Taken from my local (Melbourne) newspaper's website! I don't know whether I think this is very very funny .... or very very sad!

"Internet hoaxes are continuing to fool folks around the world - even when they're not actually hoaxes. Australian artist Justine Cooper currently has an exhibition showing at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York. The exhibition takes the form of a marketing campaign for a drug, called Havidol, which is a treatment for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD).

Both the drug, and the disease (as you may have guessed), were made up by the artist. The exhibition includes fake advertisements and a fake website, and according to a Reuters report, many people believe the campaign is real.

"The thing that amazes me is that it has been folded into real Web sites for panic and anxiety disorder. It's been folded into a Web site for depression. It's been folded into hundreds of art blogs," Daneyal Mahmood said.

The campaign parodies the way some pharmaceutical manufacturers market their drugs.

Check out the rather amusing web site for Havidol here - http://www.havidol.com/
I reckon it's pretty clever, though, yet again, I'm amazed anyone could think it was a serious site.

It is slightly scary that in the US, where advertising prescription drugs is legal, people actually believed the campaign was real, despite slogans such as "When more is not enough". Read the Reuters story on Havidol here - http://au.news.yahoo.com/070216/15/12g8e.html

What do you think? Could you use some Havidol to "bring about positive change without you having to recognize exactly what your problem is"? (There's a test on the site that will tell you if you may need the drug)"

Only thing is I went to the site and it looks real enough. I can see little things that are off but to a person with worse problems mentally than myself, I can see were they'd believe it.

I'm not quite sure why this is considered art. It seems more a social experiment to me. And one in extremely bad taste.

I find it very very sad. There are so many people in our world who are mentally ill and are only able to function with the assistance of medication. To poke fun by 'hoaxing' in the name of art is in bad taste. Of course, this is my opinion only and this may be influenced by the fact that I chose to take medication to help me get through the bad times.

I have a little different take on it...I find it a biting criticism of how pharmaceutical companies recruit patients to pay for medications that may not really be necessary, and the glossier and shinier the ad the more likely a patient is to request the medication.

This reminds me of when the makers of Prozac, Eli Lily, were losing the patent on Prozac and it was going generic, so they repackaged Prozac 10 mg capsules as "Serafem" for premenstrual dysphoric disorder so it could get a new patent. Patients saw the ads, came in asking for the new miracle menstrual problem drug, and were disappointed when I told them it's just Prozac 10 mg a day, which I could prescribe without the pretty packaging for pennies a day.

There's a reason there is a glut of ads for mental health treatment...it's big money. Some of the meds I prescribe cost hundreds of dollars a month. Pretty shiny happy ads, like the ones the havidol website mocks, are part of that cost. Now that most places are signing agreements not to interact with drug reps (like where I work, we don't have reps on site and they provide no money to us for any reason, even education), the companies have to take their message somewhere else, and it goes to the public. So when a patient comes in and says, "I want the pill with the happy ball (Zoloft)" or "I want the pill with the blue butterfly (Lunesta)" you can be sure where they saw it first; drug ads.