Paper short abstract:

Mental illness in a child threatens parents’ moral agency, and parents undertake various strategies to mitigate that threat. I explore these strategies of “relational repair” to emphasize their social, rather than biomedical, character, and to highlight the intersubjective nature of moral agency.

Paper long abstract:

The devastating effects of psychiatric diagnoses have been well documented by anthropologists and other scholars. Furthermore, anthropologists have long demonstrated the harm compounded by a mental healthcare system that stigmatizes and dehumanizes individuals with mental illness. A recent special issue of Ethos (2019) has brought attention to the direct threat posed by the mental healthcare system to “moral personhood,” or “the shared and culturally derived sense that one is a good and valued person” (Myers and Yarris 2019:4). Drawing from these recent discussions, and based on my ethnographic research among Japanese families with mental illness, I suggest the need to attend to the moral status not only of diagnosed individuals but also of close relations. Following psychiatrist Elizabeth Bromley’s observation that “[a] focus on the suffering subject sometimes seems to depopulate the social and institutional contexts around that subject” (2019:110), I seek to repopulate the “suffering subject’s” context by attending to how the emergence of mental illness affects the family, especially parent-child relations. I explore parents’ strategies for regaining a sense of moral agency in the wake of their children’s illness. I argue that, taken together, these strategies form a sort of “relational repair” that works on the social, rather than biomedical, consequences of diagnosis and treatment.