Culture, Coping and Help Seeking
Denise Saint Arnault, Ph.D., RN, FAAN
Associate Professor, UM School of Nursing
Psychiatric Clinical Nurse Specialist and Medical Anthropologist

This presentation will explore themes emerging for clinical ethnographic data from interviews with over 80 women in Japan and the US. The interactions among suffering symptoms, meanings, and cultural rules for help seeking will be examined. Audience will be engaged to discuss the implications of these for assessment and intervention.

Beyond “Killing the Self”: Modes and Meanings of Suicides in Japan
Jennifer Robertson, Ph.D.
Professor, UM Depts. of Anthropology and the History of Art

“Suicide” is regarded by outsiders and many Japanese alike as a “national allegory” or “cultural predisposition.” This equation of Japanese culture with an aesthetic of suicide is a largely literary and theatrical motif associated with the premodern samural class, a motif that was made operational during WW2 in the form of the kamikaze and human torpedo units formed in the fall of 1944 as weapons of last resort. Today, suicides intervene in public spaces, most often in the form of “human body accidents” at a train or subway station. If suicide is defined as “killing of the self” then attention needs to be paid to the socio-cultural meaning and construction of that “self” -- is it a singular, independent thing, or a situational, interdependent thing? Following a brief review at the status of suicide in Japan today, focusing on age groups, “sexual minorities,” methods, and international comparisons, I will discuss some distinctive concepts of suicide in Japan, including “love suicides” and “parent-child suicides,” and their ramifications.