Brain

I'm going to touch on a sensitive topic, and one that is very important to me, personally, which is that of mental health, and particularly on mental health in schools, and even more particularly on how mental health is seen in Japanese schools, based on my anecdotal experience.

In my experience, mental health awareness in Japan is near non-existent, especially for the more subtle disorders, and especially for those with no apparent physical component.

People are aware of it, vaguely, on some sort of conceptual level. There are movements and attempts at progress being made. But they are few and far between.

I have one student who I am 95% sure has autism or some mild form of autism. It is completely normal for other students to laugh at him for being "weird." Even the teachers - who are nice people otherwise - make statements such as "oh, he's just a little different," or "he's a strange one." Some of the nicer teachers call on him often to give him a chance to participate more, but as for any sort of special needs program or any real recognition of whatever it is he has, forget it.

I get so angry when the students laugh at him. I didn't know how to handle it at first.

"Don't do that," I'd say in Japanese, and they didn't listen.

Now I just hold up my hand and say "stop" or "hey" in English and they get the picture. It took some level of comfort with my students to get there, though.

I have another student who is terminally shy and breaks down when asked to answer a question in class. We do this game, criss-cross, as a warm-up. Students raise their hand if they know the answer to a question, and choose column, row, or "just me" to sit down if they get it right. It's a very simple game. By the end, there's usually two or three students standing, and they all have to answer a question.

One time, the terminally shy kid was one of the last ones standing. I gave him a super easy question to make things easier for him.

"What color is my shirt?" I asked.

Dead silence.

"Ok," I said. "What is the weather?"

Dead silence.

"What is your name?"

Dead silence.

All periods of silence lasted for two or three minutes. It was deadly deafening. The other students looked as confused as me, and my JTE refused to intervene. Every time I said "ok, it's ok, you can sit down," the JTE said "no, they can do it."

Eventually the JTE had to walk over to the back of the classroom and have the student whisper the answer in their ear. He was beet red by the time the ordeal was over.

I was mortified at how they could basically torture the poor kid like that. I really wanted to just let him sit down.

After class, I asked my JTE if he had any issues.

"No," they said. "I don't think so."

Yeah, well, I think so.

I knew and was very close with a special needs student in America. He had all sorts of issues, from OCD to anxiety to depression. He also had very poor spatial recognition and an organizational disability where he had trouble organizing not only material things, but thoughts in his head.

He was absent a lot in high school because of it.

His parents were caring enough people that they found him a great support network. A therapist/psychologist combo, with the therapist in particular working very closely with the schools to make sure he had things like extra time on assignments, testing spaces where he could take the test by himself instead of in class, doing independent studies instead of elective classes, help organizing his folders.

He wouldn't have graduated high school if it weren't for the intervention of his parents and this group of specialists.

By college he was living a much more normal life and functioning on his own.

I get the feeling that in Japan, he'd have been labeled as "disinterested" or "lazy" or something similar, and left to his own devices, and probably have failed out of school.

I've had skirmishes with this sort of mentality. Weakness is often seen as one's own fault, regardless of circumstance. Caught a cold? You should have worked to prevent it better. Anxious? Shape up and stop disrupting the atmosphere of the room. Forgot an assignment or somewhere you had to be? Irresponsible and careless.

For a mentally healthy person, these might be appropriate responses.

But for someone suffering from difficulties, they are insensitive, and likely only worsen the problem.

Weakness is not tolerated very well here, regardless of the reason, and this is partially due to the group mentality that everyone is supposed to adhere to. Some people are wired differently, and this clashes with that mentality, causing a lot of friction when it comes to recognizing mental illness or even different ways of thinking, like Asperger's Syndrome.

I feel like this is one of the areas where a foreigner - an ALT, in this case - can be a great help to the Japanese classroom.

In western cultures, we have a much greater awareness of mental health and how it should be handled. We can bring this to the classroom in small ways.

Paying extra attention to students we know probably have some sort of difficulty, giving them a little extra guidance when answering questions in class. Being more gentle with certain students. Comforting students who are crying after being forced to apologize for handing in their homework late, when you later find out they're having problems at home. Simply taking the time to talk to these students outside of class.

Even just being here and discussing the topic with others, whether they be our students or JTEs or whoever, is beneficial towards progress. If not towards overall progress, then definitely at least for that particular situation with that particular student, even if to a small degree.

You can't shake the nation, and you can't change the culture, but you can help in small ways. And those small ways make it worth being there, I think, even if I often feel like I'm not able to help as much as I want to.

Every little bit helps. Baby steps are better than no steps at all.