THE NEW PUBLIC SERVICE AD: JUST SAY 'DEAL WITH IT'

The image is lurid even by today's standards: a young woman kneels on a
bathroom floor, head over the toilet, then stands, wiping her mouth with
the back of her hand.

"Sound familiar?" asks a voice with muted Welsh vowels. "If so, you may
have bulimia. You cannot flush away your problems. It won't go away until
you stop gagging your pain and give it a voice."

The short animation, narrated by Catherine Zeta-Jones, is part of the "Face
the Issue" campaign: seven public service announcements aimed primarily at
adolescents and young adults, in which the voices of celebrities like
Jennifer Lopez and Kate Hudson address eating disorders, domestic violence
and drug abuse.

The campaign is different from those that have gone before it. It does not
try to shame the viewer into action. There are no scare tactics that end in
the coffins or graves. This is not your brain on drugs. Nor does it
emphasize a positive message - snowboarding as the anti-drug, say - that
might seem out of reach to its target audience.

Like its precursors in the squeamish 1950's, the wised-up 1970's, the
fearful "Just Say No" and let's-hear-nothing-else-about-it 1980's, the
"Face the Issue" campaign reflects its time. Brutally frank and
uncomfortably intimate, it delves into a world in which young people grow
up faster, are more sophisticated and, statistics show, are increasingly
diagnosed as troubled. Perhaps more important, rather than appeal to
parents, it asks young people to take action themselves. Each message ends
with the words: "Your choice."

The 30-second spots, made at cost with the stars donating their time, have
been shown on MTV, the WB and other networks. An important component is the
corresponding Web site, www.facetheissue.com, a sort of online group
therapy session whose users post messages about their problems. The day
after the campaign began in late October, the site got 300,000 hits. As of
last week, two million people had visited.

The postings lay bare the elaborate pathos of teenagedom today. A girl who
says she cannot refrain from cutting herself wrote: "Everyone thinks that
because I am a 'surgeon's daughter' and because we have money that my life
is perfect.

NEWSFLASH: MONEY DOES NOT BUY HAPPINESS."

Another user wrote of a disorder involving a compulsion to pluck one's
eyebrows and lashes until only bloody clumps remain. "My parents say that I
can stop anytime I want,'' she said.

Unlike most public service campaigns, "Face the Issue" was created without
focus groups or market testing. It is the brainchild of two women, Jane B.
Semel and Melanie Hall, with no experience producing such messages. Ms.
Semel, the wife of Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, founded ijane
inc., a nonprofit production company that promotes public health issues,
and Ms. Hall is the company's president.

It gets high marks from mental health experts, particularly because the Web
site offers teenagers, who may resist formal treatment, a way to seek
support and information anonymously.

"These videos really represent the future rather than the past, because
they use animation, they use the Internet, they're interactive," said Jay
Winsten, who, as the director of the Center for Health Communication at
Harvard, introduced the concept of the designated driver. "It's a model for
what future communications with young people will look like."

Public service messages have long been driven by both the national mood and
a continuing debate over effective strategy. In the 1950's, children were
shown films like "Let's Be Clean and Neat," which emphasized conformity. As
Ken Smith, a scholar of such films, writes in "Mental Hygiene," the
narrators mocked hapless teens whose bobby socks sagged or who refused to
get along.

Indifference toward the afflicted lingered into the 1970's, when one ad
showed an addict crying and begging her father for money, then counting it
the minute she was out. The "Face the Issue" ads do not ostracize or
preach. But they do present reality: with unchecked anorexia, "you'll be
dead before you're thin enough''; with abuse, "it will happen again."

"What I like about them is they portray the person in trouble as an active
agent," said Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and a scholar at the conservative
American Enterprise Institute. She said they served a different purpose
than the "Just Say No" slogan. "They're aimed at different people,'' she
said. " 'Just Say No' is prevention. This is for people who really have a
problem already."

It was AIDS that led to this plain speaking. In the 1980's, the Ad Council,
the major producer of public service announcements, persuaded networks to
broadcast the first commercials to use the word "condom."

When it came to effectiveness, celebrity competed against the tragic
ending. But William J. Bennett, the first President Bush's drug policy
adviser, argued in favor of the fear approach. "Kids need to see more
burnout cases," he said in 1989.

Both strategies had pitfalls. Not everyone can identify with celebrities.
Horror stories could scare people into inaction. If the peril were
exaggerated, young people would smell a rat (or, as with "this is your
brain on drugs," fodder for a joke).

A problem with public health campaigns is that they generally address a
single issue, said Joseph A. Califano Jr., chairman of the National Center
on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. The reality, he
said, is that people with eating disorders are more likely to abuse drugs
and both must be treated to be effective. "It's all one ball of wax," he said.

In the 1990's, research showed that parents are far more effective
messengers. New slogans urged parents to talk to their children about drugs
and sex.

But an obstacle for teens with eating disorders or drug problems, several
experts said, is their parents' denial. A child may not have anorexia but
still have serious food-related problems, said Susan Smalley, a psychiatry
professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies such
disorders. "The site is tapping into that group of children and adolescents
that aren't being identified," she said.

Peggy Conlon, the president of the Ad Council, said that one way to change
behavior is to change what is considered normal. She points to the Legacy
Foundation's antismoking ads, showing children ambushing tobacco executives
with tough questions. "They're making kids appear smart if they resist
smoking," she said.

"Face the Issue" grapples with another issue: what to do when low
self-confidence and eating disorders seem to be the norm.

"There is no magic wand, 'Oh, do this and it's all going to be fine,' "
said Ms. Semel. "The whole point was not to make the issues so negative. To
take the stigma away from it and just make it like anything else in life,
something you should deal with."