An article about how Japanese started to get “depressions”, because western pharmaceutical companies felt a need to sell them prozak and other antidepressant drugs.

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.

This traditional way of thinking about suffering helps to explain why mild depression was never considered a disease. ”Melancholia, sensitivity, fragility — these are not negative things in a Japanese context,” Tooru Takahashi, a psychiatrist who worked for Japan’s National Institute of Mental Health for 30 years, explained. ”It never occurred to us that we should try to remove them, because it never occurred to us that they were bad.”

The medical model of depression, by contrast, sees suffering as pathological and prescribes a pill in response. That outlook is partly pragmatic: call depression a disease and health insurance covers its treatment.

Via Misha Verbitsky.

Posted by Nadya in English, life, psychology