Narrative Magic and the Construction of Selfhood in Antidepressant Advertising

Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 27 (1):24-36 (2007)
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Abstract

This article examines the way in which selfhood is constructed in direct-to-consumer advertisements for antidepressant medications. The sample consists of advertisements that appeared in nine popular magazines between 1997 and 2005, television commercials that ran between 2003 and 2005, and online promotional Web sites. The analysis is divided into three sections. First, it is argued that the ads rely on metaphors of communication, information exchange, and plenitude to construct a relationship between biology and selfhood. Second, in offering the choice for antidepressant treatment, the ads grant individuals a new capacity for the exercise of personal agency. Third, the author describes antidepressants as pills that perform a narrative “magic.” In contrast to religious and psychoanalytic narratives that required individuals to incorporate disavowed elements of their selves into an ongoing life narrative, antidepressants are medications that allow individuals to put aside, or jump over, inexplicable and painful moments in their life.

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Sources of the self: the making of the modern identity.Charles Taylor - 1989 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.Charles Taylor - 1989 - Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.Ulrich Beck, Mark Ritter & Jennifer Brown - 1993 - Environmental Values 2 (4):367-368.
Dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments.Max Horkheimer - 2002 - Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Edited by Theodor W. Adorno & Gunzelin Schmid Noerr.

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