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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the involvement of ex/patients in Japanese psychiatry during the 1960s. While the decade is known as the darkest era of Japanese psychiatry, it was also a crucial time for the rise of ex/patient activism, simultaneously revealing how ex/patients' perspectives have been dismissed.

Paper long abstract

The 1960s are known as the darkest era in the Japanese mental health system: with systemic support, Japan entered a “psychiatric hospital boom,” rapidly expanding its number of hospital beds. While the invention of psychotropic drugs prompted many developed nations to pursue further deinstitutionalization, Japanese psychiatrists instead used these medications to manage inpatients. At the same time, the mass media criminalized people with mental illness, encouraging the public to demand greater surveillance. Existing scholarship has highlighted the resistance formed by families of patients, young psychiatrists, and psychiatric social workers—a profession then on the rise—but activism by ex/patients themselves is often dismissed, with the assumption that such movements emerged only in the 1970s. This paper challenges that view by examining recent studies produced by contemporary mental health activists, which reveal the radical involvement of ex/patients during this darkest era. These studies show that the 1960s were, in fact, crucial for ex/patients to form connections and raise awareness, laying the groundwork for the expanded movements of the 1970s. Moreover, the historical dismissal of activism in this period suggests that ex/patients’ movements became legible to researchers only after the failure of segregation-and-confinement-based psychiatry had become apparent, making patients’ perspectives newly relevant.