That whole “words will never hurt me” rhyme is so bogus. Medicine deals in labels, stereotypes, and diagnoses, and they have real effects on people. Sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Mild depression has just recently become a treatable illness in Japan , and it’s interesting to see how it’s playing out, especially in a developed, Eastern culture.

I was a bit disappointed to see the cultural component addressed so late in the article. It automatically assumes that Japanese mild depression is something that necessarily needs to be treated. While personally, *I* think that the mildly depressed would probably be happier (and therefore, better off) with therapy or anti-depressants, I don’t know that it’s safe to assume that the Japanese agree. Perhaps they do, perhaps they don’t.

We have to be careful with what we decide is disease. There’s a human need to fit in, to feel accepted, to be “normal.” By changing the Japanese understanding of “mild depression” to the Western, treatable version, we categorize a group of people as diseased, as different, as abnormal.

I was speaking with a friend yesterday who is clearly OCD , even admitting that he has “lots of little obsessions,” but the moment I told him that there are ways to treat it, and that he probably has OCD, he instantly went on the defensive and changed his position. As long as they’re just obsessions, that’s one thing. But when they turn into a diagnosable mental disorder, especially with all the mental health stigma out there, the symptoms became a different beast entirely.

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