Psychopharmaceutical Advertising Strategies: Empowerment in a Pill?

Drug companies market psychopharmaceuticals as treatment for emotionally symptomatic “disorders” such as depression, social anxiety, obesity, premenstrual syndrome, and menopause. Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) television advertisements for psychopharmaceutical prescription drugs offer potential consumers—particularly women—empowerment through gendered messages that promise the sufferer increased control over her symptoms and thus her “disordered” life. By performing an in-depth, interpretive, ethnomethodological reading of 13 DTCs for psychopharmaceuticals, I identify four interrelated advertising strategies. These are (1) establishing medical legitimacy, (2) blaming and shaming, (3) use of feminist and 12-step movement rhetoric, and (4) offering validation and empowerment to women. Despite their overt empowerment messages, DTC advertisements actually reinforce the medicalization of women's emotional experiences and bodily processes, and remind the viewer of socially constructed beliefs that recovery from illness is the individual's responsibility and obligation. Rather than “empowering” women (as a class), these strategies tend to (re)construct disempowering notions of feminine fragility and biological restrictions, reinforcing patriarchal beliefs of female inferiority.