Kitanaka, Junko

Junko Kitanaka is a professor of medical anthropology in the Department of Human Sciences at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. Kitanaka has been awarded five awards, mainly for her work on depression with the book titled Depression in Japan: psychiatric cures for a society in distress (2012, Princeton University Press), including the prestigious American Anthropological Association’s Francis Hsu Prize in 2013. The book has been translated into French, Japanese, Persian and Korean (and parts of it in Chinese). She has been featured in global media including New York Times, The New Yorker, and BBC, CNN, and Danish, German, and French national TV. She is a member of Japan’s Science Council and has served on numerous journal editorial boards including BioSocieties, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Cultural Anthropology and is an associate editor for Transcultural Psychiatry. She is also part of the editorial team for Case Studies in Global Social Medicine to be featured in the Lancet. Her articles include: “The social in psychiatries,” with Ecks, S. and Wu. H. Lancet, 28 May 2021; “Depression.” Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, with S. Ecks. 2021, and “Depression as a Problem of Labor,” Sadness or Depression?, J. Wakefield & S. Demazeux eds. Springer, 2016. Her work on dementia, preventive psychiatry, and the neuropsychiatrization of the lifecycle has appeared as “In the Mind of Dementia,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 34(1), 2020, which has been translated into Spanish.

I am a medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; depression and suicide; aging and dementia; and global health and preventive medicine. My book Depression in Japan (Princeton Univ. Press, 2012) examines the rise of depression and the emergence of psychiatry as a force of social transformation in Japan. My current project on dementia investigates the changing landscape of aging in the genomic age and the global psychiatrization of the life cycle.

• Medicine
• /Psychiatry
• /History of Medicine
• /Cultural Psychiatry
• /Anthropology

Others / Medical Anthropology

Medical Anthropology of Depression and Suicide