Hanganu-Bresch, Cristina (Author)
This dissertation studies the intersection of visual culture with mental health, focusing on one of the most controversial mental health topics of our time: antidepressants. Antidepressant advertising reflects societal conceptions of normality and abnormality, and at the same time aims to shape doctors' opinions about the proper way to diagnose and treat depression. In this study, I discuss how the images used to sell antidepressants portray the depressed vs. the "normal" population, and whether this portrayal has changed since the beginnings of psychotropic drug advertising. I selected a generous sample of antidepressant ads from two major psychiatric journals in two countries: the American and the British Journals of Psychiatry , from 1960 to 2004, a time which covers periods of profound paradigm shifts in psychiatry. First, I trace the genealogy of contemporary illustrations of depression back to an era that long precedes the invention of antidepressants, and describe the long tradition of representing the "melancholic" and how it has been remediated in ads. Second, I use a combination of content analysis and visual semiotics to provide a diachronic and cross-cultural analysis of representation of depression/ normality in the two journals. Third, I complement the content analysis with a closer comparative analysis of the advertising campaigns of two antidepressants, one old (amitryptiline) and one new (fluoxetine, or Prozac) in each journal, using mostly the tools of visual semiotics as outlined by Kress and van Leeuwen in their seminal 1996 work on the grammar of visual design. This is a mixed-methods case study in visual rhetoric, and as such useful to scholars in the field insofar as it demonstrates the possibilities as well as the limits of content analysis and semiotics. The study also offers scholars of psychopharmacology and of cultural studies a comprehensive examination of trends and themes in antidepressant advertising.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/05 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3313444.
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