For the final project, I want to design a speculative and synthetic website imagining personalized antidepressant subscriptions. Current beauty and skin care brands like Curology and Function of Beauty utilize a “customizable” and “personalized” subscription model to curate the “perfect” formula for their consumers. These personalized formulas are often determined through a short quiz which determines your goals and the problems you are facing. Additionally, Curology asks that you submit pictures of your bare skin which will then be reviewed by a dermatologist.
I’ve recently been prescribed antidepressants by my psychiatrist. This raised a lot of questions of how did they determine what brand/prescription will be best for me? What if this prescription doesn’t suite my needs? What if the side effects are terrible? I’ve heard dozens of people needing to switch and test various drugs due to their side effects, how long will it take before I find the right ones?
These questions led me to consider: What if these drug formulas could be personalized to every individual depending on what they are struggling with? Should access to these SSRIs and antidepressants in general be more open? What if ordering antidepressants were as easy as ordering skin care or beauty products? How would the public react to that? Would it ever be possible with the stigma surrounding mental health?
As telehealth and online health grows, dermatology has advanced to Curology, so would the same developments be possible for pharmaceuticals and psychotherapy? I’ve also been curious about how AI may play into this development. Would AI be able to replace therapists or psychiatrists in the future? Or is mental health too complex and too personal?
As for what this site is hoping to convey, it surveys a reality where antidepressants are ubiquitous and as normalized as skincare. It questions if this is a future that we hope to achieve. Would it be safe or would it end up as another episode of Black Mirror? Would the public be accepting or would this idea be too controversial, too risky, too impossible?
In terms of the content, I plan to mimic company landing pages that employ this business model already for their products. I especially want to draw from their minimal, clean, and elevated aesthetics to offer a new branding alternative to antidepressants and mental health. I plan to use AI to help generate ideas for branding, copy, as well as code for the design of the website.