An Analysis Of Susan Sontag's Essay The Mega-Marketing Of Depression

Humans rely on reasoning to comfort themselves in face of the unknown. In Ethan Watters’s essay, The Mega-Marketing of Depression, he describes the efforts made by pharmaceutical companies to make profit by selling drugs known of SSRIs to aid depression. He analyzes the tactics used by GlaxoSmithKline to establish a market for their antidepressant, Paxil, in Japan where they understand depression differently. In Susan Sontag’s monograph from 1978, named Illness as Metaphor, she points out the tendency for humans to associate metaphors with illnesses or diseases that they cannot explain. Sontag describes and analyzes the multiple metaphors associated with tuberculosis and cancer throughout history to prove her point that illnesses should not be attached with metaphors or connotations. In many cultures around the world, depression is view as a disease or illness, which

interpretations vary from each country. There is no known full explanation regarding depression, that every culture would agree on and not contradict.

As every mysterious illness does, depression has a metaphor or stereotypical explanation from each culture. The many different of metaphors about depression are formed by the social constructs it interacts with and in turn shapes a culture’s ideologies.

The proficiency-supportive cultural beliefs in Japan about depression helped form metaphors that collectively glorified the state of being depressed, which produced a common appreciation and praise to those afflicted. Previous to the western drug companies alteration of the country’s beliefs regarding depression, “The personality typus melancholicus… influenced psychiatric thinking in Japan” (Watter 520). The common Japanese understanding of the mental illness was an idea that created a connection between the “respected personality style in Japan: those who were serious, diligent, and thoughtful (Watters 520) and the state of melancholy. The nation’s interpretation of depression spawned a belief, not acknowledging the mental condition as an illness or disease but an inherent mental status from a

specific personality. Depression is therefore given an indirect metaphor that implies “that the disease expresses the character… that the character causes the disease” (Sontag 46). The theory regarding those with typus melancholicus was that “when cultural upheaval disordered their lives and threatened the welfare of others” they were prone to “feeling overwhelming sadness” (Watters 520). Their sensitivity to those around them is a part of their characteristic, once triggered, the crushing sorrow or depression is the disease that is the product of their delicate personality. The fact that depression was treated as a mystery and not completely understood in Japan caused it “to be morally, if not literally contagious” (Sontag 6). The positive Japanese-forged beliefs and metaphors about the disease, or personality type as the country’s culture viewed it, were created to fill the disquieting gap in their knowledge regarding the source of their internal distress. This resulted in the shaping of the prevailing metaphor that “having such a sadness-prone personality was something not to be feared but aspired to” (Watters 520). Once one experiences constant melancholy it is considered a sign that the person possesses the characteristics that are treasured greatly in Japanese culture. The connections associating a personality type with the emotional state of being melancholy results in a person afflicted by the Japanese version of depression to be considered a morally “superior one: sensitive… a being apart” (Sontag 32), since it is seen as “a mark of refinement, of sensibility, to be sad” (Sontag 31). Individuals with typus melancholicus, or the Japanese interpretation of depression, “expressed great concern for the welfare of other individuals and the society as a whole” (Watters 520), making them exceptional beings in the realm of morals and ethics.