The Stigma Associated with ADHD
The Japanese public had little exposure to media stories about ADHD until the late 1990s. Then, in 1997, a troubled 14-year-old boy kidnapped, murdered, and decapitated an 11-year-old child in Kobe, leaving the victim’s head by the gate of his elementary school. The gruesomeness and inexplicability of the crime, the young age of the victim and the murderer, and the relative rarity of violent crime in Japan brought immediate national attention to the case. The murderer’s bizarre, taunting interactions with police, later revelations that the boy had eluded capture for a previous murder of a 10-year-old girl, and his controversial trial and subsequent release in 2004 extended media coverage of the crime for years (fig. 13.1). The media soon discovered that the accused murderer had been diagnosed with ADHD; the publication of his diagnosis coincided with and contributed to the first period of sustained popular attention to ADHD in Japan (Teruyama 2014). Thus, some of the earliest mentions of ADD/ADHD in Japanese newspapers occurred in reference to one of the most grotesque crimes of the decade. Hattatsu shogai—though not specifically ADHD—continued to be associated with violence and criminal deviance in media discourse into the 2000s.
An analysis of mentions of ADHD in two prominent national newspapers reveals that before 1997 there was almost no popular press attention to ADHD or its predecessor diagnoses. Before 1997, at most 1 article per year mentioned attention deficit or hyperactivity disorders. In 1997 and 1998, a total of 6 and 9 articles, respectively, mentioned these disorders in the wake of the Kobe murders. By 2000, a total of 50 articles mentioned one of the terms, and in 2001, a total of 107 articles mentioned one of the terms. From a sociological perspective, the timing and context of the rise of ADHD in Japan is meaningful because it suggests that the disorder has been associated with deviance from its very introduction to public discourse. Even as public understanding of ADHD and other hattatsu shogai has evolved and these conditions have become increasingly medicalized, this group of disorders remains popularly associated with social maladjustment and crime (Tamekawa et al. 2014; Teruyama 2014). As elsewhere, researchers in Japan have noted associations between juvenile crime and ADHD symptom severity (e.g., Matsuura, Hashimoto, and Toichi 2010).
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