Summary Of The Mega-Marketing Of Depression In Japan

Gianna Silva
J.K.Lalli
Expos EC F17
11 September 2017 In “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan,” Ethan Watters uses the rollout of Paxil to investigate how culture shapes the collective perception and expectations of mental illness. In spite of the documented popularity of western drugs in Japan, multinational pharmaceutical companies believed that different cultural attitudes towards depression would prevent the financial success of antidepressants on the Japanese market. The assumptions made by the pharmaceutical companies, from their theory that Western antidepressants would be incompatible with existing Japanese culture to the marketing strategies they designed to mitigate that incompatibility, did not materialize out of nowhere.

Laurence Kirmayer’s theory of explanatory models created the culturally expected experience of the disease in the mind of the sufferer. These explanatory models, he argues, outline culturally-specific expectations about the symptoms, feelings, and causes of depression-like states. Western pharmaceutical companies were able to transform the cultural attitude towards depression by transforming existing explanatory models for depression. The transformation of cultural attitudes reveal that the culture itself is open to influence of other cultures. The kokoro no kaze campaign is a perfect example of this process, by changing the word for depression in japan, it changed the whole meaning of the illness, making it more straightforward and appealing to drug marketers. Moreover, changing the culture’s ways they have always known about illness by the simple change in language. As Watters points out, “cultural beliefs about depression and the self are malleable and responsive to messages that can be exported from one culture to another,” it is possible that symptoms can replace a culture’s explanatory model, and redefine what “normal behaviors” are (Watters

It is clearly pointed out, by Watters, that their advertisements for their drug is intentionally ambiguous and ill-defined, to be able to be applied to the largest possible population for the widest range of symptoms. By taking advantage of their “new” definition of depression, the marketers so vaguely defined the disability that clearly included common emotions of a person that would once be considered a gloomy person. Then, using the words of other doctors and associations, the marketers at GlaxoSmithKline were able to exploit the high suicide rate of the country for their own personal gain on their medication. This somehow brought their simple internal cold illness to a serious sickness that needed immediate medical attention. The drug company executives made themselves appear to be fighting the depression for their consumers, basically, doing the unthinkable considering that these diseases remained untreated for so long in japan. On the other hand, as it seems they’re doing god’s work and helping all these newly diagnosed people with their problem, these innocent people would not have needed this support if they were not tricked into believing this indeterminate disorder. The potent driving force for the executives was not only the moral uncertainty but the possible billions of dollars lying in the