Suicide and Mental Health

I’m on the train to Tokyo.  It has been sitting at one station for more than 30 minutes.  Some sort of accident is causing the delay…probably a suicide.  I miss church service all together and arrive in the middle of lunch.

In Korea they jump off bridges.  Here they jump in front of trains.  Unfortunately, many people don’t have basic coping skills, and seeking or even admitting to needing mental help is considered shameful.  Very 1950s way of thinking. 

Last year I had a student struggling with depression & anxiety issues.  Would you believe that one of the villagers said to me “I heard one of your students has depression.”  As if a child’s mental health issues are something to gossip about.  It also angered me that someone on staff shared confidential info about a student.  Especially when many people generalize all mental health problems as being crazy or weak-willed. 

Kyla thinks that the root issue for all this suicide could be that they have no concept of faith or a God who loves them more than they can imagine.  That might be true in Japan, but many Koreans are believers in some sort of religion, Eastern or Western.  Another contributor is the intense pressure from all sides to succeed with zero tolerance or room for failure.  Also, this is a society where shame or loss of face is the worst thing that could happen.  In the West people say “I was so embarrassed, I could die!”  Well, here, they actually do.  Another factor is that most people don’t think in terms of having a Plan B or C, so when things don’t work out according to plan, suicide is a viable alternative because your life is over anyway.

There are countless stories about people who kill themselves after a breakup with their girlfriend or boyfriend.  That I don’t understand.  It’s not as if that person was the last one left on earth.  You can date someone new.  Then there’s the woman who killed herself when her beloved dog died.  Dogs have a short life span compared to humans.  She should’ve known this was going to happen eventually.  I’ve had three dogs and two cats die in my lifetime.  You can get another dog.  In this particular case, I believe she must have had mental issues.   

A couple years ago a well-known Korean news reader broke up with her boyfriend.  She sent him text messages begging him to come back to her.  The jerk made the texts public.  So she jumped off the roof of her apartment building.  Most Westerners in that situation would have simply ridden out the embarrassing incident knowing that people would forget about it in a week or two.  But use a permanent solution for a temporary problem, and you can’t undo it. 

  

June 8, 2019

The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered Down

Ai-chan tries really hard in school. She does well too. While most girls at the junior high school wear their hair in ponytails or short bobs she wears hers in two thick braids. Eight months into my time in Gunma, she started missing school. Through the other teachers’ bizarre explanations, I came to realize that she was suffering from anxiety and depression (“She doesn’t want to get out of bed. She cries too much at home. She afraid to go outside.”). I prayed that her parents could find qualified people to help her through this. In many ways, the field of psychiatry is still in its infancy in Japan because general attitudes toward mental health issues are stuck in the 1940s.

By the time I left Gunma, she had just started coming back to school a few days per week. Most Japanese people don’t understand mental illness and treat it like weakness of character or lack of willpower. Therefore, some of her teachers saw her absenteeism as bothersome. Whenever I saw her, I always greeted her and told her that I was happy to see her. Apparently this meant a lot to her and she wrote me a letter saying so.

She is also a Jehovah’s Witness in a school full of non-religious or barely Buddhist people, so that also added to her reputation as a wierdo. One teacher said, “Her family goes to church three or four times every week. Can you believe it??” I told him, yes, I can. Jehovah’s Witnesses are common in the West and I’ve had JW classmates, friends and colleagues. He was shocked. He thought they were rare. 

Many Japanese traditions are rooted in Shintoism and/or Buddhism, so when there were school events she couldn’t participate in for religious reasons, I’d keep her company. It was just the decent thing to do. I didn’t want her to feel ostracized or punished for being different (which, in the land where conformity is king, it is the modus operandi).  

An often-repeated Japanese proverb says that “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down…” That’s all well and good if you’re literally referring to nails, but people aren’t nails and diversity shouldn’t be punished. Especially when it’s things outside of our control.  

December 27, 2019