How Japan came to believe in depression | Hacker News Reader

How Japan came to believe in depression

bbc.com

95 pointscremno22 comments

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.

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.

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 :-).

without reading the article are they suggesting that the depressed brooding boy trope didn't come across as depressed to people?

NGE was a social commentary and a deconstruction of the "mecha" genre moreso than it was about depression.

> 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 but there were other trials before.

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

Chalk another win up to capitalism. high fives all around

Yet Japan has hikikomori.[1]

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

https://vimeo.com/28627261

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

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.

tl;dr by reading anime about depression

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