When a brain receives strong stress, it can damage the immune system, autonomic system, endocrine system, and cause troubles in various parts of the body. We often think that mental illness affects only mind, but actually, it sometimes cause troubles only on body. These disorders on the body triggered by stress are called, “psychosomatic disorders.” It is not a disease name but a name of clinical condition.
Therefore, the name of disease will be the illness appeared on the body. Asthma and atopic dermatitis are common symptoms of psychosomatic disorder. General ulcers are also common in psychiatry and psychosomatic clinic.
Marriage, divorce, pregnancy, childbirth, entrance exams, illness, moving, dismissal, too much card loan, worry about the rent, shortage of the savings, multiple debts, marital quarrels, etc… Any of them can cause a psychosomatic disorder. Children’s social withdrawal, school-rejection syndrome, shoplifting… These family and individual problems are now getting bigger every year.
Social problems are now in a serious condition in modern Japanese society, where the economy has sunk; the salary of workers never rises but rather falls even if the company grows. Furthermore, the repetition of the shocking tax raises, such as consumption tax, inhabitant tax and social insurance is giving severe stress to the sober people who have lived systematically.
The cause of depression and psychosomatic disorders can be multiple factors of all mentioned above. It is hard to completely separate the two, because people suffering from depression often suffer from physical symptoms too. They frequently feel nauseous, dizzy, overeat or even cannot eat at all.
If the family doesn’t have enough understanding, the patients have no one to consult with and sometimes fall into a situation called, “masked depression.” The masked-depressed patients are so patient that they never whine. So, their stress comes out as physical symptoms like diarrhea, stomachache, or sleep disorder. There is a TV commercial lately introducing a medicine for stomachache that you can intake “without water,” for the case you have a sudden stomachache on a train for work. You are obliged to take pills without water on a commuter train, because you can’t get off on a way just to take them. This medicine must have been developed from the fact that more and more people are experiencing sudden stomachache on a train these days, because of stress.
While these mental disorders are becoming of great variety, the Internet is playing an important roll here. There are websites where you can learn the names of medicines and disorders in detail, and even side effects that other users actually experienced. Thanks to the Internet, the knowledge of the general public about medicine is amazingly deeper than a decade ago.
If you post a question in Q&A corner of the website, many experiencers, probably including doctors, will kindly give you specific advises. For example, if you are having hard times with your radical doctor, they will advise you like, “how about going to another doctor to get a second opinion?”
On the other hand, since parallel importing has made it too easy to get medicines like Prozac by ourselves, there are also many people who refuse to go to the doctor. These people parallel-imported medicines without knowing which one is the most appropriate for them from the doctor, making their conditions much complicated and hard to be cured.
Continued to part 3…
