Mental Health and Social Withdrawal in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

Preface vii which they are hiding. In either case, they do not seek help, for whatever reason they have renounced asking.The clinic has always been about responding to the patient's demand, even if in many cases, this meant reinterpreting it in a different way. Medical and psychiatric categories are tools that help the specialist endowed with knowledge, called upon because of that knowledge, to respond to the patient's demands. Hence the need for a different method and approach when the person's way to 'address' others is silence, isolation, social renunciation; one that is not, or at least that is less, predicated on a hierarchical relation of knowledge and thus closer to that of anthropologists. Clinical psychologists interested in hikikomori have to do fieldwork. They cannot remain in their office waiting for the patients to come. They must go to them. This profoundly changes the relationship and indicates that these individuals in distress are not like those who can be analyzed, and disciplined through the use of psychiatric categories. In what ways are they different? This is what this book describes with finesse and attention and tries to interpret in a larger social and historical context.The hikikomori phenomenon, according to Tajan, makes visible an ongoing process of social transformations of which it is part. One that is particularly visible in Japan, but that is also present in many places across the world. It concerns the place of medical professions in contemporary postmodern societies, the way individuals attempt to make themselves into subjects, their refusal of current mental health practices, and it questions the place and role of anthropological knowledge in this changing world.

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