Anita Calmdown, a high achiever majoring in bio (on the pre-med track, of course) and political science (pre-law—as a back up) is paving a new career path for overworked, anxious students; in other words, for anyone enrolled at Columbia. How, you might ask, has she done it? Simply put, by commercializing her own suffering.
Anita recently signed a sponsorship deal with Lorazepam as part of a new campaign focused on the drug’s abilities to help keep college students calm amidst the pressures of life and young adulthood. “I don’t need a healthy sleep schedule or a work/life balance—not when I have Lorazepam!” declares a bold headline above a picture of Anita’s smiling face in a new poster produced in this line.
“I haven’t broken down on the phone with my parents in months!” she’s quoted as saying in another. “Actually, my parents would never let me break down on the phone,” Anita shared when asked about this particular poster. “They wanted me to be a doctor, so crying didn’t really fly. But the overwhelming pressure from them has actually really helped me land this new deal, so I guess in the end I have a lot to thank them for.”
These posters and many like them have sprouted up across campus and the city like weeds. Several have even been spotted on official Columbia notice boards, but when asked about such posters, members of the administration seemed divided.
“I’m in full support,” one board member commented, “I don’t think I could deal with this school unmedicated, either.” Other board members seemed to disagree, though. “It’s bullshit,” said one as he tore down a poster. “If I was paying this much to send my kid here, I’d want them as anxious as possible.”
Anita is facing a lot of backlash from students at Columbia and Barnard who claim these brand deals are the ultimate capitulation to capitalist ideals. “My rampant anxiety was the one thing that those money hungry pigs couldn’t touch,” proclaimed one student. “Now they’re taking even that from me!” Such sentiments are shared by many among the student body, who feel Anita’s deal, and deals like it, exploits the suffering of students. Anita doesn’t let that bother her though, and cites the reason for her indifference to their critiques to be “the money, mostly. I’m just trying to afford the occasional Joe’s coffee and print copies of my textbooks, you know, and if this is what it takes, so be it.”
While these brand deals offer an exciting new opportunity for other students like Anita, it seems that Columbia students are still trying to break into the anti-depressant industry. Despite repeated attempts, depressed Columbia students have yet to forge a single deal, which, they report, has not helped their mental struggles. “Why would we come to you all,” one anonymous spokesperson for an SSRI conglomerate explained, “When there’s another Ivy League upstate with nets under their bridges?”
