Advertising for psychotropic drugs in the Nordic countries: metaphors, gender and life situations.

Advertisements for psychotropic drugs which appeared in the leading medical journals in Finland, Sweden and Denmark were analyzed to identify the picture content and trends in advertising between 1975 and 1985. The most common picture was a metaphor, the frequency of which increased in the 1980s. The second largest picture category was a patient, the rate of which remained constant during the study period. Both the use of a metaphor and a patient was related to the low sales of the drug in respective country whereas picture of a drug package was related to a stable market position of a drug in the country. The patients were increasingly depicted as men in the Danish and Swedish journal whereas the pictures of females were most common in the Finnish one. The portrayal of working persons, especially office workers and teachers, was a new feature in the advertisements in the 1980s. It is argued that the drug industry still uses gender as a device to expand their market of psychotropic drugs in a new way.