘success’ in investment banking in an attempt to make students get involved in the banking career. Both of these ideas of modifying a system are joined together by the subliminal nature of techniques used in marketing, a system evident in both Watters’ and Ho’s essays. Before scrutinizing how marketing influences different groups of people, we have to first understand the type of marketing used in these texts. Primarily, the notion of mega-marketing has to be understood— marketing in a way that changes the ‘total environment’ (every aspect of the environment, from the government to the public) of the country. This general idea of changing the environment is the most commonplace marketing strategy, and is evident in both texts from Ho and Watters. With this logic, one can understand how such an influential change can define the exact relationship between investment bankers and ivy league students.

In the ever-expanding world today, consumers are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the ploys of mass media advertising and pharmaceutical companies alike. Ethan Watters in “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan” delves into the dangers of the globalization of a mentality for depression that seeks to transcend cultural values and traditions completely. Pharmaceutical companies, proponents of globalization, aim to eliminate the social and natural confines of a disease like depression, and instead, establish a medical model that is rigidly enforced through marketing and challenging existing cultural norms. Drug corporations continually bombard the general public with drugs that can cure ailments that supposedly afflict them, even if they are not indeed suffering from them. Therefore, a question arises, how much of what we perceive of the world around us is truly accurate and untainted by external influences? On the surface, corporations present themselves as benefactors of society working for the grace of the people; in reality, they are after the mighty dollar and strive to exploit new markets for product distribution. Every culture is unique in its explanatory reasoning for various circumstances and events that occur in the population, ranging from mental health to a general outlook on life. It is a travesty that cultures undergo unnecessary changes that can alter their very nature for the sake of monetary gain. Since cultural background shapes the conception of the

A culture typically portrays the character traits or identity of a particular group of people. Each culture has diverse ideologies and perceptions; therefore, every group is different. On a large scale, these ideas merge together and give shape to cultural norms, which in turn form the foundation of reality. In "The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan," Ethan Watters explores the relationship between cultural norms and actuality. The article talks about the influence of pharmaceutical companies on the paradigm shift in Japan's psychiatry. Watters explains, "The objective was to influence, at the most fundamental level, the Japanese understanding of sadness and depression" (516). In other words, Pharmaceutical companies attempted to alter

“[I]magine culture as invisible webs composed of values, beliefs, ideas about appropriate behavior, and socially constructed truths” (Trumbell, 9). Everybody has a different background to correspond with how they see the world through their values, beliefs, and ideas. People act a certain way and dress a certain way because of their culture also. Someone’s culture has a significant impact on the way they view other people and the world because of how uncertain they are of their culture and their own personal and past experiences.

In “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan,” Ethan Watters reveals how a community can be manipulated by marketing because of culture barriers. The author discloses the intentions of a western pharmaceutical company, which is to “make Paxil a hit in Japan.”(516). Paxil, a drug said to cure depression, has led people on because of the remarkable advertising that was used. Ultimately, the advertising turned out to not match up with what they were trying to sell and their idea of depression. To convince the Japanese to buy their drug, they first had to change Japan's views of depression. Like Kirmayer said, “Cultures shape the illness experience,”(Watters 515) saying that the Japanese had a

Most Americans are not aware of the many definitions the word culture has had over its course of existence in the English language. Some associate their knowledge of culture with one of Beethoven 's classic symphonies or with a beautiful painting by Picasso. These same individuals most often classify their ideal of culture in two classes- high and low culture. As the authors state, “a cultured person is someone who has achieved a certain level of refinement and

For the purposes of this piece, culture is defined as “the full range of human patterned experience” as described by Cole (1996) cited in Gla ̆veanu & Jovchelovitch (2017, p.113). This chapter also provides a description of the importance culture plays in psychological research.