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Madness, Media, and Mass Marketing

A majority of people have a pessimistic view toward mental illness and we can see how erratic behavior isn’t easily tolerated. When you say that someone has a mental illness, you begin labeling them followed by stating the specific illness they have. This can frighten the person many times and they then begin thinking they have some sort of “disease”. That is what we call the ‘labeling theory’ — once someone is given a label, in time they become that person. Often times these labels can be misleading and both frighten and worry the person which causes them a lot of harm in the long run. The label applied to the illness becomes almost as damaging as the illness itself. Instead, these people need words of encouragement.

Mental illness is not a “thing” – like a specimen in a museum – for which a label much be found. It is rather a state of functioning, a way of behaving. When we label people as either a psychotic or a psychopath, it sounds degrading. This gloomy prognosis of a person means something despised through the use of these damning words. We have to be careful of how we speak about mental illness. Many of the words that psychiatrists choose to use are in fact dangerous. They misrepresent mental illness and therefore permit the public to have a pessimistic view of mental illness.

We have to be careful in the ways we label someone as being insane or mentally ill. A lot of people don’t actually lose their minds. They may just be extremely stressed, confused, or anxious. It would be plain demoralizing to give them a diagnosis such as i.e. manic-depressive. A good psychiatrist has to help the patient have a clear mind at the end of their session no matter what kind of disjointed or ludicrous problems and thoughts they may have. Public attitudes toward mental illness are negative due to the social influence. People are afraid of anyone that deviates from the norms that society wants them to uphold but we have to be aware of the fine line between mental illness and insanity.

For example : 

“The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan” by Watters

Regarding Kirmayer’s presentation to the GlaxoSmithKline drug company, cultural beliefs about depression are easily malleable in response to messages that are exported from one culture to another. Kirmayer believes that the drug company representatives are interested in changing the notions of depression in Japan to those of the Western hemisphere. In the globalizing world, the cultural conceptions surrounding illnesses such as depression could be influenced and shifted over time. The drug companies were solely interested in standardizing the diagnosis of depression psychiatry around the world. By standardizing the diagnosis criteria of illnesses like depression, drug companies were believed to be able to provide additional advances and accurate diagnoses in psychiatry, and in return receive huge profits.

However, the notion of other cultures and their unique expressions, descriptions, and understanding of different ‘states of beings’ would die out. This reshaping of a population or culture can possibly kill diversity as certain categories of depression in the United States don’t equally fit well everywhere around the world, including Japan. The one-size-fits all notion of depression is what the drug company representatives believed they could successfully achieve through this “mega-marketing” campaign of depression in Japan.