Pride month is over — the rainbow logos that adorned corporate social media accounts are gone, but for gay, queer and trans communities, mental health challenges persist. As colorful shows of support for the LGBTQ community fade in July, Janssen Pharmaceuticals says it will create a longer-lasting impact with a new campaign empowering those communities to take charge of their mental health.
“Pride Month is one month out of the year. We're not doing one month and moving on to the next thing. We're committed over the long haul,” says Courtney Billington, president of Janssen Neuroscience and head of the ‘Depression Looks Like Me’ campaign, which launched in May. “The resources we're providing are going to be available 24/7, 365 [days a year] and we're going to continue to build on that.”
The goal of the campaign, Billington says, is to amplify the stories of severe depression sufferers and provide educational resources to decrease stigma around the disease for LGBTQ people who are disproportionately impacted.
The campaign’s website — DepressionLooksLikeMe.com — serves as the main hub, a “one stop shop” to help LGBTQ people find avenues to care, including resources from the campaign’s partners with information about different forms of depression, treatment options and links to healthcare provider directories.
“Pride Month is one month out of the year. We’re not doing one month and moving on to the next thing. We’re committed over the long haul.”
Courtney Billington
President, Janssen Neuroscience
Pairing the resources and stories is vital to the campaign’s mission of helping LGBTQ people find the care they need, says Ren Fernandez-Kim, a content creator collaborating with the campaign. Growing up, Fernandez-Kim, who is nonbinary, says mental health often wasn’t discussed, leaving no way for them to understand their symptoms or find ways to treat them.
“I wouldn't have these resources when I was younger, especially in the depths of the south of Baton Rouge, La.,” Fernandez-Kim says. “Knowing that these resources are available now and could hopefully help people who need that information … it's very important to me.”
In a 2021 survey of 15,000 LGTBQ people, almost half of respondents said they believed pharma companies were not doing enough to understand or reach out to their identity groups, noting, among other issues, that pharma advertisements often do not feature members of their communities.
Janssen’s campaign is among the first since that study was published to specifically target the LGBTQ community. It’s focus on depression is a result of the disproportionate impact the disease often has on LGBTQ individuals, Billington says.
Janssen's entry into the depression market began with the 2019 approval of its novel esketamine nasal spray for treatment-resistant forms of the condition. Spravato was the first new depression drug to hit the market in decades. Since then the drug has been marred by a number of controversies including criticisms about its cost and and questions about the data used for its approval which failed to show that three patients died by suicide during clinical trials for the drug.
Yet, the approach of using a drug like esketamine in a spray form to target depression was a notable innovation for the field and other companies have been pursuing a similar appraoch, including Seelos Therapeutics, who began dosing patients in their trial for a intranasal ketamine treatment for suicidality last year.
Here, Billington discusses Janssen’s catalyst for the campaign, how partnerships with creators like Fernandez-Kim and nonprofit groups impacted its outcome, and how the company’s own severe depression drug, Spravato, plays a part.
PharmaVoice: Many different communities are impacted by depression. Why did you focus on LGBTQ for this campaign?
Courtney Billington: I think a big piece of it is that serious mental illness, and in particular depression, affects this community, the LGBTQ community, probably more significantly than you see in the general population as a whole. When you look at some of the statistics, the numbers matter with regards to the LGBTQ community being three times more susceptible to depression than their heterosexual counterparts.
But then, the positive side to this is this community, when they receive great education, when they receive trusted information, they're two and a half times more apt to seek care than their counterparts. We just thought that was a tremendous equation for action for us.
You partnered with organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness and HealthLGBT for this campaign. How did you develop these partnerships for this campaign?
We’ve been in this business for quite some time. We’ve had many different campaigns. We learned from what some of our colleagues have done well, or not well, and likewise ourselves. So we reached out to members within the [LGBTQ] community, and we asked them: ‘What do you need more? What do you need less? What is resonating with you?’ And they told us that many of the existing campaigns that are out there, many of the resources that we think are actually good resources, they're not culturally relevant. So we said that is first and foremost one of the things we need to do a better job at — bringing together resources that they trust in one location. We partnered with six major partners that were either recommended by people as trusted sources of information or vetted by us, and then we began to pull this together and create the ‘Depression Looks Like Me’ website.
How does your severe depression medication Spravato play into this campaign?
This is an unbranded campaign. We are trying to provide general information to the public. We don't mention anything about our medication. Even when you look on [the website], we talk about other people's treatments as different options. We don't want people to kind of look at it and say, ‘Here we go again, these pharma companies.’ We're trying to help people, period. We're trying to make sure we reach a group that is often disadvantaged, they're often not the main targets for support. We wanted to do that first, to be viewed as a much more credible resource.
Now, the good thing is, we have a phenomenal medication. And, you know, people do their research. They talk with physicians that they trust and then those physicians tell them about the different options. If our treatment is a good option for them, that’s great, but we don't want to make this about our treatment. This website is a conglomeration of resources that are much more general in nature. As people start doing their double-click and triple-click down, as they learn more, understand more, then perhaps they might get to our medication or they might get to ‘Hey, I need cognitive behavioral therapy.’ We're saying that's great. Our mission is changing the trajectory of healthcare for humanity. That's our ultimate goal. And if our treatments can be part of that solution, great.
You mentioned that Janssen plans to build on this campaign. How do you plan to do that?
We're going to continue to build as we find more credible partners, trusted partners, because one of the key things we learned was to make sure that with the people we are partnering with, the information that's there, people feel it's a safe space for them to go to.
And as we can continue to connect the dots of all the key partners who are trusted within the community, provide great resources, then we feel like we can have a multiplicative effect. If we can reach significantly more people that are being reached today. By themselves, maybe our partners can touch [certain groups], but together we can touch so many more people.
