Overwork Suicide in Japan: A National Crisis

[摘要] I recently attended an international conference on affective disorders held in Tokyo and learned about the high rate of suicide in Korea and Japan. Currently, Korea has the highest annual suicide rate in the world. It is noteworthy that the increasing suicide rate is directly correlated with the annual increase in Korea’s gross national product. Japan has the third highest rate of annual suicide (after Hungary) and has witnessed a staggering 30,000 deaths per year for the past decade related in part to the sustained economic recession. It has not been easy for these proud and tradition-based cultures to acknowledge the relationship between suicide and depression, but the enormous social and economic consequences of the deaths have fostered an unusual partnership between the government and psychiatry to confront this urgent bio-psycho-social issue. Whereas suicide was once “normalized” by many Japanese as an act of free will, the alarmingly high suicide rates have contributed to a new conceptualization of suicide as a genuine mental illness and a new category called “overwork” suicide to describe people who take their lives simply because of working too hard. Although overwork suicide represents only a small fraction of the total suicides in Japan, this new category has had a marked social and political impact in the country.

[学科分类] 精神健康和精神病学