How advertising for psychotropics constructs an enhanced gendered self

Abstract

This chapter looks at the discourse in advertising for psychotropic drugs (N=200) in Scandinavian medical journals in 2005. The discourse in the ads displaying users (n=89) conveys a gendered image of mental health. The ads promote these drugs as life-enhancement drugs – for handling the lifestyle of a postmodern self – but draw on gendered scripts for promotion of a “healthy” self. This finding suggests that although the neurobiological paradigm prevails, the pictures of users in psycho-pharmaceutical advertising continues to depend on culturally fixed gendered scripts.

Citation

Riska, E. and Heikell, T. (2008), "How advertising for psychotropics constructs an enhanced gendered self", Texler Segal, M. and Demos, V. (Ed.) Advancing Gender Research from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 275-289. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-2126(08)12014-8