From the debut of Prozac in 1988, 10 years before direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising, one of the top-performing drug categories in the United States was depression drugs. Because depression has no drug or lab test and pop culture has convinced many that life should be one big “buzz” of extreme happiness, “depression” sailed Pharma through the 1990s and 2000s—even sometimes when people really didn’t probably have it. Certainly, if you had money, job, and career problems, family and relationship problems, or many kinds of health problems, you could be “unhappy” but not necessarily “depressed.”
Whereas drugs like Valium and Librium were once prescribed for “anxiety,” anxiety was redefined as “really” depression during the blockbuster antidepressant years and was treated with the new drug class. In fact, 10 years after DTC advertising began, the number of Americans on antidepressants had doubled to 27 million, or 10 percent of the population! Nor was it probably a marketing coincidence that unlike anxiety drugs, antidepressants were not taken as needed but taken every day, for years. Ka-ching.
