Abstract
Hikikomori (‘social withdrawal’) appeared in Japan at the end of the twentieth century, inciting public panic about a generation of Japanese youth who shun social contact and fail to engage in the age-appropriate activities of young adulthood. Widely cited as a ‘condition’ rather than a psychiatric symptom or disorder, hikikomori has functioned variously as a diagnosis of individuals, families, and society at large. Taking the polysemous (and controversial) nature of hikikomori as a starting point, we draw on fourteen months of ethnographic research to explore how families negotiate a diagnosis of hikikomori in everyday life. Our focus on families opens up fruitful questions about the moral economies of life under diagnosis, not simply for the diagnosed individual, but also for those who assume responsibility for that individual’s health and wellbeing.
Highlights
On a Saturday afternoon in 2009, the first author (EBR, hereafter ‘I’) accompanied a psychiatrist who was presenting to a family support group on the release of a new antipsychotic medication in Japan
One father had just moved to Tokyo from Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, where his son had been diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of thirteen
The project began as a comparative study of the communities of care that had developed around the presumed universal psychiatric disorder of schizophrenia and the alleged ‘culture-bound syndrome’ of hikikomori (Rubinstein 2012)
Summary
On a Saturday afternoon in 2009, the first author (EBR, hereafter ‘I’) accompanied a psychiatrist who was presenting to a family support group on the release of a new antipsychotic medication in Japan. Sue Estroff (1981) and Tanya Luhrmann (2007) have written about how easy it is for individuals to be socialized into the role of the chronic psychiatric patient, someone who is marginalized, feared, and not-quite-human Because this thirteen-year-old boy had been diagnosed as mentally ill, regardless of the accuracy of the diagnosis, the parents were sure he was likely already learning to identify himself in terms of his disorder. The second set of guidelines, released in 2010, made more explicit reference to mental illness, while continuing to acknowledge hikikomori’s fuzzy etiology: ‘In general, hikikomori has been defined as a non-psychotic condition, thereby excluding individuals who withdraw as a result of positive or negative symptoms of schizophrenia.
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