'Crazy in Japan’ Conference Explores Country’s Increase in Mental Health Issues

“Crazy in Japan” is the title of a conference to be held Friday-Saturday, Nov. 14-15, at Yale.

The event — subtitled “Ethnographic Perspectives on Psychiatry and Mental Illness” — is sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies, part of the MacMillan Center, and the Yale Department of Anthropology.

The conference is being organized by Karen Nakamura, assistant professor of anthropology and East Asian studies at Yale; Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University; and Ellen Rubinstein, a doctoral student at Yale.

The organizers write: “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.”

The conference will take place 1:30-6 p.m. on Friday and 9 a.m.-3 p.m. on Saturday in Rm. 105 of the Anthropology Building, 10 Sachem St.

The keynote speaker will be Laurence Kirmayer, the James McGill Professor and director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. For a list of other participants, visit http://research.yale.edu/eastasianstudies/events.php.

Those interested in attending should register for the event by Tuesday, Nov. 11, by sending e-mail to anne.letterman@yale.edu or calling (203) 432-3428.