Ethan Watters's The Mega-Marketing Of Depression

Small Things Matter Does the color of your walls, writings or pictures frames around the room really matter? According to the Broken Windows theory, the answer is yes. This criminological theory takes a radical approach in explaining the “tipping point” that causes people to commit crimes; simply put, humans are extremely sensitive to their surroundings and, for that reason, are prone to misbehave if they detect any physical disorder, big or small, in the environment. As presented in this theory, the power of context is truly overwhelming; something we consider trivial, such as the graffiti on the walls, can bring someone to put a gun to someone’s head. However, sometimes people can also take advantage of this phenomenon to get their desired

In The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan, Ethan Watters demonstrates the manipulation of the Japanese mind by the pharmaceutical companies attempting to sell their new drugs in a culture where the understanding of depression is fundamentally different from that of western countries. Comparably, Leslie Bell’s Selections from Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom explains how women cope with major conflict regarding sex and relationship by understanding the problem and reaching to a solution of their own. Similarly, The Power of Context by Malcolm Gladwell portrays a radical concept that humans are extremely sensitive to their social or physical environment and proves it with various psychological experiments. Through all three writings, a significant relationship between comprehending one’s internal emotional state and changing the immediate environment of that person is constantly highlighted. After understanding the subject’s internal emotions, one can put his or her own meaning into the context in an attempt to drastically alter the

Watters wrote that pharmaceutical companies decided to “alter the total environment in which these drugs are or may be used” (Watters 524). In order to adjust the Japanese public’s attitude toward antidepressants after discovering the general public’s negative perception of depression in Japan, pharmaceutical companies attempted to alter the physical environment in order to control the Japanese to purchase their products. “Company marketers quickly reproduced and widely disseminated articles in newspapers and magazines mentioning the rise of depression, particularly if those pieces touted the benefits of SSRIs” (Watters 525). By indirectly exposing the Japanese public to the idea of depression through mass media, pharmaceutical companies attempted to familiarize the Japanese drug market with antidepressant and eventually tried to influence the behavior of the Japanese public into buying their products by controlling the physical context of the Japanese people. Equivalently, Jayanthi from Leslie Bell’s essay, being afraid to meet men because she got too attached and either felt played with or felt like she lost her identity, changed the context of her own relationship in order to fulfill her desires as a person within relationships with men. “She used men