Junko Kitanaka is a medical anthropologist and professor in the Department of Human Sciences, Keio University, Tokyo. For her McGill University doctoral dissertation on depression, she received a number of awards including the 2007 Dissertation Award from the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Medical Anthropology. This has since been published by Princeton University Press as a book titled Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress, which won the American Anthropological Association's Francis Hsu Prize for Best Book in East Asian Anthropology in 2013. The book has been translated by Dr. Pierre-Henri Castel at the University of Paris-Descartes and published by D'Ithaque as De la mort voluntaire au suicide au travail: Histoire et anthropologie de la depression au Japon (2014). She is currently working on a new project on health screening, old age, and the psychiatrization of the life cycle.
Presentation Abstract
Psychiatric Screening for Secrets: A New Care of the Self in Japan
In Japan, until recently, mental health issues have been carefully guarded as personal and family secrets. In 2014, however, the government passed a revision of the Labor Safety Hygiene Law and institutionalized “stress checks” for all workers across the nation. This psychiatric screening was installed as a response to the high number of depressed and suicidal workers in a country plagued by recession since the 1990s. The screening was also prompted by a grassroots movement that helped establish state and corporate responsibility for protecting workers' mental health. These changes have initiated a web of corporate surveillance practices, pressuring workers to self-disclose, turning their psychology into a new object of rehabilitation and resilience training. At the same time, there are signs of emergent therapeutic spaces where psychiatrists and workers explore protective forms of sharing secrets while regaining a sense of a private self. By investigating the emerging forms of psychiatric screening and self-monitoring as a new “care of the self,” I ask what happens to people's subjectivities when their minds and bodies become repositories of valuable secrets.