Narrative Magic and the Construction of Selfhood in Antidepressant Advertising
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the way in which selfhood is constructed in direct-to-consumer advertisements for antidepressant medications. The sample consists of advertisements that appeared in nine popular magazines between 1997 and 2005, television commercials that ran between 2003 and 2005, and online promotional Web sites. The analysis is divided into three sections. First, it is argued that the ads rely on metaphors of communication, information exchange, and plenitude to construct a relationship between biology and selfhood. Second, in offering the choice for antidepressant treatment, the ads grant individuals a new capacity for the exercise of personal agency. Third, the author describes antidepressants as pills that perform a narrative “magic.” In contrast to religious and psychoanalytic narratives that required individuals to incorporate disavowed elements of their selves into an ongoing life narrative, antidepressants are medications that allow individuals to put aside, or jump over, inexplicable and painful moments in their life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".