Studies of Personality and Mental Illness in Japan
Jun Sasaki
Osaka University
Traditionally in Japan, many theorists and researchers have been fascinated with the link between mental illness and personality. For example, psychiatrist Masatake Morita (1874 - 1938) indicated in the 1920s that introversion and perfectionism were fundamentally responsible for the onset of certain types of neuroses, such as 'taijin-kyofusho' (social phobia) and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Mitsuzo Shimoda (1885 - 1978) proposed in the mid 1900s that 'shuuchaku' temperament, which he called statothymia, was the pre-morbid personality of depressive disorder. We still use such concepts sometimes to explain the genesis of mental illness in our contemporary healthcare system.
Now let us turn to The Japanese Journal of Personality, vol. 15, published in 2006 - 2007, available on the website of J-STAGE (http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/personality/-char/en). There are 40 articles in the volume, including 15 regular articles, 6 exploratory reports, 1 review, and 12 short reports (all in Japanese with English abstract). For example, Katsuya (2007) examined whether reassurance seeking explained changes in depression, anxiety, and self esteem. Moriya et al. (2007) examined the relationship between self-focused attention and negative judgmental and interpretive biases in social anxiety. More than half of them have technical terms of clinical psychology or psychiatry in their title. This would indicate that many Japanese personality psychologists are interested in the domain, and quite a few clinical psychologists are interested in the journal.
However, participants of almost all studies were not from clinical populations; they were mostly university and high school students. Some clinicians might quarrel with the generalizability and applicability of such studies, but recent research has shown that analog study of the sort is meaningful and useful. Research has shown that 'normal' people often have the same symptoms as that of people in clinical settings who suffer from severe mental illness. In addition, such studies should weaken the prejudices against mental patients that see them as strange and different, and help promote appropriate interventions for the illness. It is certainly important to compare normal people and psychiatric patients, but it is also valuable that we can normalize mental patients, at the same time making attempts to explore relevant symptoms among normal people.
References
Katsuya, N. (2007). Reassurance seeking, depression, anxiety, and self esteem: An examination of depression specificity hypothesis. The Japanese Journal of Personality, 15, 161-170.
Moriya, J., Sasaki, J., & Tanno, Y. (2007). Trait social anxiety, self-focused attention, and negative judgmental and interpretive bias in social and non-social situations. The Japanese Journal of Personality, 15, 171-182.
