The Medicalization and Gendering of "Depression" in Japan: From a Medical Anthropological Perspective

这项研究考察了自20世纪90年代以来，“抑郁症”如何在日本成为一个重大的医学问题，尽管它在历史上没有出现，以及日本正在进行的抑郁症医学化如何改变人们的体验。鉴于抑郁症的全球化医学化，人们越来越担心这一过程可能会导致个人生物简化论，从而使最初导致抑郁症的社会问题变得隐蔽，并作为个人问题来处理。然而，在日本，部分原因是抑郁症经常被描述为工作的精神病态，尤其是辛勤工作的男性，它越来越多地被作为一个社会问题来讨论。这项研究从医学人类学的角度以及人种学田野调查和档案研究的数据，从而阐明了抑郁症的医学化是如何在日本走上一条独特的道路的。

This research has examined how "depression" has emerged as a significant medical problem in Japan since the 1990s despite its alleged historical absence there, and how the ongoing medicalization of depression in Japan is transforming people's experiences. Given the globalizing medicalization of depression, there is a growing concern that this process may lead to individual biological reductionism, whereby social problems that have given rise to depression in the first place become concealed and are instead dealt with as problems of individuals. In Japan, however, partly because depression has often been depicted as psychopathology of work that particularly afflicts hardworking men, it is increasingly discussed as a social problem. Drawing upon a medical anthropological perspective and data from ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this research thus illuminates how the medicalization of depression has come to take a distinctive course in Japan.