I’ve had anxiety my entire life (which has been getting better the older I’ve got), but I realized that there is no actual direct translation for “anxiety” in Japanese.
Are Japanese people unaware of it? Do they simply link anxiety to other emotions, like 不安 or 心配?
I myself find this a bit strange since I view anxiety as something separate from these emotions.
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I think it would be 不安 because anxiety medication is 不安安定薬 however I’m not a native speaker and I’ve found myself struggling with this as well. I didn’t know how to tell someone I thought their kid had “test anxiety” “受験不安？” still not sure.
不安 means anxiety. A lot of Japanese people have it because this is a high stress culture.
‘ 不安感’ fuankan is anxiety.
The Japanese government has a couple different classifications for it (at a glance, depending on the kind or severity perhaps?) but you could call it 不安障害 (ふあんしょうがい) if it’s debilitating enough
https://www.mhlw.go.jp/kokoro/youth/stress/know/know_02.html
不安症
Yes, fuan is anxiety. I would also add kincho 緊張 or nervousness to the mix when talking casually.
I think it’s just that the word ‘anxiety’ has been used in a specific way over the last decade or two in English which has changed some people’s perception of ‘anxiety’ in English to mean/be conflated with chronic anxiety disorder and has created a lot nonspecific use of the word ‘anxiety’ as a catch all for anxious feelings. Actual medical anxiety disorder we refer to as 不安障害. In English many people talk very vaguely (online, that is) about anxiety but in Japanese we really only bring it up in regards to specific situations that make us anxious so it hasn’t caught on to just say something abstract like ‘I have anxiety.’
In Japanese, the term for general anxiety disorder is 一般性不安障害 (ippansei fuan shougai). This term refers to a mental health condition characterized by excessive and persistent worry and anxiety about a variety of everyday events or activities.
Do you mean anxiety as a medical condition? I get anxiety pills from my GP. He calls it fuansho不安症 Japanese people definitely know what it is.