Shakespeare and anti-depression ads

http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/medshow/jackass.html

I can just hear my high school English teacher groaning at this ad for Cipramil, an anti-depressant that incorporates Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Dream into its ad. The man in the photo has the “head of an ass,” referencing the character of Tom Bottom from the play. “He got lost and fell asleep in the woods. Now he has the head of an ass and the queen of the fairies wants to marry him. The last thing he needs is more complications,” the ad states. Honestly, it took reading this a few times to understand what this was trying to say; probably because I’m too familiar with the Shakespeare play and was trying to figure out why, out of all the characters to pick from, they chose Bottom, who is possibly one of the least depressed and depressing characters from Shakespeare.

My offense at their lack of understanding towards English literature aside, the ad continues on: “Do you dream of an uncomplicated antidepressant? Chances are you're dreaming of Cipramil. It's effective, well tolerated and associated with a low risk of drug interactions. In other words, Cipramil helps to make treating depression or panic disorder less of a performance.” Oy, theater puns. Like Cipramil’s slogan, “Anti-depression not anti-patient,” this drug appeals to the simplicity of this treatment and the belief that it will not cause troubling side effects like other medications can (though reading about it on Wikipedia, it didn’t sound that much safer). The creators of this ad seem to present that curing depression is just s simple as taking a pill, and that all the drama the depressed victim is suffering now will be as gone as instantly as Bottom’s troubles at the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Troubling, considering that overcoming depression generally takes more than only medication. It’s interesting to me that the entire ad focuses on depression treatment, until the little blurb where panic disorder is added into the treatment options for Cipramil, as if panic disorder and depression were one and the same. In fact, using the man with the donkey head seems to reference anxiety more than depression, so it’s a bit weird that it’s not more prominently mentioned.

Of course, this ad makes a very basic assumption – that you will, in fact, know that the man with the donkey head refers to a play. This ad seems to be designed for a certain audience – one of a specific educational background, culture, and class. Yet I feel like the idea depression or anxiety has something to do with an ass-headed man could lead to some terrible miscommunications even among its target audience – or increase the stigma mental disorders have by associating a character in the midst of a freakish magical mishap with a depressed patient. Even understanding the reference doesn’t really help make much sense of this ad in my mind. It’s a rather strange strategy for trying to sell medication and makes me wonder how affective it was.