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Paper short abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of mental health self-help groups, this paper explores a rising overdose or OD crisis involving everyday drugs among women and young people in Japan. Special emphasis is placed on the importance of gendered inequality in grappling with ikizurasa or 'pain of living'.

Paper long abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of more than 100 meetings in mental health peer-support or self-help groups (SHGs), this paper explores Japan’s everyday drug issues from a gender-centred stratification perspective, with a view to highlighting inequality as a fundamental and complex driver of social suffering. I will begin with a broad analysis of the Japanese political economy of everyday drugs where a nexus of key institutions including businesses, the state and psychiatry forms the backbone of Japan’s mental health landscape. This is followed by a detailed empirical examination of individual perceptions and experiences of drug consumption in everyday life. Special emphasis is placed on how uneven power distribution, combined with cultural assumptions surrounding gender roles and personhood, in grappling with agential constrains and opportunities, as well as ikizurasa or 'pain of living'. By bringing lived realities back to structural scrutiny, the paper aims to generate insights and lessons that might inform drug policies and mental health care elsewhere.