Dialogue: Beware the men in white coats

By ROANNE PARKER

Master Ten is very proud of the fact that he was conceived in the United States. He's even been to Disneyland, although he was only about 3cm long at the time.

He still calls himself an Australian, where he was born and spent the first seven years of his life. But at least he's stopped telling me he wants to move back to Melbourne as soon as he's old enough to play Australian football for the Tigers.

When an adult has lived in another country for a few years, you can end up at a bit of a loss as to where you really belong on the planet. But he was caught young enough, I hope, that he will eventually come around to the fact that he's a Kiwi.

It was that fact that got me back here. He was sitting at the Bledisloe Cup at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and - shock, horror - he was cheering for the Aussies. That was it, the defining moment, when I knew he'd be lost forever to the green and gold if we didn't move sooner rather than later.

But it's the Americans who had the biggest impact. Living there 11 years ago was fantastic. I loved it. I loved the fact that it all looked just as it did on television.

There were lots of amazing things that living there opened my eyes to. I loved all that junk food. We are making a sterling effort to catch up now, but we will never reach the truly amazing heights of junk food greatness of the Americans.

In fact, I just read about the newest sensation in the American supermarkets - single-serve peanut-butter slices. Don't you love it? No more messy knives in jars - just unwrap and slap it on your sandwich.

And all those drugstores. I was reminded of our changes in the restrictions of advertising of prescription medicine as I watched my weekly TV fix and noticed that, all of a sudden, the pharmaceuticals are advertising. A lot.

In two hours I was touted asthma medication, nostrums for headaches, coughs, colds and flu, antacids, anti-inflammatories - they were all there.

Back then in the US it was everywhere, all over the screen, and it was so different from home that it stood out. There was a fixation with douches that perplexed me - vinegar douches, herbal fresh douches. What the heck's a douche anyway? And drugs for constipation and diarrhoea, incontinence, indigestion, obesity, malnutrition and on and on.

All these gorgeous Americans told me night after night about their most embarrassing moments before Drug X, Y or Z saved them from their own bodies.

By all accounts things haven't changed much there, and reading an article in the Economist had me gasping.

In an attempt to offset losing the cash cow represented by the patent for Prozac, one of the most profitable and heavily marketed drugs ever, its manufacturer, Eli Lilly, has relaunched the drug in a pretty pink capsule called Sarafem. So what is Sarafem? Well, if you read the fine print, it's Prozac in fact.

And happily for the company, researchers have reportedly discovered a new illness for which doctors can diagnose and prescribe Sarafem. And Eli Lilly can, coincidentally, offset the loss of its star earner with a newly patented drug which will ensure it cannot be replaced by a generic clone at the drugstore.

So, ladies, just when you thought chocolate was the answer to that irritability, moodiness and bloating, from here on in it is to be known as premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) and you can turn to a full-on, brain-doping anti-depressant instead.

On the Eli Lilly website you can read the audacious claim that Sarafem is the first and only approved prescription treatment for both the mood and physical symptoms of PMDD. Well, wonder why?

Launched with a patronising TV campaign showing a man being snapped at by his grumpy wife ("Oh, my God, she must be out of her mind. Quick, get that woman some drugs."), Sarafem is the spectre of the instant cure come to life.

You can just about hear 100 million husbands pointing to the screen saying, "Oi, that's what you've got, you grumpy old cow".

I suppose the play on the word seraphim is supposed to imply that the drug will turn you into an angel of the highest order.

No doubt Eli Lilly has engineered a marketing coup, but how on earth could it have got away with it? It's one thing to tell women that their womanly bits smell bad and they should flush themselves inside out with toilet cleaner, or whatever it is they make douches out of.

It's another to invent a serious illness out of being female, which has somehow escaped discovery until 2001.

As the Economist so eloquently put it: "Whether PMDD is real or not, women beware. Those men in white coats really are after you."