Abstract: . . .  Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 24, Nos. 1/2, Summer 2003 ( C 2003) Selling Sanity Through Gender: The Psychodynamics of Psychotropic Advertising Jonathan M. Metzl 1 , 2 This paper provides a brief visual history of the ways women patients, and specif- ically women patients whose marital status is identified in conjunction with their “illness,” have been constructed as abnormal in the images of advertisements designed to promote psychotropic medications to an audience of psychiatrists. The advertisements I discuss come from the two largest circulation American psy- chiatric journals, The American Journal of Psychiatry and Archives of General Psychiatry , between the years 1964 and 2001. I use the ads to focus on two con- comitant narratives. On one hand, I show . . .
. . .  a brand-named product, unfolds in a narrative trajectory from top to bottom, left to right, and past to present. 21 These actions would later be attributed to the disinhibition of the neurotransmitter GABA. Page 14 92 Metzl The first of the two-page advertisements (Fig. 2) appeared inside the front cover of the journal in April, 1970. 22 A series of framed pictures, arranged chrono- logically, construct a visual narrative of a woman named Jan. The advertisement invites its viewers to “read” the story of Jan’s fifteen year history of unsuccessful heterosexual relationships after her happy childhood playing tennis with her father (top left). But neither Tom (top, middle), nor the James Dean-like Joey (top, right), nor buff Charlie (middle, right), nor drunken, groping Bunny (bottom, left) mea- sure up to Dad (who reappears in the bottom, middle image). “Jan never found a man to measure up to her father,” the text explains. The narrative’s final photograph (bottom, right) shows Jan alone on a ship, looking forlorn while standing near a life preserver. AsimplecomparisonrevealsaglaringdifferencebetweenDeprolandValium: in the space of six years, the single woman replaces the married woman as the marker of pathology and abnormality. While the Deprol presented marriage as the source . . .
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