Mental Health and Illness in Contemporary Japan

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Japan’s relationship to concerns of mental health and illness illustrate a patchwork of divergent and conflicting views. Attitudes toward mental illness that are conventionally labeled as “traditional” remain sporadically entrenched, intermingling with the strong influence of Western biomedicine and Japan’s robust medical infrastructure. The result is varied institutional practices and treatment methodologies, periodically conflicting views of diagnosis, cause, or severity, and uneven, possibly exclusionary, societal perception of afflictions. An anthropological approach to mental health and illness asks us to reexamine the fundamental categories that structure it as “an entirely different way of being in the world” (Kleinman 2012: 185). Taking Japan as our area of focus, this panel addresses contemporary concerns of mental health and illness from a diversity of perspectives including the ideological structuring of alcoholism and addiction, deinstitutionalization and mental health care, dementia within the aging population, and shifting views on the extent of excessive gambling. Across this range of papers, this panel illuminates the varied ways in which association with mental illness shapes individual lives and subjectivities in contemporary Japan.

Kleinman, Arthur. “Medical Anthropology and Mental Health: Five Questions for the Next Fifty Years.” In Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Histories, Activisms, and Futures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Area of Study

• Japan

Session Organizer

• Paul Christensen, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Individual Presentations

• Disease or Symptom? Therapeutic Responses to Compulsive Gambling in Yokohama - Tom Gill, Meiji Gakuin University

• A Town without a Psychiatric Ward: Italian-Style Deinstitutionalization in Japan - Karen Nakamura, University of California, Berkeley

• Scripting Addiction, Constraining Recovery: Alcoholism and Ideology in Japan - Paul Christensen, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

• Stressing Out about Radiation after Fukushima - Nicolas Sternsdorff Cisterna, Southern Methodist University

Discussants

• Nicolas Sternsdorff Cisterna, Southern Methodist University

• Allison Alexy, University of Michigan