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14 results

Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century
  • Edited by David Cantor, Edmund Ramsden
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    20 February 2014
  • 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.

  • 8 - Work, Stress, and Depression: The Emerging Psychiatric Science of Work in Contemporary Japan

  • from Part Four - Work
  • 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
  • Book:
    Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    20 February 2014, pp 222-238

  • Summary

    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.