Black Dogs and Blue Words: Depression and Gender in the Age of Self-Care

By Kimberly Emmons
Rutgers University Press

Jerry Seinfeld jokes that pharmaceutical companies could save time by naming all of their antidepressants “Cramitol” (“Cram it all”). Kimberly Emmons would likely agree. Her eye-opening Black Dogs and Blue Words opens up an original, potentially life-changing perspective on antidepressants and the companies who market them. Emmons, an English professor at Case Western Reserve University and an expert in medical rhetoric, offers shocking and persuasive evidence that women are not only the targets of these ads, but have become complicit in the targeting.

Emmons builds her case brick by brick. Although her prose is academic and dense in places, the slowly building logic and the reader’s ensuing sense of outrage make the book as hard to put down as any who-dun-it. In fact, the book is its own brand of who-dun-it. How did women become Big Pharma bulls-eyes? Solving the mystery requires understanding how the language of antidepressant advertising both reflects and shapes gender stereotypes. To illustrate, Emmons dissects print and broadcast ads word by word and frame by frame. She points out how words such as “excessive crying," “fatigue," “loss of zest,” and “tearfulness” have long been used in our culture to describe women’s emotions and alleged deficits, and how drug manufacturers have co-opted the phrasing to describe depression.

It gets worse. Analyzing the photographs that accompany the ads, Emmons demonstrates how they reflect our societal norms of acceptable female behavior. The ads feature sad women standing apart from their family, women whose disappointed children accuse them of being “no fun anymore,” and protective fathers with their arms around children, standing apart from mom, fixing her with baleful stares. Next frame, the woman diagnoses herself with depression. Next, she is shown at her doctor’s office requesting antidepressants, and, presto, next frame, the woman has been restored to her acceptable “gendered self.” How do we know? She reports her progress as she shops for the family groceries, or while playing with her children, or while involved in some other womanly scenario. Emmons also surveys children’s literature and that women’s magazine staple, the self-diagnostic quiz, with equally interesting and well-considered conclusions.

One of the book’s most fascinating chapters traces the history of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which, as the title implies, spells out the criteria for diagnosing psychiatric illnesses. In one of her biggest bombshells, Emmons reveals that much of the language employed by Big Pharma to describe depression is not found in the DSM. Rather, drug manufacturers have cherry-picked synonyms primarily associated with women. Women absorb the ads, diagnose themselves with depression and make a beeline for the doctor’s office. The doctor, bombarded by the same marketing and lacking the time for a more in-depth probing, agrees. Prescription signed. Pills sold. And so we circle.

But don’t think that Emmons is anti-antidepressant, because she isn’t. Her view is much more reasoned. She acknowledges the good that medication can do under the right circumstances. But she also urges women to go from a regime of self-doctoring to a regime of self-care. Emmons uses “self-doctoring” to refer to women’s willingness to buy into the pharma-philosophy that emotional and social malaise stem from chemical problems which only can have chemical solutions. By accepting this rhetoric, says Emmons, women deprive themselves of their own personal narrative, one which may have little or nothing to do with clinical depression. In contrast, self-care involves reacting to signals that something is not right with a conscious surveying of one’s life and all its circumstances. Perhaps medication will help. Or perhaps a much more profound change is in order. Learning how we have been manipulated, our lives altered by corporate profiteering, is depressing. Pass me the Cramitol. On second thought, don’t. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Review by T. Tamara Weinstein

Lifting Depression: A Neuroscientist's Hands-On Approach to Activating Your Brain's Healing Power

By Kelly Lambert
Basic Books

"Depression hurts," chimes the television announcer. Most people have been depressed at some point in their lives, whether from a life-changing event or simply a bad patch of circumstance. I am willing to wager that if you haven’t been there yourself, you know someone who has suffered from depression. The pharmaceutical industry is now doling out pills to treat depression and a large portion of our population is taking them, some with marked results, some going from pill to pill searching for the perfect cocktail that will relieve them of pain and anxiety, fear and restlessness.

In her book Lifting Depression, Dr. Kelly Lambert explores the reasons why people born in the middle of the twentieth century are ten times more likely to suffer from major depression compared to people born in the early twentieth century. Why, in our modern day convenience-filled society, do people seem to be so ill at ease? Dr. Lambert is the chair of psychology at Randolph-Macon College and President of the Behavioral Neuroscience Society, and her research has been featured on ABC’s World News Tonight and in Scientific American Mind.

In one experiment she conducted with rats, some had to work hard for rewards, and some they dubbed the "trust fund rats" were simply given the treats. After five weeks, the hard working rats were sixty percent more persistent in trying to work on a new task. She describes this as "learned persistence," and theorizes that coming from our agrarian roots, the human brain receives stimulation from doing concrete tasks like working with our hands, and accomplishing something you can hold as the fruit of your labor, "effort driven rewards." Her studies find that engaging the effort driven rewards circuit of your brain appears to be equivalent to taking a dose of the most powerful antidepressants. With this in mind, she suggests that something like "behavioral activation therapy" can work to retrain your brain to be happier in the long term. With this form of therapy, a person learns how to alter their behavioral responses to situations and even change their environments to stimulate the brain into feeling more rewarded and therefore relieving the subject of their depression. She is not advocating the end of pharmaceutical intervention to lift someone out of a lethargic and depressed state. But she maintains that without some other form of therapy, or alteration in activities, a person could simply remain on these drugs, without ever being able to get out of the cycle completely.

This book is not only a valuable addition to the field of psychology in an academic sense, but it is also a readable guide book that I would recommend to anyone struggling with depression or seeking to understand how they could offer better guidance to a person who is.

It seems so simple, to engage in exercise, to take up knitting or woodworking as a way to engage the brain in a new rewards program that will assist in finding happiness. But if it is so simple, (and inexpensive!), then why are most people advised by their healthcare providers to just pop the pill and carry on as usual?

Review by Jen Wilson Lloyd

Mathilda Savitch

By Victor Lodato
Picador

Despite years of being told not to, I immediately judged Victor Lodato’s novel Mathilda Savitch by the cover. I opened it expecting to speed through a mature version of Harriet the Spy with a twist of Tim Burton’s eccentricity. The title suggested a fantastic world not unlike Coraline; however, the fantasy of Mathilda Savitch is of the saddest shade.

Young Mathilda Savitch is a teenager who introduces herself in the first line of the book by saying, “I want to be awful.” Disoriented by the sudden death of her older sister Helene, Mathilda descends into an internal world of obsessive compulsive habits, nightmares, and delusion. Her home reflects her dark imagination, as her mother has succumbed to depression and alcoholism while her father weakly tries to maintain the family’s previous levity.

Mathilda Savitch is bitterly funny at times, reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye or The Bell Jar. While it’s supposed to be a coming-of-age story—addressing menstruation, sexual experimentation, as well as basic rebellion—it feels more like a moment fixed in time.

While there are wonderful moments in the book, it isn’t flawless. A parallel theme of terrorism felt superficial and gratuitous. I also wasn’t completely convinced by Mathilda’s voice, especially when it came to puberty and sexuality. As a woman, I did not sense authenticity in these moments as I did when she was frustrated with her parents or missing her sister. Her thoughts, which compose the majority of the book, often sound more like staged monologues.

In fact, Lodato is a playwright and a poet, and this is his debut novel. Bits of the text read like poetry—“Window eyes, a window nose, and a door for a mouth”—while other parts sound like a play. Overall, however, Lodato has captured a painful stream of consciousness. I could imagine myself as a sometimes unhappy teenager wanting to find a dark place, alone, to obsess over Mathilda Savitch like a secret friend. This is a book worth reading, and although a fast read, it is not best suited for the beach.

Review by Claire Burrows

JENNY McCARTHY - Suavenomics ?

Jenny McCarthy has teamed up with Suave shampoo to promote their new ‘Beauty Stimulus Campaign’ also known as Suavenomics. The actress hit Times Square in bustling Manhattan and waved a placard.



I love marketing and advertising in general, but the audacity of the ad companies to aggressively market a recession in the middle of a recession to the victims of the recession is mind boggling ! Kudos Gentlemen Kudos !
Suave's suavenomics campaign