ABSTRACT
This cultural study of a 2015 advertisement for Merck & Co’s sleeping medication Belsomra yields insight into the commodification of health and wellness, and the ideological underpinnings that shape how individuals in Western culture define themselves as productive, responsible, and healthy. It summarizes the broader contexts of direct-to-consumer drug advertising and the sociological scholarship on insomnia to frame a semiotic close reading of the 2015 Belsomra advertisement. To this effect, this chapter details the advertisement’s narrative and filmic strategies, as they navigate the tension between the pejorative connotations attached to “sleeping pills” and the medicalized imperative to live better though chemistry. This analysis demonstrates how interdisciplinary health humanistic work can provide nuanced understandings of the relationship between a drug’s biological, societal, and cultural effects. This reading not only contributes to the existing critiques of medicalization, but also affords a unique opportunity to improve interactions between prescribers and patients by modeling a practice of collaborative interpretation.
