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Images used to sell psychotropic drugs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2021

John H. Owen
Affiliation:
University Department of Mental Health, 41 St Michael's Hill, Bristol BS2 8D2
Matthew Jelley
Affiliation:
Fromeside Clinic, Stapleton, Bristol BS16 1ED
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Advertisers use powerful images to sell everything from cars to coffee, from banks to baked beans. That this should also apply to pharmaceuticals then is unsurprising. Whatever view we as clinicians might take of drugs, for their manufacturers they are a product like any other, and doctors are the natural targets for their promotion. In 1982 the pharmaceutical industry spent £150,000,000 on drug promotion in the UK (Medawar, 1984). We have attempted to take an objective view of drug advertisements by examining the images used in all the advertisements that have appeared in the British Journal of Psychiatry over the last 30 years.

Type
The Times
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, 1992

References

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