The Mega Marketing Of Depression

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.

By making depression seem ambiguous and less severe than it really is, the general population became more inclined to use the antidepressants. By depicting depression as kokoro no kaze, “it implied that [depression] was not the severe condition it was once thought to be and therefore should carry no social stigma…[and] suggested that the choice of taking a medication for depression should be as simple and worry-free as buying a cough syrup or an antihistamine” (Watters 524). The last message portrayed to the general public is the phrase “depression [is] ubiquitous” (Watters 525). By using the analogy to connect the common cold to depression, GlaxoSmithKline downplayed the severity of the mental illness and as a result, made the general population more open to acknowledging the possibility of having a mental illness and thus making depression a social and societal norm. “Depression was so broadly defined by the marketers that it clearly encompassed classic emotions and behaviors formerly attributed to the melancholic personality type” (Watters 525). Depression became “intentionally ambiguous and ill-defined, applicable to the widest possible population and to the widest possible range of discomforts…. The only feature that distinguishes depression as a ‘disease’ from an ordinary depressed mood seems to be the length of time…” (Watters

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

Ethan Watters’s Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche explores there reality of mental illness. The chapter “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan” discusses the relationship between “scientific” notion and culturally accepted norms. Western pharmaceutical companies rushed to Japan to tap into a new lucrative market. In the process, scientific fact was often brushed to the side in order to make the largest profit. Through the introduction of scientific research regarding the correlation between SSRIs and depression, the West culturally imperialized Japan in order to make a profit.

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

Culture often has large differences in a society in terms of common interest, belief and sense of the real word. Definition of culture is the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time. The majority of world population, even some uncivilized, primitive villages in Africa, has owned culture that member of the society comply and give them guidelines for the way to live a life. In Ethan Watters’ text “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan”, he talks about how different culture brought difference view about the same incident, depression, mental illness and its medication. He explains that Japanese culture has a different understanding and definition of depression and mental illness as compared with American culture. In Japanese culture, doctors distinguish depression and mental illness as very rare and crucial matters that makes patients going to the mental hospital for over a year. In contrast, in American culture, everyone can get instant medical services about depression and mental illness whenever people need it. As a member of a culture, an individual’s life is affected by the culture since that culture is what he is living in, which causes people of each culture have their way to handle a matter. Unfortunately, when it comes to an opportunity about seeking profit, people or organizations who have power, like pharmaceutical companies, will try to bring a method that globalizes culture differences to

Depression is a growing problem in today’s modern society. In the United States sixteen million adults currently suffer from clinical depression. This leads to over thirty thousand suicides, and five hundred thousand suicide attempts amongst Americans every year. Even people in a “perfect” world can not escape this reality. Bernard from Brave New World suffers bouts of depression often. Depression is a growing issue that is not always recognized for its severity, nor treated with the attention it requires, which only results in the worsening of the issue. Despite the lack of attention, depression is one of the nation’s leading causes of disability. It is an easily treatable mental health disorder, and with rising general knowledge and awareness

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

explanatory model, and redraw the line demarcating normal behaviors an internal states from those considered pathological ” (Watters 519). GlaxoSmithKline learned the cultural differences in Japan in order to create a setting where people would more likely use their drug. The company learned that people in Japan had a very negative attitude towards depression and they would not accept the disease (Watters 515). Using this information, the company wanted to make Japanese feel more comfortable about the idea of depression. One way they did this was by creating a new name for depression, which in English meant a “cold of the soul” (Watters 526). This change in name made people believe that everyone could suffer from depression and that they would

If people think differently it makes sense that different illnesses may also manifest differently. By learning about culture, and being aware of its effects on psychopathology, we have much to gain.

Depression is more than just a feeling of sadness; it can easily gain control of an individual’s life if these feelings continue.