PMID: 22352006Feb 23, 2012Paper

Disease mongering and bipolar disorder in Japan

Seishin shinkeigaku zasshi = Psychiatria et neurologia Japonica
Hiroshi Ihara

Abstract

Frequently used in a pejorative sense, "disease mongering" connotes a widening of the diagnostic boundaries of illness. Pharmaceutical companies conduct disease awareness campaigns on the pretext of educating the public about the prevention of illness or the promotion of health. Encouraged by disease awareness advertisements, people gradually become filled with concern that they are ill and need medical treatment. As a result, pharmacotherapy is increasingly being applied to ever-milder conditions, leading to potentially unnecessary medication, wasted resources, and even adverse side effects. Among all fields of clinical medicine, psychiatry is undoubtedly the most vulnerable to the danger of disease mongering. In Japan, depression provides the most drastic example of the impact of disease awareness campaigns on the number of patients seeking treatment. Until the late 1990s, Japanese psychiatrists focused almost exclusively on psychosis and endogenous depression, the latter being severe enough to require conventional forms of antidepressants, known as tricyclic antidepressants, and even hospitalization. At this time, people's attitude toward depression was generally unfavorable. Indeed, the Japanese word for clinical depression...Continue Reading

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