Depression in Japan

Paperback

Kitanaka, Junko 저자(글)

Princeton University Press · 2011년 10월 16일

책 소개

"This is an important ethnographic, cultural, and historical account of a crucial topic in society. Illustrative and compelling."--Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University "Fully engaged with the scholarly literature, and steeped in detail and description, this exemplary book is clearly the product of great care and careful listening and observation. With its high quality, simplicity, and eloquence, it is bound to become the book on depression in Japan."--Adriana Petryna, University of Pennsylvania "The management of depression in Japan differs markedly from treatments elsewhere, and this book draws out historical examples of the ways in which the nation has imagined and treated sadness and insanity. The author's findings do not conform to the familiar narratives of medicalization, in which social issues are depoliticized. Cogent and persuasive, the book offers a sophisticated analysis of a complex problem, making a major contribution to the field of medicine and mental health in Japan, and to medical anthropology and modern psychiatry."--Amy Borovoy, Princeton University
Junko Kitanaka is an associate professor in the Department of Human Sciences at Keio University, Tokyo.
Since the 1990s, suicide in recession-plagued Japan has soared, and rates of depression have both increased and received greater public attention. In a nation that has traditionally been uncomfortable addressing mental illness, what factors have allowed for the rising medicalization of depression and suicide? Investigating these profound changes from historical, clinical, and sociolegal perspectives, Depression in Japanexplores how depression has become a national disease and entered the Japanese lexicon, how psychiatry has responded to the nation's ailing social order, and how, in a remarkable transformation, psychiatry has overcome the longstanding resistance to its intrusion in Japanese life. Questioning claims made by Japanese psychiatrists that depression hardly existed in premodern Japan, Junko Kitanaka shows that Japanese medicine did indeed have a language for talking about depression which was conceived of as an illness where psychological suffering was intimately connected to physiological and social distress. The author looks at how Japanese psychiatrists now use the discourse of depression to persuade patients that they are victims of biological and social forces beyond their control; analyzes how this language has been adopted in legal discourse surrounding "overwork suicide"; and considers how, in contrast to the West, this language curiously emphasizes the suffering of men rather than women. Examining patients' narratives, Kitanaka demonstrates how psychiatry constructs a gendering of depression, one that is closely tied to local politics and questions of legitimate social suffering. Drawing upon extensive research in psychiatric institutions in Tokyo and the surrounding region, Depression in Japanuncovers the emergence of psychiatry as a force for social transformation in Japan.
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

작가정보

저자(글) Kitanaka, Junko

목차

• List 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

기본정보

ISBN	9780691142050 ( 069114205X )
발행(출시)일자	2011년 10월 16일
쪽수	240쪽
크기	155 * 231 * 20 mm / 340 g
총권수	1권
언어	영어