Celebrity endorsements of various products have long struck me as one of the odder features of being human—that is, a tribal primate that lives in a conspicuously hierarchical social structure. Recently, while walking through an airport, I saw the following advertisement that made me wonder what the grandparents of old wine properties in France think of the American advertising endorsements. I once met an old countess who owned a chateau in the Loire Valley. I got the impression from her manners that she would struggle to come to terms with this association.
In 2002, star college and NFL quarterback Ricky Williams appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss his struggles with social anxiety and chronic shyness, and the great remedy he’d obtained by taking the antidepressant Paxil. He did NOT mention in the interview that he was being paid by GlaxoSmithKline to flog its product. About a year later, Williams stated that Paxil wasn’t so great after all and that marijuana worked better for him.
Williams was one of many celebrities who spoke of their struggles with depression. Prozac, the first widely prescribed SSRI antidepressant, became a cultural symbol after its 1987–1988 launch. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s 1994 memoir Prozac Nation framed the drug as both personal salvation and generational marker.
In the early 1990s a wave of public figures—journalist Mike Wallace, Tipper Gore, novelist William Styron, and others—spoke about depression and treatment, thereby promoting the grossly oversimplified notion that depression is merely a neurotransmitter deficiency that can be easily corrected with a pill.
In fact, depression is a complex mental condition that is partly an expression of the mind telling you that you need to make changes in your life, habits, and often the company you keep in order to achieve a more fulfilling life.
Actress Carrie Fisher was one of the most consistent voices on treating her depression with a pharmaceutical product. After her death, her ashes were placed in a porcelain vessel representing a giant Prozac capsule.
Viagra was another blockbuster drug that received numerous celebrity endorsements.
