Widening the Psychiatric Gaze: Reflections on PsychoDoctor, Depression, and Recent Transitions in Japanese Mental Health Care

Abstract

Japan has one of the world’s highest rates of psychiatric institutionalization, and popular images of mental health care and public attitudes toward mental illness there have been stigmatized for decades. However, there are transitions underway that are reshaping the mental health care landscape as well as affecting public representations of mental illness. Those transitions include attempts to promote community-based care, move away from long-term hospitalization, reduce stigma, increase utilization of services, and bring clinical psychological services under the national health insurance umbrella. This article discusses one cultural representation in which those transitions are brought into relief: a 2002 television series entitled PsychoDoctor that portrayed the clinical practice of a psychiatrist. The article analyzes the messages inherent in the series about the nature of mental illness, the everyday-ness of sufferers, and the expanded repertoire of treatments now available. In so doing, the article suggests that the efforts of progressive clinicians, pharmaceutical companies, and mental health activists to put forth new images of mental illness and mental health care are now having a degree of success in the arena of popular culture.