Paxil, Glaxosmithkline: A Psychological Analysis

Depression is a word that is usually associated with negative connotations but from the perspective of a marketing company, is it really a bad thing? For a group of people who are assigned to promote such an idea, they must find a way to manipulate the context of depression into something that is relatable to everyone. This is exactly what the producers of Paxil, GlaxoSmithKline, had done. It was their goal to set in motion a new understanding of sorrow and depression in Japan. Before in Japan, psychiatrists had only bothered to recognize very rare cases of depression, most of whom would be sent into an institution. With Japan being an extremely hard market to sell their SSRIs’, the company brought over psychiatrists and anthropologists who were feted in luxury, in return for their insights. For Paxil to be considered a success, “The objective was to influence, at the most fundamental level, the Japanese understanding of sadness and …show more content…
The Western influence is among the greatest that it can influence the entire world in a manner we ourselves might not even be informed about. The development of a disease in America can cause a new arrival of diseases in places, like Japan, that would have never had a problem with in the first place. This only results in a wildfire around the world. For instance, GlaxoSmithKline manipulated the scientific understanding of the drug for it to fit in a culturally accepted manner in Japan, resulting in a high economic benefit from the sales. In this case, it changed depression into a money making disease and removed the original culture from Japan. The entire idea was American thinking and they tried to install that into the Japanese people. The overall experience was changed by what it should be instead of what it was. Such simple changes in a culture can create a whole new phenomenon on ideas, for better or for worse or maybe