Work, Stress, and Depression

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.