Tokyo Counseling Services

Eurobiz Magazine featured article on Andrew Grimes of Tokyo Counseling Services

“Inner worlds”

A WORD MAY CHANGE A LIFE, AS PSYCHOLOGIST ANDREW GRIMES CAN ATTEST

While browsing in the library of the University of Huddersfield (West Yorkshire, UK), he came across the Japanese word “yuugen” (幽玄).

http://www.eurobiz.jp/content/2012/april/columns/culture-shock
“The book explained it as a subtle and profound truth, beyond intellectual understanding,” says Grimes. “Right then I knew I had to see the land where they had such a word.”

It was quite a leap for the young Englishman, who had chosen Oriental Studies as the least repugnant third subject (after English and Philosophy) for his BA in Humanities.

In 1986, at age 33, Grimes was in Tokyo teaching English. He enjoyed teaching, but there was something missing.

“I decided that I should do some volunteer work, partly to get closer contact with the local community,” he recalls. Easier said than done, in those days. It took six months, and a friend’s introduction, before he found himself in the Ikebukuro office of Dr Noboru Hozumi, who gave him a practical test.

“He told me to go downstairs to the [psychiatric] day-care centre and teach the members some English … ‘If they like you, you can come back’,” Grimes relates. It was a rough session with the day-care clients, as he remembers it, but successful, and his life course was completely altered once more.

Hozumi, of Keio University Hospital, was a pioneer in his field. He had only recently opened the day-care centre, as the first of its kind in Japan outside a hospital setting. He must have developed a trust in the volunteer teacher, for about a year later he suggested that Grimes help out in a new way.

Number of school bullying cases rises 6.7% in 2010 school year

TOKYO (Kyodo) — The number of bullying cases recognized by public and private primary, junior high and high schools across Japan in the 2010 school year ended in March 2011 rose 6.7 percent from a year earlier to 77,630, an education ministry survey showed Monday.

That was the first increase in five years as the number of bullying cases had been falling since the 2006 school year when the ministry began collecting such data. An education ministry official said the number rose as teachers have become better at recognizing bullying in its various forms.

The figures released by the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry reflect data from the prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima that were not available for preliminary survey results published in August due to the March 11 earthquake and tsunami last year.

Per 1,000 students, 5.5 bullying cases occurred, up 0.4 from the previous year. Cases totaled 36,909 at primary schools, 33,323 at junior high schools, 7,018 at high schools, and 380 at schools for the disabled, according to the survey.

The rate of bullying cases being “resolved” by school authorities following detection was 79.0 percent, down 0.5 percentage point from a year earlier, the ministry said.

Regarding types of bullying as asked in a multiple-choice question, ridiculing and slandering topped the list at 66.8 percent, with shunning by friends or groups next at 20.8 percent.

The number of students who committed suicide came to 156, down nine from the previous year. Of them, four junior high school students were found to have been bullied.

The number of elementary and junior high school students who failed to attend classes for 30 days or more during the school year for reasons other than illness or their guardians’ economic status totaled 119,891, down 2,541 from a year earlier.

Among high school students, the number who failed to attend classes increased 3,979 to 55,707.

The number of violent acts in or out of primary, junior high and high school premises totaled 60,305 cases, down 610. Violence between students topped the list with 34,439 cases, followed by property destruction (14,990 cases) and violence against teachers (8,967 cases.)

Another survey by the education ministry showed the number of pupils and students at kindergartens, elementary, junior high and high schools in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures as of May last year dropped 26,167, or 3.6 percent, from the previous year, following the March disaster that triggered a nuclear crisis in Fukushima.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20120207p2g00m0dm008000c.html

NUCLEAR FREE JAPAN
Articles and commentaries on the growing social networking and activism of the Japanese people working towards bringing a permanent nuclear free Japan for the sakes of their children and the generations to come.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/22/japanese-mothers-rise-nuclear-power?newsfeed=true

Japan‘s nuclear power industry, which once ignored opposition, now finds its existence threatened by women angered by official opaqueness on radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after it was struck by an earthquake-driven tsunami in March.

“Mothers are at the forefront of various grassroots movements that are working together to stop the operation of all nuclear plants in Japan from 2012,” Aileen Miyoko Smith, head of Green Action, a non- governmental organisation (NGO) that promotes renewable energytold IPS.

More than 100 anti-nuclear demonstrators, most of them women, met with officials of the Nuclear Safety Commission this week and handed over a statement calling for a transparent investigation into the accident and a permanent shutdown of all nuclear power plants.

Currently six of Japan’s 56 nuclear plants are closed, some for stress tests after the Fukushima accident exposed serious breaches of safety precautions in the nuclear power industry.

More than 150,000 people remain unable to return home because of high levels of radiation in the Fukushima vicinity. There is now evidence that contamination has spread to rice and vegetables grown in nearby farming areas, and found its way into baby food products on supermarket shelves.

Japanese authorities announced last week that the devastated Fukushima Daiichi complex has been brought down to a state of cold shutdown.

“The first stage of controlling the terrible accident has been achieved. The government will follow a road map which in 30–40 years will make Fukushima safe again,” said Goshi Hosono, minister of state for nuclear power policy and administration.

Speaking to the press, he explained that there is now no nuclear activity in the Fukushima nuclear reactors emitting radiation.

Power companies and government officials have also pledged to enforce safety regulations strictly and to ensure transparency.

Smith views the latest announcements as a warning. “We are stepping up our activism to ensure that the government and power industries, now eager to create a notion of security, will not restart nuclear plants,” she said.

Indeed, groups of women, braving a cold winter, have been setting up tents since last week preparing for a new sit-in campaign in front of the ministry of economic affairs.

The women have pledged to continue their demonstration for 10 months and 10 days, traditionally reckoned in Japan as a full term that covers a pregnancy.

“Our protests are aimed at achieving a rebirth in Japanese society,” said Chieko Shina, a participant, and a grandmother from Fukushima. “There is a need to change the way the authorities have run the country by putting economic growth ahead of protecting the lives of people.”

Experts view the ongoing protests as a landmark in Japan’s fledgling social movements long consigned to the sidelines of a prosperous and hardworking society that puts a premium on achievement and success.

“The ongoing demonstrations symbolise the determination of ordinary people who do not want nuclear power because it is dangerous. There is also the bigger message that we do not trust the government any more,” said Takanobu Kobayashi, who manages the Matsudo network of citizens’ movements.

Distrust stems primarily from the fact that the meltdown of the Fukushima reactors was not reported to the public immediately, causing huge health risks to the local population from radiation leaks.

Internet sites have recorded hundreds of thousands of comments by people expressing disbelief over assurances put out by the government or officials from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), operator of the Fukushima plant, on nuclear safety.

The accident also broke the myth of safety of nuclear power plants that authorities had maintained for decades to gain public support as the country embarked on massive nuclear power programmes.

Faced with public anger, the government and TEPCO have acknowledged mismanagement and promised major reforms.

Prof. Hideo Nakazawa, a sociologist at Chuo University, describes the ongoing protests as both a display of resentment against authority as well the use of nuclear power.

“Demonstrations have reached cities, taking the nuclear issue to the forefront of civil movements in Japan,” he told IPS. He added that the lack of involvement of political parties in the anti-nuclear movement contrasts with the older pattern that had strong leftist leanings.

The leadership of women in civic movements is also unprecedented. Mothers have been leading the demonstrations, with many of them coming out for the first time to gain sympathy and support for their campaign to prevent exposing children to the dangers of radiation.

“Japanese civic movements have languished on the margins mostly because of the cold shoulder treatment they have received in society. These barriers are being broken now,” explained Nakazawa.

Parliamentarian Mizuho Fukushima, one of Japan’s leading female politicians and an active participant in the anti-nuclear demonstrations, told IPS that the protests against nuclear power are not going to die down.

“Forcing changes to stop nuclear power in Japan is very possible,” said Fukushima, chair of the Social Democratic Party of Japan since 2003.

The Western English Media Corporations Hunt for PTSD in Post Triple Disaster Japan.

PTSD Prevention over PTSD Prediction

Good day to you from a wonderfully rainy morning in Tokyo ~ tomorrow is forecast to be sunny in the Land of the Rising Sun…. Here in Japan too people are showing the world that the Japanese people and all who live here are able to rise up once again and grow through even the most terrible of the traumatic natural disasters such as happened earlier this year on March 11, 2011 when at 14.46 and 18 seconds in the afternoon, on a typically early blue sky day when the first plum blossoms were showing the way for the cherry blossoms to follow them on and bloom even in sometimes chilly winds,… the Great East Japan Earthquake Tsunami stuck with a Magnitude force o 9.0 and took the lives of at least 19.595 people in that single sunny sunny afternoon that was watched with disbelief, shock and sadness in Japan and all around the world through western and other international media organizations around the world… After two brief days and nights following the earthquake and tsunami, as terrible as it was and in spite of the aftershocks that were to plague the East Japan, Kanto and Tokyo Regions for many months to come, people were just beginning to calm down from the initial natural state of shock and heightened stress levels caused by the acute stress disorientation that naturally follows disasters on this scale, when the first news and media reports from journalists and reporters from both Japanese, English speaking and other international media professionals began to reveal that we were also now threatened by the meltdowns and release of radiative contamination into the very air we breathed and even for a while in the water we had always drank without thought or fear from the taps in our kitchens and water heaters… the third, and this time man made disaster was revealed and in the midst of anxiety, fear and confusion the frightening truth that at least 3 of the 6 nuclear reactors in the Tokyo English Electic Power Company’s Number One Nuclear Power Plant were in a state of meltdown… we were going through the events and developing aftermath of of three disasters simultaneously in a way which was without precedent in not just the history of Japan but of the whole world..

As the fear of radiation spread through the hearts, minds and reporting of western and other international media professionals reporting from Tokyo and the Tohoku (East Japan) region rational and objective decision making was rendered impossible. Looking back this was due to several factors, such as failure of the government to to take immediate and decisive action to contain and prevent the widespread nuclear emissions that have resulted in at 3% of the Japanese land mass being rendered uninhabitable for at least decades if not generations to come, the failure of The Tokyo Electric Company (TEPCO)’s to clearly inform the government and the Japanese public about the full extent of the nuclear crisis and the risk of contamination to the people living within Fukushima and the surround prefectures including Miyagi, Iwate, Chiba Prefectures and the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan areas. The repeated shocks and fears induced by the experience of the Great East Japan Triple Disasters resulted in great anxiety in the public at large and in some cases panic in the non-Japanese speaking residents and international media reporters and journalists. The rapid onslaught of the events of those first frenetic days and weeks of the triple disaters, and in particular the fear of the effects on health that nuclear radiation and contamination may be having on the health of themselves and their families led to a mass exodus of some sections of foreign nationals from Tokyo and Japan. This group consisted in the main of expatriate employees of international companies as well as the international media reporters, journalists and support staff of their parent organizations; and an exodus that was sanctioned by first the French and Australian and then virtually all international embassies and consulates in Tokyo and in other parts of Japan. Once out of the country and away from the central story of the deterioration of the nuclear reactors at TEPCO’s Number One Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima Prefecture, some members of the reporting departments of English speaking and other international media corporations television channels and newspaper and magazine publications looked for other ‘angles’ to report on. One aspect that soon became a common news ‘story’ was a frenzied search for English speaking ‘experts’ on PTSD and trauma. In the vast majority of cases these experts not only were health professionals with no or little real first hand and long term experience in providing psychosocial support or Psychological First Response with victims of natural or nuclear disasters, they had never been to Japan and knew next to nothing about the mental health first response training and expertise that existed and was in place in the disasters zone. Ludicrous articles and blog posts began to appear like black rain all over the internet forecasting and broadcasting fears of a mental health disaster of biblical proportions that would see a surge in the number of people suffering PTSD in the effected disaster areas of up to 40% of the survivors of the tsunami, earthquakes and aftershocks. There was no scientific evidence to support this but nevertheless a rash of PTSD pundits and prophets were at hand from around the world to forecast and claim that countless numbers of cases of PTSD were already being found. This was not the case and never is the case during or in the immediate weeks and even months following traumatic events whatever the scale of the disaster. Despite the frenzy and obsession with PTSD by the international media and also by blog articles, so called reports and features by a few opportunistic mental health professionals and self serving ‘experts’ in other English speaking countries, the reality that the over 100,000 licensed professionals in the mental health care community in Japan are working with and the approach we are taking is very different indeed.

So, I decided to create this blog in English with the name of Japan Trauma Recovery to look back through the difficult and tragic times that Japan and her children have suffered not only until now but also to record and look forward as all of the people living here still move on in the Tohoku (East Japan) and Kanto Regions, in Tokyo and in Japan as a whole many still endure both physical and mental – spiritual hardships and difficulties as they stoically and courageously make enormous and heroic efforts to rebuild and create a new and better Japan for their children and their children’s children to live safely and with smiles on their faces once again…

As the situation and recovery efforts evolve the focus of this blog may well evolve with it in time. In the first instance I feel it is useful to report on the careful and coordinated responses of licensed mental health professionals in Japan organized by 44 national and regional Psychological, Psychiatric and Medical Associations and Societies. Thank you for reading this far and please bookmark and tweet, facebook and link it on through your online social networks. In this way you can make a difference and help to tell the true story of the people of the Tohoku region, the farmers and the fishermen, the first responders and the members of the national defense forces and fire and rescue services and the tens of thousands of psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric social workers and community and mental health nurses who are working tirelessly to make sure that we provide the most culturally sensitive, humane and appropriate psychosocial support and preventative care in order that the good people of East Japan can recover and move on through this most difficult time of their lives and show the world that each and every one of them are the true heroes of the Great East Japan Triple Disasters.

With warm regards from Tokyo

Andrew Grimes

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Tokyo Counseling Services mental health counseling professionals are qualified JSCCP Clinical Psychologists licensed to practice in Japan. Every Psychotherapist at TCS holds the Japanese Certificate for Psychotherapy and is qualified and legitimately registered as a Psychotherapist by The Japan Federation for Psychotherapy. Our counselors provide individual counseling, couples counseling, marriage counseling and family counseling. group therapy and psychotherapy services. Counseling and therapy services are available in English, French, German, Korean, Japanese and Portuguese for all residents living in the Tokyo Metropolis and Kanto region. Telephone Tokyo 5431-3096

Tokyo Counseling Services mental health counseling professionals are qualified JSCCP Clinical Psychologists licensed to practice in Japan. Every Psychotherapist at TCS holds the Japanese Certificate for Psychotherapy and is qualified and legitimately registered as a Psychotherapist by The Japan Federation for Psychotherapy. Our counselors provide individual counseling, couples counseling, marriage counseling and family counseling. group therapy and psychotherapy services. Counseling and therapy services are available in English, French, German, Korean, Japanese and Portuguese for all residents living in the Tokyo Metropolis and Kanto region. Telephone Tokyo 5431-3096

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John Nash’s Genius Is Extraordinary. Recovering From Schizophrenia Is Anything But.

The end of “A Beautiful Mind,” the Oscar-nominated movie based loosely on the life of Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr., depicts the Princeton mathematician’s emergence from the stranglehold of paranoid schizophrenia, the most feared and disabling of mental illnesses. Moviegoers who have watched the cinematic metamorphosis of actor Russell Crowe from the disheveled genius who furiously covers his office walls with delusional scribblings to the silver-haired academic perfectly at home in the rarefied company of fellow laureates in Stockholm might assume that Nash’s recovery from three decades of psychosis is unique.

But mental health experts say that while Nash’s life is undeniably remarkable, his gradual recovery from schizophrenia is not.

That contention is likely to surprise many people, including some psychiatrists, who continue to believe the theory, promulgated a century ago by Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries, that the serious thought and mood disorder is a relentless, degenerative illness that robs victims of social and intellectual function, invariably dooming them to a miserable life in a homeless shelter, a prison cell or, at best, a group home.

More focus on psychotherapy and mental health

It is wonderful to see a project to construct a building to accomodate a psychodrama, psychotherapy and occupational therapy at a Hospital for the people of Trinidad and Tobago is being funded by the Japanese Government. It is truly a very good, very inspiring and worthwhile project. It is to be hoped that the government will now turn to providing the same kind and quality of buildings for the Japanese public too. This would be a great help for the movement away from institutionalization through the many small and medium private hospitals that still exist today. Pooka

Health Minister Julius Timothy said the Government of Dominica is committed to ensuring further improvements is made to the Mental Health Programme.

Timothy was addressing the official contract-signing ceremony for the construction of a building to accommodate a psychodrama, psychotherapy and occupational therapy activities at the Princess Margret Hospital on Friday morning.

The project, which is costing some US$94,450, is being funded by the Government of Japan.

“Gone are the days when mental health was practiced within the context of institutionalization, alienation and discrimination. Through public health education, our society is gaining greater incite in the cause and treatment of mental illness. Hence more people are showing a greater level of respect to persons who suffer from mental illness,” he added.

Timothy said mental health is a priority area for the Ministry of Health

“Just last year, the Ministry of Health was able to complete a process that saw the formulation of the first Mental Health Policy. The final draft is being reviewed to make it a truly people’s Mental Health Policy in Dominica, and will shortly be submitted to Cabinet,” he said.

According to Timothy, Government is fully committed to reorganizing the Mental Health Program.

He said mental health is now being seen as the area of health that concerns everyone in the population and government is committed at ensuring that the mental health services move to the next level with the other areas of the health sector.

He noted that the new project is testimony of the government’s belief that those who are mentally ill must be rehabilitated for optimum functionality in the society.

“While pharmacological treatment is necessary, efforts at cognitive restructuring and social integration is paramount to the patient well being,” Timothy said.

Project Coordinator Dave Laudat, in delivering remarks at the ceremony, noted that the project will concentrate on the area of treatment.

“The building will facilitate activities such as music, dance, drama, individual and group counseling, art, craft, cooking, baking, sports and remedial education,” he said.

The Counselor of the Embassy of Japan in Trinidad of Dominica Kiyoshi Takeuchi signed on behalf of his government.

He said both governments will work together to ensure the completion of the project in an opportune time.

The project also allows for the purchase of a cooking stove and refrigeration, a therapist office, storage room and other area.

Embassy of Japan in Trinidad and Tobago

Article From Dominica News Online