Does Your Soul Have A Cold?
(2007)The concept of depression as a mental illness and the use of antidepressants to treat that illness has just recently been introduced to Japan—even though the country has one of the highest annual suicide rates. This new awareness was greatly influenced by Western pharmaceutical companies’ advertising or “educational campaigns,” which included the slogan “Does Your Soul have A Cold?” The film is an intimate and purposely unresolved look at five young people taking antidepressants in Tokyo. It is a meditation on the issues of globalism, pharmacology, and social shame towards mental illness, as seen through the everyday lives of these people. The film does not feature any “specialists” of “experts” and instead foregrounds the experiences of the people who are suffering from depression and trying to find a way out.
