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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Couldn’t it be that there are just far less mentally ill people in Japan, per capita? At least when it comes to the mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, which are likely to produce homelessness and street harassment? I’ve seen persuasive evidence that rates of schizophrenia differ by race/ethnicity, and it seems plausible that Japan would have significantly less homelessness than the U.S. no matter what economic/political arrangement were in place in either country.

I’ve seen persuasive evidence that rates of schizophrenia differ by race/ethnicity, and it seems plausible that Japan would have significantly less homelessness than the U.S. no matter what economic/political arrangement were in place in either country.

Do you have a link? I agree it seems plausible Japan would have less homelessness regardless.

Here’s an analysis of race differences in psychotic personality. Huadpe also linked to a similar one up above. I’ll see if I can find one about schizophrenia.

That's a study of race and psychopathic personalities. That's a pretty big mistake. But otherwise a very interesting study, cheers.

You’re right, and I should have been far more careful in my phrasing and distinguished those two things. Good call-out.

I'm under the impression that mental health is very poorly-understood in Japanese society compared to the US, so it may just be that they seem mentally-healthier simply because they're broadly more ignorant of the potential reality of things. You arguably see this reflected in the culture; besides the culture around suicide mentioned below, I have seen a fair number of "these people need therapy" takes in discussions about mecha anime (especially as many characters in these works tend to be teenagers who go through traumatic things), and ever since the explosion of VTubing, the term "menhera" (from the English term "mental health") has become a fixture of the lexicon of certain communities around it (and often used in context of talents making particularly odd or poor decisions stemming from, well, mental health issues that haven't been diagnosed or treated). Japanese culture seems to favor the grin-and-bear-it approach to emotional suffering, whereas modern Western/first-world culture favors directly interrogating emotional suffering.

"Mental illness" is, I think in most cases, something of a euphemism. At best most of these people are dual diagnosis (mental illness and drug addiction).

Right, I’m specifically talking about the mental illnesses that cause the types of symptoms we associate with homeless street harassers; I don’t doubt that Japan has high rates of depression, anxiety, etc., but those don’t make you homeless and don’t make you harass strangers.

Japan as a culture has a long, long history of valorizing and romanticizing suicide as a totally acceptable and even deeply admirable response to a variety of negative situations. If culture has any effect at all on behavior, I'd expect a lot more suicide in a country that pumps out a deluge of memes about how suicide is heckin' rad.

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