We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Edited by
Anne M. Lovell, Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale, Paris,Gerald M. Oppenheimer, City University of New York and Columbia University, New York
The recent global rise of preventive psychiatry has brought psychiatric epidemiology into a more public arena, generating new sets of community surveys about developmental disorders, depression, and dementia. This is certainly the case in Japan, where one psychiatric epidemiologist has diagnosed the field as having long remained in a “prenatal stage.” Despite its early footing in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, psychiatric epidemiology faced an inhospitable environment there. Particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, stigma against psychiatry was so strong that community mental health surveys would cause alarm about their underlying political implications and possible invasion of privacy. Aside from a few WHO collaborations, psychiatric epidemiology was further hindered by the long-lasting antipsychiatry movement from the late 1960s to the 1980s, which critiqued it as an insidious surveillance tool that appropriates ownership of self-knowledge and promotes/naturalizes certain ideologies through a particular vision of psychiatric health. Thus, mental health community surveys only began to reflourish in the 1990s, with a community survey on depression in 1994 that may have helped pave the way toward near-mandatory “stress checks” (mental health screening) among workers nationwide, beginning in 2015. With the installment of the Act to Support Persons with Developmental Disabilities in 2004, surveys about developmental disorders followed. Dementia has received much attention recently, as mandatory dementia screening is required for anyone over seventy-five wishing to renew a driver’s license. With the increasing “neuropsychiatrization of the lifecycle,” psychiatric epidemiology is gradually gaining acceptance in this country and being incorporated into pre-existing health screening systems in the school, the workplace, and the community nationwide.
Despite the changing attitude, public ambivalence continues to be expressed at more thorough attempts at collective surveillance of mental health, as seen in the debates regarding epidemiologically based, preventionoriented community experiments such as the “Smart Wellness City,” an urban planning innovation for managing the health of residents who volunteer to monitor their daily health information via an automated, electronic system. Even as some doctors and policymakers rejoice in the technological advancement that such a thorough screening system provides and the autonomy it can create for individuals, other social commentators have expressed concern about potential invasion of privacy and unease about surveillance that seeks to reveal our (hidden) neuropsychological health.
The modern concept of stress is commonly traced to the physiologist, Hans Selye. Selye viewed stress as a physiological response to a significant or unexpected change, describing a series of stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion, when an organism's adaptive mechanisms finally failed. While Selye originally focused on nonspecific physiological responses to harmful agents, the stress concept has since been used to examine the relationship between a variety of environmental stressors and mental disorders and chronic organic diseases such as hypertension, gastric ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and cancer. This edited volume brings together leading scholars to explore the emergence and development of the stress concept and its ever-changing definitions. It examines how the concept has been used to connect disciplines such as ecology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, public health, urban planning, architecture, and a range of social sciences; its application in a variety of sites such as the battlefield, workplace, clinic, hospital, and home; and the emergence of techniques of stress management in a variety of different socio-cultural and scientific locations. Contributors: Theodore M. Brown, David Cantor, Otniel E. Dror, Rhodri Hayward, Mark Jackson, Robert G. W. Kirk, Junko Kitanaka, Tulley Long, Joseph Melling, Edmund Ramsden, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, Allan Young. David Cantor is Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health. Edmund Ramsden is Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester.
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
In Japan, amid a prolonged economic recession since the 1990s, psychiatry has suddenly gained popular appeal by depicting depression as a quintessential illness of stress. Concerns about stress-induced depression have heightened after an epoch-making lawsuit in 2000, in which the Supreme Court ordered Dentsū, Japan's biggest advertising agency, to pay to the family of a deceased employee the highest amount ever to be paid for a worker's death in this country. The court determined that the employee was driven to suicide because of depression, which had been caused by chronic work stress. As the rising discourse about overwork depression coincided with an aggressive campaign for new antidepressants beginning in the late 1990s, a stress-based notion of depression quickly permeated Japanese society, turning it into one of the most talked-about illnesses in its recent history. In response to legal disputes and the rising number of the depressed particularly in the workplace, the government has made changes in labor policy to address the psychopathology of work. Most notable in this regard is the creation of Stress Evaluation Tables, which has done much to firmly establish psychological stress in the workplace as a legitimate reason for economic compensation.
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Edited by
David Cantor, Acting Director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health,Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester