If the BBC feels it absolutely must tie depression in Japan to comic books somehow, as part of its standard Japan narrative, it at least should have gone with discussing the comic book memoir <i>Tsure ga Utsu ni Narimashite</i> ("My Husband Got Depression") which got a lot of attention from 2009-2011 and helped raise awareness about modern medical attitudes toward depression.
Wasn't <i>Neon Genesis Evangelion</i> enough to convince anyone that depression was real, back in the 1990s?<p>> Word was spread about depression as <i>kokoro no kaze</i> - a cold of the soul.<p>Well, <i>kokoro</i> 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.
> 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.<p>This is false. Prozac was submitted several times for registration in Japan. The most recent one is here: <a href="https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01808612" rel="nofollow">https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01808612</a> but there were other trials before.
Yet Japan has hikikomori.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Y7R5zP0wc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Y7R5zP0wc</a>
Recommended reading: "Crazy Like Us" by Ethan Watters. I'm not sure about the validity of this article, but the Watters book presents a fair amount of evidence that mental disorders are in many ways socially constructed by individual cultures. And often the construction is sped along by inventive pharmaceutical company marketing departments.