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But not AS laughable as Abilify's ads, which feature a host of cartoon figures: a depressed person (always a female), a physical manifestation of depression (a balloon, a weight, a black hole, a cave, a bath robe, an umbrella...), and a doctor, whose helping hand lifts the "stuck" woman from out of her hole of depression so that it doesn't bother her anymore.
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You can already start to parse out the common tropes of a depression commercial: a woman's voice-over (that's the most necessary component to make a successful depression commercial), a "before" scene, in which the characters are plagued by sadness and depression (or a weird black blob - whatever), and an "after" scene, in which the doctor and/or the drug itself saves the character and shows her the light (literally).
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Last but not least, in the "after" scene where the depression is cured, the character MUST be seen outside either camping or picnicking. This is imperative.
There's a lot of window-gazing in this commercial. My favorite part is when the commercial makes a revelation: "Cymbalta can help." The piano music, which was at first slow and melancholic, immediately picks up, and that's when the peaceful, thoughtful looking-out-the-window moments start happening. Just like that, Cymbalta was able to cure those peoples' depression and make them happy again.
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What are the redeeming features of commercials like this? Well...there aren't really that many from my perspective. It seems like the attempt was to show everyday people living their everyday lives, but the music and the woman's soft, monotone voice gives the whole thing a melodramatic vibe. At the very least, though, this commercial seems to take depression seriously; they want you to know that they realize you're in pain, and they sympathize with that pain, and they want to help. But that sympathetic angle they take is overdone - so much that it becomes laughable.
Abilify is especially cringe-worthy, though, because it's so silly and cartoonish. There is no indication in their commercials that they care to take the illness seriously - if they did, it probably wouldn't be such a cutesie animation. So how can we expect the people seeing these commercials to take depression seriously? It's quite possible that commercials like these contribute to the gap I'm talking about - the one where the illness is not widely understood by the general population. It's no wonder anyone who feels sad calls themselves depressed when Cymbalta shows such a laughable version of the condition, and it's no wonder many people don't take it that seriously when Abilify animates the whole situation. And it's really no surprise that the overcoming of depression is widely misunderstood when pharmaceutical companies give the impression of a magic pill.
The thing is, I can tell that nobody take these ads seriously because for every depression commercial you google, twice as many parody versions appear. There are countless parodies for Zoloft, Prozac, Abilify, Cymbalta, and more, everything from video spoofs to memes.
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It's made its way into popular culture through comedy, which is not exactly the ideal way for people to be talking about depression. Granted, Cymbalta probably didn't intend for their commercial to inspire memes, but they did make a commercial that put them in a vulnerable place to be made fun of. They are, quite frankly, an easy target. The woman's voice, the overload of sympathy, the darkness to lightness metaphor - these commercial tropes have led to a subgenre of depression commercials, which tend to either dramatize the problem or turn it into an umbrella, a bathrobe, or a cute black blob.
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Do you need more proof that depression ads have seeped into the realm of pop-culture comedy and become a comedic subgenre all their own? It doesn't get much more popular than David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, both of whom in the videos below create parodies of depression commercials as comedic political commentary.
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So yes, I think pharmaceutical ads are somewhat responsible for popular conceptions of depression and how some people respond to depression as an illness. Don't get me wrong - I'm cynical enough to believe people will always find ways to make fun of things like depression, but I think when pharmaceutical ads (which have otherwise built a reputation as some of the most boring ads on TV) start to become a source of comedy, there's a problem in how we're thinking about the illness. Ads for depression pharmaceuticals are special because they themselves don't seem to acknowledge that depression is an illness - they're unlike any other pharmaceutical ad out there, and they've built a subgenre around the lighthearted misrepresentation of depression, which ultimately makes depression itself a target for parody.
Depression: Parodying Disease
Examining Popular Pharmaceutical Advertisements
Antidepressant advertisements are challenging to do well just by virtue of their being advertisements. We all know that every ad has one goal: to sell. In order to do that, the commercial ad must identify a target audience and try to create a short video which will entice those target viewers to buy their product. So since women are more likely than men to be diagnosed with depression, it makes sense that women are the key figures in all of the ads I will be discussing here.
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Selling pharmaceuticals to depressives is no easy feat. Here are just a few reasons why:
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Every antidepressant comes with a massive list of side-effects; you'll notice this is many of the ads because it takes half the commercial just to list them all. This freaks people out.
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These are drugs that are supposed to mess with the chemical make-up of your brain. Anybody who has been on any sort of medication like this knows that antidepressants are highly individual: every patient needs to figure out for himself what special cocktail of drugs works for him, which takes trial and error. This probably makes it less likely for someone to see a commercial and want to give it a whirl.
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Plenty of depressives are in denial that they even have depression. Similar to leprosy, there is a moral element built into the illness wherein the patient may experience a certain level of guilt or shame for having it. So if you're marketing a drug to a population of patients who might not even think they need medication, you're in for a fun time.
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Or, if a depressive's denial is not due to feelings of shame, it could just be that they don't have an understanding of the symptoms of depression. Many people aren't sure how to distinguish between normal sadness and depression.
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Even if the patient is not in denial about her illness, there is even greater shame attached to the idea that you might need medication in order to deal with it. Depression may just be the only disease where others expect a patient to get better by sheer force of will. (Shout out to the gap).
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All this is to say that I empathize with the plight of marketers faced with the challenge of selling antidepressants. They face the task of describing the illness and its symptoms, hiring actors with whom depressives might identify, convincing depressives that they need medical treatment, convincing them that their drug in particular will help them, and so on. And all the while, they're not necessarily concerned with what non-depressives might think about the ad, because they're not the people who might buy the product.
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So it makes sense that most (if not all) TV commercials for antidepressants are problematic in a lot of ways.
Take this Cymbalta commercial, for instance: