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How Japan came to believe in depression

bbc.com

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Re: How Japan came to believe in depression

#7
> All this made Japan such a poor prospect as a market for anti-depressants that the makers of Prozac all but gave up on the country.

This is false. Prozac was submitted several times for registration in Japan. The most recent one is here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01808612 but there were other trials before.

Re: How Japan came to believe in depression

#8
Wasn't Neon Genesis Evangelion enough to convince anyone that depression was real, back in the 1990s?

> Word was spread about depression as kokoro no kaze - a cold of the soul.

Well, kokoro means mind and heart as much as it means soul. It's a bit harder to describe a phenomenon when you don't quite have the words. David Lynch referred to four types of illness (via the Log Lady): physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Those concepts are a little more mixed together in Japan.

Re: How Japan came to believe in depression

#9
post #8

Wasn't Neon Genesis Evangelion enough to convince anyone that depression was real, back in the 1990s? > Word was spread about depression as kokoro no kaze - a cold of the soul. Well, kokoro means mind and heart as much as it means soul. It's a bit harder to describe a phenomenon when you don't quite have the words. David Lynch referred to four types of illness (via the Log Lady): physical, mental, emotional, and spir…

Well, we watched it knowing about depression, and my personal (and for personal reasons, genetic ones unfortunately...) study of e.g. cognitive psychology and therapy made the original TV ending pretty comprehensible with effort, at least about what Anno thought important (people, not the giant robot/super-conspiracy gloss).

But wouldn't most people, including a large fraction in e.g. the US, just think Anno was weird (which as a successful creator he pretty much as to be anyway :-).

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