Tadaaki Furuhashi

In my case, I have been studying French psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and have stayed in France often. As I did so, I found that there were young people also in France who withdraw from society (i.e. “Hikikomori”) just like the socially withdrawn students I usually consult at Nagoya University. Thus I began to indicate that they could be explained more with the word “Hikikomori”. In France, there were young people who had socially withdrawn from before, however, there was no term to refer to them. Currently, there are some French Hikikomori that I regularly follow-up, and there are times I am asked to give a lecture in various parts of France and recently also in other European countries (UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, etc.). Leaving that aside, after all, it is necessary to have some kind of traditional base of existing psychiatry to academically describe what kind of new phenomena it is.