[Disease mongering and bipolar disorder in Japan].

Frequently used in a pejorative sense, "disease mongering" connotes a widening of the diagnostic boundaries of illness. Pharmaceutical companies conduct disease awareness campaigns on the pretext of educating the public about the prevention of illness or the promotion of health. Encouraged by disease awareness advertisements, people gradually become filled with concern that they are ill and need medical treatment. As a result, pharmacotherapy is increasingly being applied to ever-milder conditions, leading to potentially unnecessary medication, wasted resources, and even adverse side effects. Among all fields of clinical medicine, psychiatry is undoubtedly the most vulnerable to the danger of disease mongering. In Japan, depression provides the most drastic example of the impact of disease awareness campaigns on the number of patients seeking treatment. Until the late 1990s, Japanese psychiatrists focused almost exclusively on psychosis and endogenous depression, the latter being severe enough to require conventional forms of antidepressants, known as tricyclic antidepressants, and even hospitalization. At this time, people's attitude toward depression was generally unfavorable. Indeed, the Japanese word for clinical depression, utubyo, has a negative connotation, implying severe mental illness. This situation, however, changed immediately after fluvoxiamine (Luvox-Fujisawa, Depromel-Meiji Seika), the first selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) to receive approval in Japan, was introduced in 1999. In order to aid the drug's acceptance by the Japanese public, pharmaceutical companies began using the catchphrase kokoro no kaze, which literally means "a cold of the soul". Thus armed with this phrase, the pharmaceutical industry embarked on a campaign to lessen the stigma surrounding depression. According to national data from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the number of patients with a diagnosis of mood disorder increased from 327,000 in 1999 to 591,600 in 2003. At the same time, antidepressant sales have sextupled, from\14.5 billion in 1998 to\87 billion in 2006, according to statistics from GlaxoSmithKline. Recently, the pharmaceutical industry has shifted its focus from depression to bipolar disorder. Historically, Japanese psychiatrists have been familiar with Emil Kraepelin's "manic depressive insanity" (1899), whose definition was much narrower than that of its contemporary counterpart, bipolar disorder. Thus far, perhaps due partly to the reference in Kraepelin's definition of "manic depressive" disorder, Japanese psychiatrists have rather conservatively prescribed mood stabilizers for persons with frequent mood swings. Japanese psychiatrists can learn a great deal from their experience with the aggressive marketing of antidepressants. In the case of depression, over-medication arguably did more harm than good. The same risk exists with bipolar disorder. Disease mongering may occur whenever the interests of a pharmaceutical company exceed the expected benefits from the proposed pharmacotherapy on those affected by the putative bipolar disorder. In cases that are not severe enough for aggressive medication, psychiatrists should propose natural alternatives, such as an alteration of lifestyle and psychotherapy.