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

I'm not saying I believe you about this, but

[brin_bellway]

Some anti-medication article I skimmed: >>Preventing and treating colds is practically a national pastime there. Everywhere in Japan, you see people wearing gauzy surgical-style masks covering their nose and mouth.

Me, thinking about the sort of people who would bother to adopt widespread masking as a cold-prevention measure and the sort of people who would think it reasonable to describe depression as a "cold of the soul": ...

---

(if you're the sort of person for whom colds are a tiny deal, why would comparing [some condition you've never contemplated before] to a tiny deal convince you to care about it)