The whole ad thing in the US has always been crazy, Alexandra. We have "Joe Camel" selling cigarettes to children and we're forever getting bombarded with beer ads, you have no idea how young and sexy and what a good life I have because I drink a certain kind of beer, LOL.

Most of us make fun of the ads I think; there aren't just mental health drugs being advertised but every drug and over the counter crap you can imagine and not in any particular order since it has to do with what a company will pay. So we get stupid "take this horse pill with 5,000,000 times the Vitamin X you need and you'll be happier than a pig in stinky, brown stuff!" right before or after an ad for a product to clean your bowels of the "accumulated" stinky, brown, stuff and then you get a med ad and as Jeff Foxworthy has joked, one of them had the side effect of "%#@&#! seepage" and that's not something someone wants to chance getting. I told my doctor I didn't want any drug where the side effect was "death" (which some asthma drugs actually have) so we don't just look at the drugs themselves and what they allegedly can do for us, we make fun of the people going from social isolation to being the life of the party and we pay attention to the side effects.

I think there's another side to the 70% as those people probably didn't go to the doctor at all before, didn't know there might be some hope or name to what they had or how to approach it. Look at the number of people who come here and ask questions about "what is this?" There's a lot of truth I think, at least here in the US, to the education thing drug companies do; they at least give a name to situations and maybe a hope where there wasn't one before. As you know, it often takes more than one drug to address a problem; I don't think there are a lot of people who just go to the doctor on a whim though; it's not fun in this country to go to the doctor :-) and through all the hassle. But all the other ads get ignored. I can tell you about pain relief, allergies, asthma meds, little purple pills, sleep meds, etc. (as well as programs to get all meds paid for/at reduced cost) but I am not affected by those because they're not "my" problem (though the asthma is, I have meds that work for that so don't pay much attention to the ads. I don't think I'm different from others?