Mass suicide by members of the Japanese Friend of the Truth Church

This paper reports an instance of mass suicide committed by seven members of a local religious cult following the leader's death in Japan in November 1986. The case is discussed from the following viewpoints: (1) a Japanese feudal form of suicide called Junshi; (2) religion and current social changes in Japanese society; and (3) the destructive aspects of a cult.     

14 Culture and Suicide: From a Japanese Psychiatrist's Perspective

There have been numerous papers focusing on culture and suicide, but it seems that they have often emphasized cultural differences excessively, thus running the risk of increasing prejudice toward different cultures and reinforcing overgeneralizations. From my albeit limited knowledge and experience, it appears that there are more similarities than differences in suicide among various cultures. Most cases of suicide reflect complex human factors that are found universally among cultures. Despite the fact that some cultural differences in suicide admittedly exist in different societies and that these are important, they cannot explain every aspect of suicide. This article explains how I, as a Japanese psychiatrist, diagnose and treat suicidal patients against the backgrounds of Japanese culture by presenting my way of thinking in daily practice in order to show similarities and differences that exist in Japanese suicide, treatment, and prevention.     

How Single Older Men Reach Poverty and Its Relationship with Help-Seeking Preferences1

This study aimed to clarify patterns of poverty among single older men and examine this population's help-seeking preferences. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 83 older single men in poverty. Three main patterns of poverty were identified: lifelong, job turnover, and retirement. A common characteristic among these patterns indicated that they did not recognize their difficulties as problems. Furthermore, we identified five groups of help-receiving preferences: independent, resignation, mutual-aid, other-oriented, and seeking. Among these, the independent and resignation groups were influenced by past experiences of failing to seek help, which was characteristic of the lifelong pattern type. Furthermore, the mutual-aid and seeking groups were oriented toward positive help-seeking, which was characteristic of the job turnover and retirement pattern types. However, neither group actively sought help for social isolation or lack of social support, suggesting that it would have been challenging to establish social relationships early on in life. Thus, it is important to establish initiatives that enable older people to understand their current state and to think about their future depending on three patterns of poverty.     

Preliminary evidence for selective cortical responses to music in one-month-old infants

Prior studies have observed selective neural responses in the adult human auditory cortex to music and speech that cannot be explained by the differing lower-level acoustic properties of these stimuli. Does infant cortex exhibit similarly selective responses to music and speech shortly after birth? To answer this question, we attempted to collect functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 45 sleeping infants (2.0- to 11.9-weeks-old) while they listened to monophonic instrumental lullabies and infant-directed speech produced by a mother. To match acoustic variation between music and speech sounds we (1) recorded music from instruments that had a similar spectral range as female infant-directed speech, (2) used a novel excitation-matching algorithm to match the cochleagrams of music and speech stimuli, and (3) synthesized “model-matched” stimuli that were matched in spectrotemporal modulation statistics to (yet perceptually distinct from) music or speech. Of the 36 infants we collected usable data from, 19 had significant activations to sounds overall compared to scanner noise. From these infants, we observed a set of voxels in non-primary auditory cortex (NPAC) but not in Heschl's Gyrus that responded significantly more to music than to each of the other three stimulus types (but not significantly more strongly than to the background scanner noise). In contrast, our planned analyses did not reveal voxels in NPAC that responded more to speech than to model-matched speech, although other unplanned analyses did. These preliminary findings suggest that music selectivity arises within the first month of life. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/c8IGFvzxudk .

Research Highlights

• Responses to music, speech, and control sounds matched for the spectrotemporal modulation-statistics of each sound were measured from 2- to 11-week-old sleeping infants using fMRI.
• Auditory cortex was significantly activated by these stimuli in 19 out of 36 sleeping infants.
• Selective responses to music compared to the three other stimulus classes were found in non-primary auditory cortex but not in nearby Heschl's Gyrus.
• Selective responses to speech were not observed in planned analyses but were observed in unplanned, exploratory analyses.