Twenty-first century Japan is in the throes of a depression epidemic. Until the late 1990s, mental depression was not widely diagnosed or treated in Japan, but it has suddenly emerged from the closet of denial.
This is one of the quiet transformations in Japan, a society that was uncomfortable in dealing with mental illness until it began to do so. Junko Kitanaka has written the go-to book to understand how profound changes in norms and values have generated social legitimacy for depression.
This "discovery" of depression has coincided with a surge in suicides since 1998. The stunning finding is that psychiatrists in Japan interviewed by the author are ambivalent about medicalizing suicide and, according to her, many still cling to traditional views that romanticize and aestheticize suicide.