Speaking of marketing and mental diversity, where's that job-ad quote about

[brin_bellway]

--how diversity keeps us from missing the obvious


[cw: illness, (arguably) infohazards in link]


[Substack; Wayback] (by Scott Alexander)

As part of GlaxoSmithKline’s marketing work, they replaced utsubyo with a new idea, kokoro no kaze, “cold of the soul”. This was supposed to mean that depression was a minor illness (like a cold), something everyone got occasionally (like a cold), and something that was purely biological and could/should be controlled with medication (like a cold).

...are you *sure* it doesn't just literally mean "the sensation of having a cold, but only in your soul and not in your body".

(...also, are there any records of this term that *don't* trace back to this one book. okay, yes, I haven't tried other writing systems, but *zero* relevant Japanese webpages written in romaji?

update: a bit of tinkering with Google Translate gets me a hospital that has it in its name or something (and has poor reviews!), but still not much else.)

Comments

[lunartulip]

Insofar as you feel like digging through further Japanese pages, here's (as far as I can tell) the right non-romaji search term: 心の風邪

(Edit for clarification: 心 is kokoro (soul), の is no (possessive marker), 風邪 is kaze (cold). As far as I can tell, the hospital's name only contains the substring 心の風, not the full thing; while that still can have the same literal meaning (風 as a standalone word is still read as 'kaze' and still can, among other meanings, mean cold), as far as I can tell from a bit of searching, it lacks the idiomatic 'depression' meaning that 心の風邪 has.

[brin_bellway]

Thank you!

(It occurred to me as I was posting that I have several readers who know non-negligible quantities of Japanese, and I wondered what they might have to say.)

---

That hospital came up when I tried searching for Google's transliteration of "こころ の かぜ", which I'm guessing is using a different writing system.

Searching for "心の風邪", the first result appears to be a play called "The Last 5 Years", but nothing actually comes up if you ctrl-f for that string on that page. The second result, however, is a mental-health clinic that says (machine-translated):

The present age is said to be the "age of the heart."
Depression is often compared to a "cold of the heart."†
It is so common that everyone can get it once in a lifetime.

The number of patients with depression is on the rise, especially with mild depression.
Highly information-oriented society, nuclear family, declining birthrate and aging population, disappearance of local communities, changes in family structure, social advancement of women, bursting of bubbles, restructuring ... Rapid changes in social structure are increasing stress.

†Utsubyō wa `kokoro no kaze' ni yoku tatoe raremasu.

So that's one perspective.