Crazy in Japan: Ethnographic Perspectives on Psychiatry and Mental Illness

Crazy in Japan: Ethnographic Perspectives on Psychiatry and Mental Illness

Laurence Kirmayer - McGill University will deliver the keynote address at 1:30 PM.

Friday, November 14, 2008 - 1:30pm to Saturday, November 15, 2008 - 3:00pm
Room 105, Department of Anthropology See map
10 Sachem Street
New Haven, CT 06511

The awe-inspiring 1980s image of “Japan Inc.” has all but collapsed in the new millennium. The Japanese social machine has been crippled by self-doubt and the seeming increase of such psychosocial maladies as group suicide, alcoholism, domestic violence, mental illness, eating disorders, shut-ins, and school refusal syndrome. This two-day conference brings together leading medical anthropologists and clinical researchers from Japan, Canada, and the United States to discuss the current state of mental illness and social anomie in the world’s second largest economy. This conference is being organized by Karen Nakamura (Yale University) Chikako Ozawa-de Silva (Emory University), and Ellen Rubinstein (Ph.D.Student Yale University) and sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University (CEAS) and the Yale Department of Anthropology.

1:30 PM - Keynote Address by Laurence Kirmayer - McGill University, Cultural Minds, Brains, and Bodies: Psychiatry as an Agent of Globalization

Coffee break

3:00 PM - Amy Borovoy - Princeton University, Japan’s Hidden Youths: Mainstreaming the Emotionally Distressed in Japan
4:00 PM - Chikako Ozawa-de Silva - Emory University, Dying Well with Others: The Troubling Phenomenon of Internet Group Suicide in Japan
5:00 PM Ken Vickery - Harvard University, A Cold of the Heart: Depression in Japan

Saturday, November 15, 2008
9:00 AM - Karen Nakamura, Yale University, Crazy in Japan: Schizophrenia, Traumas of Memory, and Community Storytelling in Rural Japan
10:00 AM - Naoko Miyaji - Hitotsubashi University, Toroidal Island: Geopolitics of Trauma
11:00 AM - Junko Kitanaka - Keio University, Questioning the Suicide of Resolve: Medico-legal Disputes Regarding ‘Overwork Suicide’ in 20th Century Japan

Lunch break

1:00 PM - Susan Orpett Long - John Carroll University (discussant)
2:00 PM - John Traphagan - University of Texas-Austin (discussant)

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Japan