Psychotropic Drugs Advertisements and the Society

Drug abuse refers to use of consumption of drugs for other reasons other than the one the manufacturer intends. People abuse drugs because they induce a wide variety of physical and emotional effects that differ from normal body functions. However, substance abuse causes numerous adverse and undesirable health effects on an individual. For instance, cocaine consumption gives an individual an attractive high that makes them feel relaxed and happy for some time. After the effects of the drug wears away, a patient suffers from a crash that is characterized by fatigue, anxiety, depression, and extreme desire for more cocaine. Although there are several types of drugs that are often abused, psychotropic drugs lead in the class of the most abused substances. These drugs interfere with normal functioning of the mind. This research argues that advertisement of psychotropic drugs makes a mockery of the difficulty and pain associated with living with mental illness.

Advertisements of psychotropic drugs allegedly help to inform the public so that they can choose appropriate drugs. However, drug manufacturers mislead the public using diverse misleading statements. For instance, the commercials convince patients that depression and other associated mental issues result from a chemical imbalance. This misconception comes from Ashcroft’s 1960 research, which asserts that serotonin concentration in depressed patients is lower than in a patient who is not depressed. SSRIs advertisements convince the public that it requires taking these drugs in order to stabilize their emotions (Rubin, 2006). On the same note, the advertisements try to convince patients depressed patients that they can only resolve their psychological problems through taking drugs. Nonetheless, these ads are not honest because depression can emanate from normal life events. A simple improvement of the lifestyle of an individual can in turn help a patient to improve his/her depression.

Advertisements make a mockery difficulty and pain associated with mental illnesses since they convince patients that prescription and OTC drugs are the best, and only, solution for managing and controlling pain associated with mental conditions (Nugent & Oswego, 2007). According to the chemical imbalance theory insinuated by these ads, a patient may suffer from depression naturally one day when walking down the street because of reduced chemicals in the system. These advertisements fail to inform people that there are alternative methods of overcoming depression such as improving an individual’s lifestyle. In addition, they do not inform patients that there is no empirical evidence to support their claim on the ability to heal depression. Many drugs are only able to suppress depression temporarily through catalyzing specific brain organs to produce chemicals that counter depression such as endorphins.

Psychotropic dugs advertisements main aim is promoting sales of the respective company. For instance, manufacturers claim that mental disorders are common in order to convince many people that they might be suffering from depression unknowingly. According to a Sharon et al (1994, pp. 1343 – 1350), 6.64 million elderly Americans living in the community centers received wrong medication at least once in 1994. The patients took these drugs in the form of prescription of drugs. The most commonly advertised psychotropic drugs include diazepam, amitriptyline, Dipyridamole, indomethacin, chloropamide and chlordiazepexide. In addition, drug manufacturers do promote drugs containing controversial cardiovascular ingredients such as such as reserpine, propanol and methyldopa. Drugs containing these ingredients are classified among contraindicated medications. In many cases, some psychotropic drugs only offer temporary treatment solutions; thereby, making patients to use the substances for a long period. Similarly, advertisements that do not give accurate chemical composition of the drugs make patients to abuse psychotropic drugs through taking larger or smaller doses than the recommended amount (Sharon et al., 1994).

In many psychotropic drug advertisements, pharmaceutical companies outline various general symptoms that can help the patient to identify when they are suffering from a mood disorder. Among these examples include normal human emotion such as irritability, anxiety, restlessness and worry. While these conditions are in normal conditions viewed as distinct and unrelated, mental illnesses drugs integrate them as the basis for depression. However, the ads do not define whether patients are supposed to experience some of these symptoms or they have to occur all of them in order for one to start taking the advertised regimen. On the same note, advertisements do not offer detailed exceptions of people who should not take these drugs and the reasons when patients should stop using them (Mojtabai, 2010). This implies that the sole intention of these ads is informing the public about possible drugs that can help to control mental disorders. The ads often contain convincing language that makes patients and doctors insist on specific mental illness medications that may result from other reasons apart from mental issues.

The advertisements for psychotropic drugs should not be in radio, internet, and television because they do not accurate information. Many symptoms associated with mental illnesses and conditions intended to be treated with the drugs can result from a wide range of conditions unrelated to mental health. In addition, many patients believe the advertisements; hence, they opt to take drugs without medical analysis. Since many people have convent access to the internet and other media technologies, people who many people are misled by the advertisements. For instance, many advertisements caution mothers against using antidepressant drugs, during pregnancy, on the basis that they can harm their children. However, Sinclair (2012) refutes this claim based on Nulman’s research. The research stated that the IQ of children is influenced by that of their mothers, instead, of psychotropic medication.

References
Sharon, et al. (1994). Inappropriate drug prescribing for the community _Dwelling elderly. JAMA, July, 1994. (272). 4.
Nugent, M. & Oswego, S. (2007). Direct to consumer advertising of psychotropic medications and its role in perception of mental illness. Internet resource. Retrieved on 21 November, 2013 from http://www.oswego.edu/Documents/wac/Public%20Justice.pdf
Sinclair, L. (2012). Caution Urged Before Stopping Antidepressants in Pregnancy. Psychiatric News, American Psychiatric.
Mojtabai, R. (2010). National Trends in Psychotropic Medication Polypharmacy in Office-Based Psychiatry. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2010;67(1):26-36.
Rubin, L. C. (2006). Psychotropic drugs and popular culture: Essays on medicine, mental health and the media. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Company.

PSYCHOTROPIC DRUGS ADVERTISEMENTS AND THE SOCIETY 2

Running Head: PSYCHOTROPIC DRUGS ADVERTISEMENTS AND THE SOCIETY 1

Choose a consumer group and research…

Introduction

The generation Y consists of individuals that were born in between 1980 and 2000. There are referred to as the digital generation or the Dot.com generation as well. They generally prefer to be called the millennial generation. Generation Y are the bulk of the world’s present population. And they are every passing day increasing in the job market as well as becoming the major segment of consumers (Hoke, 2004). This generation is the first one that has been brought up with the internet in place. They have been brought up in a world where there is immense flow of information that is consumed by them even involuntarily at times. As such, they tend to be more informed than their parents ever were at their age.

The products that these consumers of generation Y go for are those that create a kind of ambience as opposed to those that create a function that were favored by their parents. Marketers should therefore switch from selling products to the millennial generation and start selling a community experience.

Generation Y’s Demographics

By the year 2000, there were around 80 million individuals in the united states that were 18 years and below. That means there are about 80 million people in America falling in the age bracket of the millennia generation. They are the children of either the Baby Boomers or Generation X. the oldest among them currently hold entry level positions in the job market while the youngest are either in elementary school or middle school. They are ethnically diverse and 25 percent of them live or have grown up in a single parent home. 3 out of 4 of them have working mothers and they have the highest level of education when compared with the earlier generations. The females among them will most likely in future earn more than their male counterparts since the rates of admissions to colleges have been in their favor. College graduates leave college and start life with a debt of $ 25,000 or $30,000.

Psychographics

The millennial generation is distrustful of the mainstream media and packaged messages. They are not persons that tolerate hypocrisy but prefer to have direct and straight forward messages given to them when communicating. They are generally optimistic and tend to seek instant gratification. They have high expectations of the products that they buy. They are not worrying about the prices of products, but care about the quality of the merchandise they buy. They love having fun, are progressive yet having traditions and reject gender inequalities.

Echo Boomers are protective of their privacy and respect the values of others though different from theirs. They embrace diversity and consider the environment to be very important. They are very technologically savvy and value the accessibility of information more than the format or presentation of the information. For them, content and technology are inseparable. They aim to please and expect the same from others. They consider communication by word of mouth to be more reliable than other forms of communication.

Their Buying Patterns of buying

In order to capture the y generation consumers, one has to sell a lifestyle as stressed above as opposed to a product. They are concerned about looking hip and having fun, and if a marketer manages to sell them a lifestyle, then they have gotten them. They are brand conscious and tend to go for the brands that align with their preferences, lifestyles and standards. They prefer activeness compared to observation and directness to subtlety which they consider to be vagueness. They rely on the community hence the marketers approach should be community based rather than reaching out to the masses. Before making a decision to buy something, they usually seek reviews of their target product and depend mostly on word of mouth from their peers. They are so much into social networking, which is their way of reinforcing their communal thinking and sharing of ideas and preferences through word of mouth.

Interviewing a Generation Y Person

The researcher identified a 24 year old generation Y male for interview and sought to know the individual’s attitude, lifestyle and consumer habits. After having an interactive session with the interviewee the following facts became apparent:

In terms of information, the young man had little trust for the information disseminated by the mainstream media. He claimed he would depend on the news posted on the internet. He felt that news in media houses gets edited a little too much in order to brainwash the public. He said he does try to be a free thinker, and one of the best ways to do so is to avoid getting fed the opinions of a few powerful corporates every passing day. He appeared to be a straight forward person and sometimes he was blunt in answering the interview queries. Price of commodities seemed not to matter to him and he claimed that quality of the products or services rendered is what matters most.

As far as his lifestyle mattered, the found that he is a fitness fanatic with the morning hours being dedicated to street workout. The food consumed by him is carefully selected and must be healthy, though he admitted to at times letting go of his guard and consuming foods considered unhealthy. His guard is let down when having fun especially at parties. The generation Yer was open-minded as his views regarding religion and morals in general appeared very liberal. He admitted to be a chronic social networker having 6 active Facebook accounts and 3 active twitter accounts. He explained further that every single account in the social networking sites has its specific set of friends. The aim, it seemed to the researcher was to reach as many people as possible.

Reference

Hoke, L. (2004). The millennial generation and strategic opportunities for your club. Club Management, 83(4), 20-24.

Kehrli, S., & Sopp, T. (2006). Managing generation Y. HRMagazine, 51(5), 113-114,116,119

Find and Redirect Commands

Using Find and Redirect Commands to Troubleshoot

The Find Command is a tool used in troubleshooting to search the file system so as to locate directories and files and this depends on the specific criteria you have used to carry out the search. One of the reasons for using the find command is to locate files that have a pattern that do not match. The “-not” in the find command is used to find files that have names that do not match for example, if one wants to come up with a list of files that do not have html as the ending, then one has to type: find. –type f –not –name “*.html” (Alexander, 2013).

The other reason for using the find command is to locate directories by using the –d option to replace with the –f option for example the command find .-type d –name countries can be used to locate files that are named countries. The find command can also be used to print one file that has been found during the search instead of printing all the files that match the search. This can be achieved by combining the grep and the find commands. One should therefore use the –I argument for example: find . –type f –name “*.java” –exec grep -1 StringBuffer {} ; .This helps in finding files that have the StringBuffer characters and also to find directories with .java as their extension (Alexander, 2013).

Redirect Command

The redirect command operator is very useful in Linux to troubleshoot since the Linux shell always sends to standard output the result of a command and therefore one can use the redirection to send the information in a different direction to a file that has its name. In case a file does not exist, then it will be created using the redirect command. A double redirector >> prevents one from overwriting a file that is already existing. The other reason for using a redirect command is to redirect messages that have been sent by error when using other commands. One therefore has to avoid using > but use 2>. For example, in case one gets error messages while using 1s -1, then you can use 1s -1 2> which will help create file errors in the directory that is current and this will help send all the errors to that file (Vugt, 2009, p. 15).

The redirect command can also be used to send to one direction the standard results that have been obtained from a command. For example, the file error and the regular output without errors can be created by using the command 1s -1 output 2> errors. The other reason for using the redirect command is to redirect the Linux devices instead of sending to another file the results obtained from a command. For example the /dev/null device can be used as a waste bin to redirect error message to this device by using the command 1s -1 2> /dev/null (Vugt, 2009, p.15) The Command piping is a redirection operator that can be used multiple times if one wants to use an output on another command instead of sending the results to a device, file or a display. An example is whereby the sort command sorts the directory in an alphabetical order after receiving output from the Dir command by using the command Dir / Sort>filelist.txt (Bhardwaj, 2006, p.35)

References

Alexander, A. (2013). Find Linux/Unix FAQ. Retrieved from http://alvinalexander.com/unix/edu/examples/find.shtml

Bhardwaj (2006). How to cheat at windows system administration using command line scripts. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=RPbQswG_i2EC&pg=PA35&dq=find+and+redirect+commands+in+IT&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7IucUrKBEqKy0QW-moDQBQ&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=find%20and%20redirect%20commands%20in%20IT&f=false

Vugt, S. V. (2009). Beginning the Linux command. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=rJW65_Q1yEgC&pg=PA15&dq=find+and+redirect+commands+in+IT&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7IucUrKBEqKy0QW-moDQBQ&ved=0CGQQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=find%20and%20redirect%20commands%20in%20IT&f=false

Research Proposal

Introduction

This research project will seek to address the issue of the relationship between the language spoken by a person and their personality. Specifically, it will aim at comparing the personality of English speakers to that of other European languages such as French, German and Spanish. With English being the most widespread language on globally, native English speakers generally exhibit a feeling of entitlement and are also more assertive compared to persons proficient in other languages (Grosjeans, par 5).

Background Information

Little research been done on the personalities projected by speakers of various languages. A study was however done on bilinguals having the ability to communicate in English to determine whether a change in the language spoken is accompanied by a shift in personality. One of the subjects claimed to feel tongue tied when communicating with native English speakers whilst feeling witty and much at home when among his Hispanic buddies (Grosjeans, par 3). In the same study, a lady of Greek origin intimated to the researcher that she felt very polite when communicating in English but felt but felt rude when speaking Greek. A study done on Japanese-American women by Professor Ervin Trip revealed that they assumed different if not conflicting attitudes when speaking first in Japanese, and then in English. One lady in particular exhibited a more assertive stance when making a presentation in English than she did in Japanese language (Grosjeans, par 4).

Another research done on Chinese students who were fluent in English showed that they became more outgoing when communicating in in English as opposed to speaking Cantonese (Wilkins, par 3). The extrovert behavior observed when they communicated in English became even more amplified when they had an audience consisting of native English speakers. The researchers that carried out this survey however mentioned that most Chinese associate English speaking people with assertiveness and may have altered their behavior to fit into that perception (Wilkins par 4).

Evidence

One of the major methods that the research team will use to collect data on language and personality will be interviews during which video recording will take place so as to effectively gauge the personality of the respondent. Nonverbal cues that maybe lost to the researcher during the interview may then be noticed when analyzing data. The respondents for these interviews will be randomly selected from each of the four language groups. The projects intention is to interview 8 respondents from each language making a total of 32, plus four linguistic and behavioral experts, one from each group. These experts are expected to be of great assistance in analyzing the outcomes. The interview schedule will include an extraversion and introversion scale and the respondents will be given a chance the air their opinion regarding the behaviors of the native speakers of other languages in the research.

Anticipated Difficulties

One of the major challenges will be the selection and recruitment of research team members, as the nature of the research requires that it be composed of native speakers from each of the four languages, that is English, French, German and Spanish. Needless to mention, the problem of language barrier and loss of meaning of responses upon translation is something the research team will have to contend with. Finally, the instruments to be used in the research and the consultation fees to be paid to the linguistic and behavior experts will exert a financial strain on the research team.

Conclusion

This research will go a long way in affirming or discounting the notion that English speakers are generally extroverts compared to other Europeans. It will also give an insight into how the native speakers of each language view the others. This will also provide a template for further research in the same field.

Works cited

Grosjean, Francois. “Change of Language, Change of Personality?” Life as a Bilingual 1, Nov 2011: Web 11 October 2013. < http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201111/change-language-change-personality>

Wilkins, Alasdare. “Speaking multiple languages can give you multiple personalities” We Come from the Future. 02 May 2011: Web 11 October 2013. http://io9.com/5797745/speaking-multiple-languages-can-give-you-multiple-personalities