In 1990s Japan, depression barely existed as a diagnosis. Pharmaceutical companies changed that with a campaign called "your soul can catch a cold," reframing normal sadness as a treatable illness. Antidepressant sales exploded in the early 2000s, making Japan one of the last wealthy nations to embrace the drugs.
Japan in the 1990s didn't really know about depression at all. They had some cases, but it wasn't really popular. If people were facing problems in their lives, or they felt low, or sometimes they had mood swings, they just thought that it was part of life. Or even if they felt really down, they just thought that these are normal life occurrence, normal life changes. But now the problem was that for the pharmaceutical industry, they couldn't at that time sell antidepressants. Now because of Japan not really using depression to describe mood swings or other mental health issues, they couldn't be sold on antidepressants, obviously. Why would they buy them if they didn't really know much about depression in the first place? They were not really educated on that. So drug companies decided to educate the public in Japan. So in the 1990s, Japanese started getting educated, and the drug companies used this catch slogan where they would say "Kuroko no case." And what does that mean? It means that your soul can catch a cold, which made Japanese understand that their soul, aka like themselves, could catch depression essentially. And of course, with the help of more education and educating especially experts, because they have the authority, then experts could educate their patients. So now depression was framed as something common, temporary, and could be fixed with medication. And they made them interpret mood swings, feeling negative, overall feeling low as them having depression. So by the early 2000s, the sales of antidepressants just started rising in Japan as they were also one of the last rich countries not using antidepressants at that time.
