Psychological Disturbances Never Disappear
If it is true that people's minds reflect the state of society, it seems likely that there is something wrong with present-day Japan.
A survey, conducted for the first time in the last two years by the Mental Health Research Institute of the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development and focusing on steps by labor unions to deal with mental health problems, has revealed that mental health among workers has worsened.
The survey, conducted in February this year, targeted 2,384 randomly selected single unions across the country; 543 unions responded to the survey, which indicates a response rate of 22.8 percent.
The survey results show that 68.7 percent of the labor unions surveyed replied that the number of union members with psychological disturbances had been increasing over the previous three years, an increase of 1.5 percent compared to the previous survey. An increasing trend was observed particularly among unions with larger memberships. At the same time, 68.1 percent of the unions surveyed replied that they had members who had been on leave for one month or longer due to psychological complaints, an increase of 4.6 percent from the previous survey.
The Japan Labor Flash has previously noted that long working hours and various other burdens are concentrated among workers in their 30s, due to cuts in the number of middle-aged and older workers, abstention from new recruitment, and the spread of performance-based evaluation systems. These trends have accompanied the prolonged recession since the latter half of the 1990s. The results of the latest survey show, as anticipated, that the age group suffering most from "psychological disturbances" has shifted from workers in their 40s to those in their 30s.
Reasons identified as causes for psychological disturbances include "human relationships within the workplace" (30.4 percent), "problems related to work" (18.6 percent) and "the working environment" (12.7 percent), with the greatest underlying factors being "deterioration of communication" (49.9 percent), "an increase in workload" (15.8 percent) and "lack of leadership among managers and supervisors" (12.3 percent).
Between September 2004 and March 2005, the Research Institute conducted a separate survey on "overtime and mental health," which targeted 10,738 people working for fifteen private firms and municipalities (the average age of respondents was 37.5 years). According to this survey, the proportion of workers who answered that they frequently feel like killing themselves was a mere 3.6 - 4.7 percent among those who did overtime for less than 60 hours per month, but 6 percent among those who did overtime for 60 hours or more but less than 80 hours, and 7.1 percent among those who did overtime for 80 hours or more.
The findings of these surveys provide crucial information for next step decision-making among labor and management regarding the increasing number of work-related "psychological disturbances" and "suicides".
