Depression as a Pathology of Work Stress:Japanese Controversies and the Riseof a New Therapeutic Ethos

Résumé :
In 2014, the Japanese government passed a revision of the Labor Safety Hygiene Law and institutionalized « stress checks » for all workers across the nation. This mental health screening has been installed as a response to the increasing number of depressed and suicidal workers in a country plagued by recession since the 1990s. The screening is also prompted by a successful grassroots movement that has helped establish state and corporate responsibilities for protecting workers’ mental health. These changes have initiated a web of corporate surveillance, generating a new realm of workers’ self-knowledge for those who had never scrutinized themselves in a psychiatrized way. Notably, while the pressure on workers for self-disclosure—and to cultivate their resilience—increases, new therapeutic spaces have emerged, where psychiatrists and workers are exploring new forms of silence and ways of retaining a sense of a secret self. By investigating the rise of depression as a workplace psychopathology and emerging forms of care of the self, this talk asks what happens to people’s subjectivities when their minds and bodies become the repository of valuable secrets.

Profil :
Junko Kitanaka is a medical anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Human Sciences, Keio University, Tokyo. For her McGill University doctoral dissertation on depression, she received a number of awards including the 2007 Dissertation Award from the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Medical Anthropology. This has since been published by Princeton University Press as a book titled Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress, which won the American Anthropological Association’s Francis Hsu Prize for Best Book in East Asian Anthropology in 2013. She is currently working on a new project on dementia and the psychiatrization of the life cycle.

Moderator: Jean-Michel BUTEL (UMIFRE 19 – MFJ)

Org.: Bureau français de la MFJ
Co-org.: CCIFJ