In Japan there is a folk illness term mentioned senile dementia and other related symptoms, “Boke” in Japanese. “Boke” is not only mentioned as a typical psychiatric terminology on senile dementia, “Chihoo” or “Ninchi-Shoo, ” but also indicated as a depreciative and vulgar word on dull mentality.

After 1970s, the medicalization of aging, e.g. free-fee medication and hospitalization for aged person by national health insurance, has been accelerated. But this policy changed at the turning point of new century because of excess of budget. And the government has promoted appropriating the outcome of brain science progress for the treatment of gerontologic issues; especially the preventing aged dull mentality, “Boke-Booshi.”

Therefore the popular concepts on the “Boke” and “Boke-Booshi” have recently acquired a new social image.

In this image the intellectual faculty for adults, e.g. reading texts in limited time, calculation in one’s head, and so on, can be represented as “Nou-Nenrei” (lit. brain-age) in linear scale.

Then one can improve through task training helped by a small video game machine, which has strongly sold in 2005. We discuss this distorted [de-]medicalization for “Boke” people in a high-tech-phile country.

Links

• From Where does Our Health Come?: The Sociology of Antonovsky’s Salutogenesis, in pdf format
  

Bibliography

other informations