Can antidepressants end the recession?

Rising reliance on antidepressants doesn't benefit Big Pharma exclusively, though. Drug companies are notorious for big marketing campaigns—bolstering revenue streams for businesses that rely on those ads. "Certainly they're contributing big time to advertising revenue," says Charles Barber, author of Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. In the first quarter of 2009, as automotive ads—long the top advertising category in the Unites States—plummeted by 28 percent, according to Nielsen rankings, pharmaceutical ad spending was more consistent. It still dropped, but by only 11 percent. Drug companies were the third biggest spender of ad money in that period. Without those purchases, some media outlets already floundering in the thinned-out ad market would have been much worse off. Take, for example, Redbook, the magazine "for the woman juggling family, career and her own needs," which, according to the most recent figures from the Magazine Publishers of America, saw its ad pages drop 10 percent this spring compared with last year. The September issue of the magazine includes ads for three antidepressants: Pristiq, Cymbalta, and Abilify. Because most depression sufferers are women, female-targeted lifestyle magazines get a particular boost from companies pushing antidepressants.

The most important benefit that antidepressants can provide, of course, is to those taking the medications.  While the salutary effects are just the relief that some people need, a few skeptics have theorized that the pills may change a person's mind-set too much. Nearly a decade ago, Randolph Nesse, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, suggested investors numbed by antidepressants would take risky bets and make bad decisions. They may "become far less cautious than they were before, worrying too little about real dangers," he wrote. He predicted that, as more people turned to prescription medications, the collective effect would cause a Wall Street bubble to grow and burst "with potentially catastrophic economic and political consequences." Did Prozac cause the most recent market free fall? Seems like a stretch, but if so, then maybe the "great recession" should have been called a "depression" all along.