General Interest > Tacitus' Realm

The Americanization of Mental Illness

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Anonymous:

--- Quote from: "Ursus" ---
--- Quote from: "Danny Bennison" ---Open trade creates advantages that are not always worth trading for. Manufactored analysis!!
Seems so American to me.      :shamrock: Danny
--- End quote ---
"Economic interests" is the bottom line here. Big Pharma wants to expand its exploitable market on a global scale. To that end, both cultural and personal conceptions of identity are expendable.

From the above article, "How the US exports its mental illnesses":

Laurence Kirmayer, director of the division of social and transcultural psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, had a front-row seat as GlaxoSmithKline launched its antidepressant paroxetine (marketed as Paxil/Seroxat) in Japan in 2000. Kirmayer, an authority on the impact of cultural beliefs on mental illness, had been invited to a GSK-sponsored academic conference in Japan. It was only when he arrived that he realised the true agenda: the company wanted his knowledge to help it understand how cultural beliefs about illness can be changed.

"The clinical presentation of depression and anxiety is a function not only of patients' ethnocultural backgrounds, but of the structure of the healthcare system they find themselves in and the diagnostic categories and concepts they encounter in mass media and in dialogue with family, friends and clinicians," Kirmayer wrote later in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. In a globalising world, all of these factors are in "constant transaction and transformation across boundaries of race, culture, class, and nation". In other words, cultural beliefs about depression and the self are malleable and responsive to messages exported from one culture to another.

The challenge GSK faced in the Japanese market was formidable. The nation did have a clinical diagnosis of depression - utsubyo - but it was nothing like the US version: it described an illness as devastating and as stigmatising as schizophrenia. Worse, at least for the sales prospects of antidepressants in Japan, it was rare. Most other states of melancholy were not considered illnesses in Japan. Indeed, the experience of prolonged, deep sadness was often considered to be a jibyo, a personal hardship that builds character. To make paroxetine a hit, it would not be enough to corner the small market for people diagnosed with utsubyo. As Kirmayer realised, GSK intended to influence the Japanese understanding of sadness and depression at the deepest level.

"What I was witnessing was a multinational pharmaceutical corporation working hard to redefine narratives about mental health," Kirmayer said. "These changes have far-reaching effects, informing the cultural conceptions of personhood and how people conduct their everyday lives. And this is happening on a global scale. These companies are upending long-held cultural beliefs about the meaning of illness and healing."

Which is exactly what GSK appears to have accomplished. Promoting depression as a kokoro no kaze - "a cold of the soul" - GSK managed to popularise the diagnosis. In the first year on the market, sales of paroxetine in Japan brought in $100 million. By 2005, they were approaching $350 million and rising quickly.[/list]
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:shamrock:
My point exactly manufactored, marketed and sold. Analysis is like a opinion, "every asshole has one". lol :shamrock:  :shamrock:

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