Depression In Japan

Understanding Culture through the Use of Text Culture: A seven-lettered word with a much larger and abysmal meaning. But how exactly does one define culture? Is it the religious beliefs that carry over from tradition to tradition? Or how about the roots and upbringings that define who you are, unique to each and every individual? Everybody has some sort of different definition of culture, and we were exposed to that in the reading by Ethan Watters. “The Mega Marketing of Depression in Japan”, a vivid and engaging text, presents us with a new idea of culture. Watters shows readers that culture is not only this idea that is embodied in our minds, but it is more of what we are able to make of it. The author states, “One culture can reshape how a population in another culture categorizes a given set of symptoms…” (Watters, 519). This proves to us how easy it was for the Japanese values and beliefs to be altered to the likings of an invasive unit. Based on the reading, I define culture as this living and breathing entity that grows as we grow, and is subject to change as we move along the journey of life. As Watters showed in “The Mega Marketing of Depression in Japan”, the Japanese concept of depression was “irregular” and needed to be replaced, or so felt by a certain group of people. When analyzing the market for anti-depressant drugs,

He was unhappy with the ways of Glaxosmith Kline, and other pharmaceutical companies that represented the Western concepts. For example, he states “Westerners may have lose their sense of moral authority in many areas of human endeavor, but we can still get our blood up defending our science” (Watters, 528). He mentions this around the time he decides to show that the anti-depressant pills were essentially a scam. Drugs like Paxil, never actually helped balance the SSRIs in patients, which was what they were advertised to