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The words used to sell psychotropic drugs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Matthew Jelley  and
John H. Owen
Matthew Jelley
Affiliation:
Fromeside Clinic, Stapleton, Bristol BS16 1ED
John H. Owen
Affiliation:
Lecturer in Mental Health, University Department of Mental Health, 41 St Michael's Hill, Bristol BS2 8DZ
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Advertisements are biased. This is not a statement of ideology, but a statement of fact. They are neither public service announcements nor balanced debates. They exist solely to encourage the consumer to buy one product in preference to another. The importance of this is that, as clinicians, we often place ourselves apart from others when considering what influences our practice. On the one hand our training emphasises a combined approach of pharmacological, psychological, and social therapies, but on the other, it is only the pharmacological approach that has the ability to finance full-colour advertisements in learned journals. In 1982 the pharmaceutical industry spent £150 million on drug promotion in the UK (Medawar, 1984). We have attempted to take an objective view of drug advertisements by examining the words used in all advertisements that have appeared in the British Journal of Psychiatry over the last 30 years.

Type
The times
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 15 , Issue 12 , December 1991 , pp. 755 - 756
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1991

References

Reference

Medawar, C. (1984) The Wrong Kind of Medicine. London: Consumers' Association and Hodder & Stoughton.Google Scholar

Note

‘Images to sell psychotropic drugs’ will appear in the January 1992 issue of the Psychiatric Bulletin .Google Scholar
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