The Mega Marketing Of Depression

Many cultural beliefs and values are held about mental illness and health in Americans of

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

Mental health illnesses affect everyone. It is highly prevalent affecting people of all ages, gender, cultures, and social groups. Attitudes towards mental health illnesses vary among individuals and often are highly influenced by the various cultures that the individuals identify with. Culture as a social concept can be defined as a set of norms, values, behaviours, and beliefs that are common and shared amongst a group of individuals (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999). Culture can be applicable to groups like Asians and Americans but also to groups of shared norms, beliefs, and values established within professions such as the culture of patients and practitioners. Culture provides these groups with structure and context to understanding their society and the world as a whole. Culture influence a wide range of aspects of mental health, including how mental health is perceived by the patient, how the patient will experience mental health stigma, and how they cope with symptoms of mental health illness. Additionally, these cultural influences impact the relationship between the patient and the practitioner in a number of ways.

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

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.

Media serves as a dictator, almost forcing society to shape around the brainwashing effect of advertisement. Society shields itself behind a thin wall they call individualism. They promote everyone being individuals and thinking for themselves when in reality, it’s the media who is lurking over the shoulder of society, whispering the rights and wrongs in the way we think and act. It’s the effect of media on society that sets that rulebook for what is considered the “well-being” of a person, both physically and emotionally. Ethan Watters supports this idea through his narrative, “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan” (512-532). He explains how Western society has been imposing on the culture of

In Kleinman, Eisenberg, and Good’s article “Culture, Illness, and Care”, they summarize the importance of

Sometimes companies try to change culturally believes in order to be able to place their product in the market. Pharmaceuticals benefit from the way society sees certain diseases. In “Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan,” Ethan Watters presents the difference between depression in Japanese culture and depression in American culture. He explores how some of the big pharmaceutical companies try to bring their products for depression into the Japanese market, but to do that they have to change the way people see depression in Japan. Watters divided his essay into different categories which are: “The Culture of Sadness”, “Junk Science and First World Medicine”, “Mega-Marketing of Depression” and “Speeding the Evolution”. In “The Culture of Sadness” he explains how different cultures express the way they feel in different ways. There is not a specific word on The Japanese language that means exactly the same as depression in English, which means that there is not the same context for the experiences of the disease. In the rest of the sections of his essay, Watters presents how certain pharmaceutical companies started to advertise depression in Japan by manipulating the researchers and media about depression and the Western solutions to it. Cultural beliefs about disease usually have a lot to do with the way people describe who they feel and what symptoms they have, but economic reasons push people to try to manipulate them; the result of these is that the cultural, scientific

Human beings are greatly restricted by sociocultural background. In individuals’ lives, they consciously or unconsciously share sociocultural assumptions about normal behavior and alternatively are restricted to these assumptions, by following the disciplines of their culture, raising their social caste based on social norms, and behaving properly according to their social surroundings. These assumptions about normal behavior contain not only sociocultural expectations of proper behavior, but also sociocultural morality and the law. During individuals’ growth, they pick up these assumptions from family members, schools, peers, public media, or other sources as an important knowledge of their culture and life. However, these assumptions are not absolutely right and can change along with time as well as cultural transformation. Ethan Watters in his essay “The Mega-Marketing of Depression”, mentions his research of the Japanese and other Asian countries’ understanding and acceptance of depression. He wonders why these countries are different from the United States when facing the problem of depression. In “Son”, Andrew Solomon describes his growth as a gay and talks about parental influence on children’s self-acceptance of own identity. And Karen Armstrong in her essay “Homo Religious”, points out that religion in effect is a cultural way that human beings try to understand their life from a transcendent direction. Three authors in their context imply how sociocultural

The cultural background of a patient can affect how they respond to treatments. It’s the responsibility of doctors to take the patients culture into account in their treatment procedures. “it seems reasonable to imagine that cultural factors--different ways of knowing the world through language and meaning--will shape different responses to the same “placebo” around the world.” The variety of cultural interpretations can aid or harm a patient’s medical treatment; a patient could suppress its natural response towards a treat without knowing. “biological processes can be “activated”, or perhaps “suppressed”, by that system of meanings we call culture, and we may have no awareness of it at all.” An example of the placebo effect hindering the treatment of patients is the White Coat Syndrome. The presence of this syndrome can be traced to an individuals cultural background, or a traumatic experienced they had in a medical setting. The importance of knowing once patients cultural background is a top priority, especially when it comes down to prescribing a medication. Something as simple as the color of a pill could have a significant impact in a patient’s response to the

Cultural differences are celebrated as a way to welcome diversity in todays society. A culture defines the way individuals think by grouping likeminded individuals for the sake of society. Culture is defined as a shared belief, values, and behaviors amongst other individuals. With many individuals being a part of a certain culture, these individuals have different experiences. Essentially, having a different culture causes a different perception of the embodied experiences. Nature vs. Nurture is one of the oldest arguments concerning how an individual perceives the outside world as well as themselves. This argument tries to explain if whether a nurturing environment such as culture plays a role in development or if the science of nature is more influential. In Ethan Watters text titled “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan” the Japanese culture influenced the society on how to process certain emotions. This clouds the true emotions felt by individuals. In Barbara Frederickson’s piece titled “Selections from Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become” culture clouds the true biological feelings of love. This starts a debate regarding the influence of science and culture on society. Culture shapes the scientific practices used in different societies by altering mindsets to explain society’s needs and wants.

When confronted with the topic of psychological abnormality, typically one will think that it is fairly simple to explain and define. However, nailing down an explicit definition is not as easy as one may think. Saying that it is an action or persistent pattern of thought that is outside of the norm is far too vague to have any impact on the field of psychology, or help anyone who may be struggling with a disorder. Furthermore, when introducing a broader scope of understanding abnormal psychology and mental health, the variability of different cultures makes this all the more challenging. This essay will explain mental health as a whole and it’s differences cross culturally. Included will be an analysis of culture bound syndromes and the

The purpose of this advertising poster is to raise awareness about a serious social issue, depression. The advertisement was designed with the intention of constructing a message of depression being unable to be seen through someone, hence it goes unnoticed majority of the time. Victims are often perceived happy on the outside, but looks can be deceiving. The target audience is aimed at todays’ society specifically from adolescents to adults ranging from both genders

The Western Culture focuses on two method of healing: chemically engineered compounds and surgical procedures. For instance in the United States, individuals have the option of antidepressants with or without the aid of cognitive therapy (depression article). Most individuals choose the quick approach due to its alluring quick fix scheme. These contrasts differently from the Eastern Culture’s main focus: the power of the mind and the energy from within: mind, body, and soul. The effects of Eastern Culture’s approach have been proven to be enduring and beneficial to the individuals involved. The Western Culture would greatly benefit by including the Eastern Culture’s healing methods into the lives of patients.