Hikikomori: Social Anxiety Due to PTSD Arising From Pressure to Succeed in an Emotionally Reserved Setting (which may explain Cho Seung-Hui's life)

For much of my twenties and thirties, I may have suffered a form of hikikomori, a uniquely Japanese form of sociopathy with a risk for violence due to social isolation.

Here's a full description of the disorder, and roots to its origins. The concept of hone (inner voice) and tatamae (outer voice) may be unique to the Japanese, but the terms I use for each of them relates to the inner voice that when inappropriately expressed may lead to social isolation and the outer voice that is appropriately expressed which leads to social integration into the group.

Thus, one only expresses the inner voice to become individualistic, while the outer voice leads one to become at one with the group, be it one's friends or society at large.

April 19, 2007: Perhaps this explains Cho Seung-Hui's early life until age 16, the year before 9/11.

The following is a quote from Mark Zielenziger's first chapter of his book, SHUTTING OUT THE SUN, which may explain Cho's first 17 years of his life (until 9/11 shocked him and the rest of us out of our sense of isolation from the horrors of terrorism).

Bluntly put, Cho's murder-suicide is another of a long blood trail of domestic terrorism, but then again so is any form of violence when it brings a chill of terror to even one heart.


A SYNDROME KNOWN AS HIKIKOMORI, IN which the outside world is shunned, is wreaking havoc on young people in Japan, a country known for its communal values. And an older generation--the very bastion of those old-fashioned values--may be to blame, according to a controversial new theory.

Hikikomori (the term refers to the behavior itself and to those who suffer from it) was first recognized in the early 1990s. One million Japanese, or almost 1 percent of the population, are estimated to suffer from hikikomori, defined as a withdrawal from friends and family for months or even years. Some 40 percent of hikikomori are below the age of 21, according to a 2001 government report.

Western psychologists compare hikikomori with social anxiety and agoraphobia, a fear of open places. The affliction has also been likened to Asperger's syndrome, a mild variant of autism. But these theories carry little weight in Japan, where the disorder is considered culturally unique and is linked to violence.

Yuichi Hattori, M.A., a psychologist currently treating 18 patients with the disorder, believes that hikikomori is caused by emotionally neglectful parenting. Hattori argues that none of his patients had been sexually or physically abused, yet they all show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder.
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As the cultural gap between Japan's youth and elders widens, some young Japanese may view their parents as too stony-faced and reserved. Hattori speaks of Japanese society's deep-rooted division between hone and tatemae--one's true feelings and one's actions--to illustrate the frustration his patients express toward aloof parents.

"Patients tell me their mothers have no emotions," says Hattori. "Six patients have called their parents zombies."

Hattori's findings, presented in November to the International Society for the Study of Dissociation, are reminiscent of the now-discredited theory of the "refrigerator mother," which attributed autism to a detached style of parenting.

"Hikikomori looks more to me like an extreme case of social anxiety," says David Kupfer, Ph.D., a psychologist with a private practice in Virginia. Emotionally unresponsive parents are only one of the factors involved in the development of this disorder, says Kupfer, who points out that "in Japan, the pressure to succeed is a unique cultural source of trauma."

For now, Eastern and Western psychologists agree only that hikikomori is unique to Japan and has serious ramifications for both generations.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Sussex Publishers, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group