TOKYO – Not long after Japan stepped up its fight against the coronavirus last year, Nazuna Hashimoto suffered panic attacks. The gym in Osaka, where she worked as a personal trainer, suspended operations, and her friends stayed home on the recommendation of the government.
Afraid to be alone, she calls her boyfriend of just a few months and asks him to come over. Even then, she sometimes could not stop crying. Her depression, which was diagnosed earlier in the year, turned around. “The world I lived in was already small,” she said. “But I felt it getting smaller.”
Teen Julie could me. Hashimoto sees no way out and she tries to kill herself. Her boyfriend found her, called an ambulance and saved her life. She now speaks openly about her experience because she wants to remove the stigma associated with talking about mental health in Japan.
Although the pandemic was difficult for many in Japan, the pressure on women has worsened. As in many countries, more women have lost their jobs. In Tokyo, the country’s largest metropolis, about one in five women live alone, and the admonitions to stay home and avoid family have exacerbated the feeling of isolation. Other women struggled during the work-from-home era with the huge differences in the division of domestic work and child care, or suffered from an increase in domestic violence and sexual assault.
The increasing psychological and physical toll of the pandemic has been accompanied by a worrying increase in suicide among women. In Japan, 6,976 women took their lives last year, nearly 15 percent more than in 2019. It was the first year-on-year increase in more than a decade.
Each suicide – and suicide attempt – represents an individual tragedy rooted in a complex constellation of reasons. But the increase among women, which spanned seven consecutive months last year, affected government officials and mental health experts who worked to reduce the world’s highest suicide rate. (While more men than women committed suicide last year, fewer men did so than in 2019. Overall, suicides increased by just under 4 percent.)
The situation has exacerbated Japan’s long – standing challenges. Talking about mental health issues, or seeking help, is still difficult in a society that emphasizes stoicism.
The pandemic has also heightened tensions in a culture based on social cohesion and dependent on peer pressure to comply with government requests to wear masks and practice good hygiene. Women, who are often referred to as primary caregivers, sometimes fear public humiliation if they somehow do not maintain these measures or become infected with the coronavirus.
“Women bear the burden of virus prevention,” said Yuki Nishimura, a director of the Japanese Mental Health Services Association. “Women need to take care of their families’ health, and they need to take care of cleanliness and can be looked down upon if they don’t do it right.”
In one widely published report, a woman in her thirties who recovered from the coronavirus at home committed suicide. The Japanese media seized on her letter and commented on the possibility that she had infected others and caused problems, while experts questioned whether shame might have driven her to despair.
“Unfortunately, the current trend is to blame the victim,” said Michiko Ueda, associate professor of political science at Waseda University in Tokyo, who is researching suicide. Dr. Ueda found in surveys last year that 40 percent of respondents were concerned about social pressure if they contracted the virus.
“We do not support you if you are not ‘one of us’,” said Dr. Ueda said. “And if you have mental problems, you are not one of us.”
Experts are also concerned that a succession of Japanese movie and television stars who took their own lives last year could potentially cause a series of suicides on copycat. After Yuko Takeuchi, a popular, award-winning actress, took her life at the end of September, the number of women who committed suicide the following month rose by almost 90 percent compared to the previous year.
Shortly after the death of me. Takeuchi started writing a blog for Nao, 30, to discuss her lifelong battle with depression and eating disorders. She had openly written about her suicide attempt three years earlier.
Such openness about mental health struggles is still relatively rare in Japan. The suicides of celebrities forced Nao, whose family name was withheld at her request to protect her privacy, to think about how she might react if she hit her emotional nadir during the pandemic.
“When you’re home alone, you feel very isolated from society, and the feeling is really painful,” she said. “I just think I was in that situation now, I think the suicide attempt would have taken place much earlier, and I probably would have succeeded.”
Nao, who is now married, wrote about her challenges and said she wants to help others who may feel desperate, especially at a time when so many people are being sequestered by friends and colleagues.
“Knowing that someone is going through or going through something similar to you – and knowing that someone is seeking professional help for it and that it actually helped, will encourage people to do a similar thing,” Nao said. the taboos associated with mental illness in Japan.
Nao’s husband could see how much she was struggling with the long working hours and the cruel office culture at the consulting firm where they first met. When she stopped, she felt angry.
During the pandemic, women suffered excessive job losses. They made up the majority of employees in the industries most affected by infection control measures, including restaurants, pubs and hotels.
About half of all working women have part-time or contract work, and if the business is smooth, companies cut the employees first. In the first nine months of last year, 1.44 million such workers lost their jobs, more than half of them women.
Although Nao voluntarily terminated her consulting job to seek psychiatric treatment, she recalls that she was plagued by uncertainty and could no longer pay her rent. When she and her then-fiancé decided to speed up their wedding plans, her father accused her of being selfish.
“I just felt like I lost everything,” she recalls.
According to her, the feelings caused the depression that led to her suicide attempt. After spending some time in a psychiatric hospital and continuing on medication, her self-confidence improved. She found a job four days a week in the digital workings of a magazine group and is now able to manage the workload.
In the past, the suicide rate in Japan increased during times of economic crisis, including after the eruption of the property bubble in the 1990s and the global downturn in 2008.
During those periods, it was men who were most affected by job losses and committed suicide at higher rates. Historically, suicides among men in Japan have exceeded the number of women by more than two to one.
“They became more desperate after losing their jobs or fortunes,” said Tetsuya Matsubayashi, a professor of political science at the University of Osaka specializing in social epidemiology.
Last year, dr. Matsubayashi noted that in the Japanese prefectures with the highest unemployment, suicide among women under 40 increased the most. More than two-thirds of the women who committed suicide in 2020 were unemployed.
Among women under 40, suicides rose by nearly 25 percent, and among adolescents, the number of high school girls doubled their lives last year.
In the case of me. Hashimoto’s fear of financial dependence contributed to her feeling of hopelessness.
Even when the gym where she worked as a personal trainer reopened, she did not feel emotionally stable enough to return. She then felt guilty for relying on her boyfriend emotionally and financially.
She met Nozomu Takeda, 23, who works in the construction industry, in the gym, where he was her training client. They only went out for three months when she trusted that her depression would become unbearable.
Because she could not afford therapy and had severe anxiety attacks, she said she identifies with others who ‘feel very much in a corner’.
When she tried to commit suicide, she only told Mr. Takeda released the responsibility to look after her. “I wanted to take the burden off him,” she said.
Even those who did not lose their jobs may have experienced extra stress. Before the pandemic, domestic work was extremely scarce in Japan. Then women suddenly had to worry not only about pleasing their bosses from afar, but also about juggling new safety and hygiene protocols for their children, or protecting older parents who were more susceptible to the virus.
The expectations to perform did not change, but their contact with friends and other support networks decreased.
“If they can not get along with other people or share their stress with other people, it is not really surprising” that they feel pressured or depressed, says Kumiko Nemoto, a professor of sociology at Kyoto University of Foreign Affairs studies.
After surviving her own suicide attempt, Ms. Hashimoto now helps others to talk through their emotional problems and connect them to professionals.
Mr. Takeda says he appreciates Hashimoto talking openly about her depression. “She’s the type of person who really shares what she needs and what’s wrong,” he said. “So it was very easy for me to support her, because she agrees on what she needs.”
Together, the couple developed an app, which they call Bloste (the abbreviation for ‘steam blow-off’) to suit therapists with those seeking counseling. Ms. Hashimoto tries to recruit experienced professionals and those at the beginning of their careers, who charge more affordable rates for young clients.
Finally, she would like to train a therapist herself, with a special focus on women.
“The country has mainly focused on increasing women’s career learning and their economic well-being,” she said. Hashimoto said. “But I would like to emphasize the mental health of women.”