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

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