I walked out of a top advertising job after being hypnotised
I used to work in advertising as a strategist, for what's consistently judged as the top "creative" agency in the UK, trying to figure out ways into people's heads and writing them down as briefs for creatives.

Structurally speaking, much "creative" advertising works in a very similar way to hypnosis, the main difference being that while hypnosis tends to address individuals directly, advertising addresses collections of individuals, and often indirectly through their peers. What I mean by this is most clearly put in diagramatic form, comparing the process of hypnosis with the advertising process:



It was company policy, confirmed by my line managers and alluded, but never directly referred to, in prior reviews and training days, to surreptitiously use this technique to induce heightened states of awareness (trance) in fledgling trainees; a way of training them in the basics of advertising, identifying those who could not cope with such an environment, picking out the long-termers from the short-termers, and establishing a pecking order between the creatives and the rest of us.

They tried it on me and suceeded to some extent, although I managed to deconstruct it enough to not be wholly taken in by it. After confirming beyond doubt that this is what they were doing by going and talking about it with my line managers, I walked out without warning one day and never came back.

To be honest, the experience fucked me up paranoid-wise for quite a while. Cognitive therapy eventually sorted out the paranoia but not before it had driven me into two years of psychosis.

Nowadays I work with people with learning difficulties, a useful job involving much more well-adjusted individuals.
( octopus footwear raaa, Mon 26 May 2008, 17:14, Reply)