Drug ads still stigmatise mental illness

Over the space of a year, Dr Juliet Foster analysed 96 different drug advertisements carried in the British Medical Journal and the British Journal of Psychiatry. She discovered stark differences in the way that psychiatric and non-psychiatric drugs are advertised to health professionals. Whereas adverts for "physical" diseases such as pain and blood pressure medication usually picture people as happy and active, either in work settings or enjoying their leisure time, psychiatric drugs such as those used to treat depression and Alzheimer's disease are more likely to show troubled or inactive individuals. According to Dr Foster: "The negative images of distressed, disturbed and often deviant individuals used in advertisements for psychiatric medication contrast sharply with advertisements for non-psychiatric medication which focus on happy smiling people engaged in healthy activity, and perpetuate links between mental health problems and abnormality, fear and otherness." As well as looking at images, Dr Foster analysed the text used in the drug advertisements. She found that while adverts for non-psychiatric drugs majored on medically-related information on the drug itself, adverts for psychiatric drugs included less text and text that is focussed on narrative description or case studies. "It is hard to argue that the general public should see mental health problems in the same light as any other health problem when it seems clear that this is not always happening in the health industry," she says.