Did Antidepressants Depress Japan?
New York Times (depressing 'free' registration required) August 22, 2004
If you had lived in Japan for the last five years, you would know by now that your kokoro is at risk of coming down with a cold. Your kokoro is not part of your respiratory system. It is not a member of your family. Its treatment lies well beyond the bailiwick of your average ear, nose and throat doctor. Your kokoro is your soul, and the notion that it can catch cold (kokoro no kaze) was introduced to Japan by the pharmaceutical industry to explain mild depression to a country that almost never discussed it.
...Depression has gone from bad word to buzzword. ''The media mention depression almost every week,'' said Yutaka Ono, a psychiatrist and professor at Keio University and one of Japan's leading depression experts. People have even come to his office with newspaper in hand, he said, and asked if what they have is depression.
...For 1,500 years of Japanese history, Buddhism has encouraged the acceptance of sadness and discouraged the pursuit of happiness -- a fundamental distinction between Western and Eastern attitudes. The first of Buddhism's four central precepts is: suffering exists. Because sickness and death are inevitable, resisting them brings more misery, not less. ''Nature shows us that life is sadness, that everything dies or ends,'' Hayao Kawai, a clinical psychologist who is now Japan's commissioner of cultural affairs, said. ''Our mythology repeats that; we do not have stories where anyone lives happily ever after.'' Happiness is nearly always fleeting in Japanese art and literature. That bittersweet aesthetic, known as aware, prizes melancholy as a sign of sensitivity.
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