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

这项研究调查了自20世纪90年代以来，“抑郁症”是如何在日本成为一个重大的医学问题的，尽管它据称在历史上并不存在，以及日本正在进行的抑郁症医学化如何改变人们的经历。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导致个人生物还原论，从而掩盖最初引起抑郁症的社会问题，而将其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一种特别折磨努力工作的人的工作精神病理学，它越来越多地作为一个社会问题被讨论。利用医学人类学的观点和来自民族志田野调查和档案研究的数据，本研究阐明了抑郁症的医学化如何在日本走上了一条独特的道路。

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.