Steven Soderbergh's 'Side Effects' Team Takes On Depression In America

Steven Soderbergh, who has tackled such hot-button topics as environmental pollution (Erin Brockovich), the war on drugs (Traffic) and epidemiological preparedness (Contagion) in the course of his multi-faceted career, takes on the pharmaceutical industry and the pills it promotes to treat depression in his newest film, Side Effects, which premiered Thursday night in New York at the AMC Lincoln Square.

A thriller, Side Effects takes a closer look at antidepressant drugs -- and the writers and producers behind the film were not shy about their desire to explore the often-taboo topic.

"There are a lot of people who suffer from depression, and a lot of those people are certainly helped by medication, the films screenwriter,Scott Z. Burns, said. "And then there are a lot of people who are sad, who are not depressed, who see ads on TV and feel these medications might be a shortcut to the place they want to go. And thats a concern. I think that when psychiatry is, like any branch of medicine, when its practiced responsibly, thats a great thing."

The film stars Rooney Mara as Emily, a depressed woman whose husband (Channing Tatum) is unshackled after four years in prison for insider trading. When he emerges from the clink, she falls back into a clinical depression that first enveloped her when his prison sentence started.

Soon after the sorrow returns, Emily crashes her car into a wall in a seeming suicide attempt that lands her under the care of a psychiatrist (Jude Law), who begins a mix-and-match attempt to find the SSRI that will best lift her from depression. Everywhere she turns, there is someone in her life offering advice on which pill is best, relaying their own experiences with various antidepressants; paired with segments that feature physicians name-checking drugs from Celexa to Zoloft, the first third of the film points out the ubiquity of the medicines in todays society.

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Burns worked closely on the script, which he was once supposed to direct, with Dr. Sasha Bardey, a psychiatrist and instructor at New York University who works on mental illness cases in the criminal justice system and served as one of the film's producers. Bardey elaborated on Burns distinction between the depressed and sad, offering a more clinical split.

"The line is where it impacts on your functioning," he explained. You should be sad if you lose a loved one, you lose a job, you get divorced, you should be sad. But if youre getting up, youre putting your clothes on, you go to work, you do what you need to do, youre just sad. But if your functioning is impaired, then youre depressed, and then sometimes you need either medication or psychotherapy, or really, both."

Bardey added that many people are medicated unnecessarily, while many who do need it go without treatment. Indeed, a 2011 study found that 11 percent of Americans over the age of 12 take antidepressants, but only a third of those that suffer from severe depression take medication for that affliction. That serves as something of an indictment of pharmaceutical companies and their heavy advocacy, both in advertising -- which is mocked in the movie and on a website created for the fictional drug it features -- and interaction with doctors.

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Steven Soderbergh's 'Side Effects' Team Takes On Depression In America