Description
Book SynopsisSince the 1990s, suicide in recession-plagued Japan has soared, and rates of depression have both increased and received greater public attention. This title explores how depression has become a national disease and entered the Japanese lexicon, and how psychiatry has overcome the longstanding resistance to its intrusion in Japanese life.
Trade ReviewCo-Winner of the 2013 Frances Hsu Prize, Society for East Asian Anthropology "Medical anthropology, with its propensity to theoretise and problemise issues and refer endlessly to other work and concepts with which the reader will not be familiar, is for many outsiders almost as impenetrable as Japanese psychiatry. Putting the two together should be a recipe for disaster, but in Junko Kitanaka's hands, this book is instead a triumph, perhaps even a classic."--David Healy, Times Higher Education "Depression in Japan sets a high methodological and analytic standard for pursuing answers to vital questions."--Kalman Applbaum, Anthropological Quarterly "[C]ompelling and challenging work... [T]his is a thought-provoking book that should be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and clinicians."--Susan L. Burns, Journal of Japanese Studies
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Chapter One: Introduction: Local Forces of Medicalization 1 Part One: Depression in History 19 Chapter Two: Reading Emotions in the Body: The Premodern Language of Depression 23 Chapter Three: The Expansion of Psychiatry into Everyday Life 40 Chapter Four: Pathology of Overwork or Personality Weakness?: The Rise of Neurasthenia in Early-Twentieth-Century Japan 54 Chapter Five: Socializing the "Biological" in Depression: Japanese Psychiatric Debates about Typus Melancholicus 67 Part Two: Depression in Clinical Practice 83 Chapter Six: Containing Reflexivity: The Interdiction against Psychotherapy for Depression 89 Chapter Seven: Diagnosing Suicides of Resolve 107 Chapter Eight: The Gendering of Depression and the Selective Recognition of Pain 129 Part Three: Depression in Society 151 Chapter Nine: Advancing a Social Cause through Psychiatry: The Case of Overwork Suicide 155 Chapter Ten: The Emergent Psychiatric Science of Work: Rethinking the Biological and the Social 174 Chapter Eleven: The Future of Depression: Beyond Psychopharmaceuticals 193 References 201 Index 231
