
How Japan came to believe in depression - cremno
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36824927
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resoluteteeth
If the BBC feels it absolutely must tie depression in Japan to comic books
somehow, as part of its standard Japan narrative, it at least should have gone
with discussing the comic book memoir _Tsure ga Utsu ni Narimashite_ ("My
Husband Got Depression") which got a lot of attention from 2009-2011 and
helped raise awareness about modern medical attitudes toward depression.

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labster
Wasn't _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ enough to convince anyone that depression was
real, back in the 1990s?

> Word was spread about depression as _kokoro no kaze_ \- a cold of the soul.

Well, _kokoro_ means mind and heart as much as it means soul. It's a bit
harder to describe a phenomenon when you don't quite have the words. David
Lynch referred to four types of illness (via the Log Lady): physical, mental,
emotional, and spiritual. Those concepts are a little more mixed together in
Japan.

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hga
Well, _we_ watched it knowing about depression, and my personal (and for
personal reasons, genetic ones unfortunately...) study of e.g. cognitive
psychology and therapy made the original TV ending pretty comprehensible with
effort, at least about what Anno thought important (people, not the giant
robot/super-conspiracy gloss).

But wouldn't most people, including a large fraction in e.g. the US, just
think Anno was weird (which as a successful creator he pretty much as to be
anyway :-).

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ekianjo
> All this made Japan such a poor prospect as a market for anti-depressants
> that the makers of Prozac all but gave up on the country.

This is false. Prozac was submitted several times for registration in Japan.
The most recent one is here:
[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01808612](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01808612)
but there were other trials before.

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im4w1l
tl;dr because of a marketing campaign by pharma companies.

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quirkot
Chalk another win up to capitalism. _high fives all around_

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Animats
Yet Japan has hikikomori.[1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Y7R5zP0wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Y7R5zP0wc)

~~~
DarkLinkXXXX
I like this documentary better. It's a bit long, but I like real footage, and
the interviews, and more in-depth discussion.
[https://vimeo.com/28627261](https://vimeo.com/28627261)

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pc2g4d
Recommended reading: "Crazy Like Us" by Ethan Watters. I'm not sure about the
validity of this article, but the Watters book presents a fair amount of
evidence that mental disorders are in many ways socially constructed by
individual cultures. And often the construction is sped along by inventive
pharmaceutical company marketing departments.

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troAway123
tl;dr by reading anime about depression

