Liberal Japan

Suicide in Japan …

2007/07/05 — I’m going to open a thread on this topic and begin commenting a little when I see articles related to this. Today there was an article in the Yomiuri discussing the Center for Suicide Prevention which was established last year in Tokyo by the central government. Clearly the central government must feel they have some responsibility in this area, or they would not have opened up the center. This new center is now planning to conduct surveys of families of those who have committed suicide, and then on the basis of these surveys recommend policies that will help alleviate the number of suicides in Japan. So my question for today is this, is the problem of suicide really the government’s responsibility? Let me share with you my opinion …


If a person commits suicide, then is the government responsible? Well maybe. For example, we could say that in a country with a large government like Japan people feel they have less control over their lives and are therefore more likely to commit suicide. After all large governments interfere with individual people’s lives more, and as a large government requires a large number of non-electable experts — bureaucrats — it is less responsive to electoral change. In a large government you can always change the elected officials at the top, but you can’t change the experts who are really doing most of the work or the whole edifice might collapse. Therefore, as long as the bureaucratic experts don’t change (and how could they), there won’t be much change in the government. In Japan, government is considered responsible for the economy, education of our children, our health, our retirement investments, stable work conditions, protection of our food and water supply, traffic safety, and so on and so forth, and as the elected officials have little control over the bureaucratic experts (how could they), this means ordinary people have little control over all these important areas in their life. I do think feeling a lack of control in one’s life does lead to feelings of helplessness and melancholy which might contribute to a person’s decision to commit suicide.

So if the government is feeling some responsibility for this issue, perhaps a good argument can be made that this is correct. Next time I post on this I hope to address the question of whether or not I think their policies in this direction are a good idea or not. I also hope to beef up my links section and add some older news stories.

News:

• 2007/07/05 Suicide center to conduct natl study, The Yomiuri Shimbun; “A national institution plans to begin a nationwide survey this autumn of the backgrounds of people who committed suicide by interviewing several hundred bereaved families of suicide victims in an effort to help lower the suicide rate, it has been learned. The Center for Suicide Prevention, which was established in Kodaira, Tokyo, last year, aims to draw up suicide-prevention measures after analyzing the results of the survey, while also offering pyschological support to the bereaved families. Suicides across the nation have topped 30,000 for nine consecutive years. However, a comprehensive study of the reasons people commit suicide has not been conducted. …With the cooperation of prefectural governments and ordinance-designated major cities, the center will survey families of people who committed suicide this year and was considering also conducting interviews with a control group. According to the center, psychiatrists and public health workers will pair up to conduct the interviews. They will ask questions about suicide victims’ lives, including their regular routines, whether they had a mental disorder or physical disease, their income, debts, working hours and relationships with others. By analyzing possible contributing factors, such as debts, fatigue and bullying, and other events that occured before a suicide, the center aims to find out what drives people to take their own lives and what could prevent them doing so. In cases where medical assistance failed to prevent a patient from committing suicide, the center intends to study to what extent the treatments worked and why they failed. … In Finland, a national measure reportedly proved successful in lowering the country’s suicide rate from 30.4 per 100,000 people in 1990 to 21.1 per 100,000 people in 2002.”

Links:

• Everything2: Suicide in Japan Excellent well rounded article.
• TPR Spotlight #1: Suicide in Japan by the Numbers Useful article attempting to debunk myths about suicide in Japan. Recommended.
• Buddhist Views of Suicide and Euthanasia By Carl B. Becker

Interesting overview of the subject.

• Morals, Suicide, and Psychiatry: A View from Japan “Because suicide in Japan is viewed as a potentially honorable, virtuous, and even beautiful act of self-sacrifice expressing one’s duty to one’s group, the western perspective is quite foreign to the Japanese self-conceptual framework. Therefore, since Japanese psychiatry and law have embraced the western medical tradition of viewing suicide as a non-rational response to mental illness, which runs counter to the cultural view that suicide is a moral (and rational) act, I argue that western explanations of suicide present significant cross-cultural problems for Japanese psychiatry.” I haven’t read this article yet, but it sounds interesting. I think the problem is we need to focus on the persons reasons for taking their life. Those reasons might well be different in Japan. However, that doesn’t in any way justify the suicide. The western medicine model is clearly confused because it assumed people commit suicide as if it were the effect of many different causes.
• Suicide as Japan’s major export? A note on Japanese Suicide Culture Mixes nihonjinron, sociology and bad economics into a confusing mess. While never intending, as is typical of such articles, justifies suicide by explaining it as the inevitable affect of certain causes.
• Suicide: Japan’s Growing Nightmare Dr. Nishijima feels that though cases of exhaustion depression and promotion triggered depression due to a huge dependence on the company have been decreasing, frequent absence from work syndrome, aversion depression, avoidant personality disorder and maladjustment stemming from mental disorders have increased. This is why suicide numbers have not decreased.” Mental illnesses have been increasing because of modern society? Hardly. More problems are being regarded not as an ethical problem but as a health problem. This, of course, dehumanizes people and contributes to the problems it seeks to resolve.