Examines psychiatric epidemiology's unique evolution, conceptually and socially, within and between diverse regions and cultures, underscoring its growing influence on the biopolitics of nations and worldwide health campaigns. Psychiatric epidemiology, like the epidemiology of cancer, heart disease, or AIDS, contributes increasingly to shaping the biopolitics of nations and worldwide health campaigns. Despite the field's importance, this is the first volume of historical scholarship addressing psychiatric epidemiology. It seeks to comprehensively trace the development of the discipline and the mobilization of its constructs, methods, and tools to further social ends. It is through this double lens-conceptual and social-that it envisions the history of psychiatric epidemiology. Furthermore, its chapters constitute elements for that history as a global phenomenon, formed by multiple approaches. Those numerous historical paths have not resulted in a uniform disciplinary field based on a common paradigm, as happened arguably in the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease and cancer, but in a plurality of psychiatric epidemiologies driven by different intellectual questions, political strategies, reformist ideals, national cultures, colonial experiences, international influences, and social control objectives. When examined together, the chapters depict an uneven global development of epidemiologies formed within distinct political-cultural regions but influenced by the transnational circulation and selective uptake of concepts, techniques, and expertise. These moved through multidirectional pathways between and within the Global North and South. Authored by historians, anthropologists, and psychiatrists, chapters trace this complex history, focusing on Brazil, Nigeria, Senegal, India, Taiwan, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, as well as multicountry networks.

Since the 1990s, suicide in recession-plagued Japan has soared, and rates of depression have both increased and received greater public attention. In a nation that has traditionally been uncomfortable addressing mental illness, what factors have allowed for the rising medicalization of depression and suicide? Investigating these profound changes from historical, clinical, and sociolegal perspectives, "Depression in Japan" explores how depression has become a national disease and entered the Japanese lexicon, how psychiatry has responded to the nation's ailing social order, and how, in a remarkable transformation, psychiatry has overcome the longstanding resistance to its intrusion in Japanese life.

Questioning claims made by Japanese psychiatrists that depression hardly existed in premodern Japan, Junko Kitanaka shows that Japanese medicine did indeed have a language for talking about depression which was conceived of as an illness where psychological suffering was intimately connected to physiological and social distress. The author looks at how Japanese psychiatrists now use the discourse of depression to persuade patients that they are victims of biological and social forces beyond their control; analyzes how this language has been adopted in legal discourse surrounding "overwork suicide"; and considers how, in contrast to the West, this language curiously emphasizes the suffering of men rather than women. Examining patients' narratives, Kitanaka demonstrates how psychiatry constructs a gendering of depression, one that is closely tied to local politics and questions of legitimate social suffering.

Drawing upon extensive research in psychiatric institutions in Tokyo and the surrounding region, "Depression in Japan" uncovers the emergence of psychiatry as a force for social transformation in Japan.