Current State and Challenges of Multilingual Mental Health Support in Japan

Abstract

Multilingual diversity is increasing in Japan as the rising number of people with different culture backgrounds are living in Japan. The needs of communities are changing in tandem with the change of members living in the community. Offering mental health services in the preferred language(s) of these community members is considered important due to the barriers that non-Japanese language speakers face when seeking mental health support from mainstream services. However, multilingual mental health support services provided in Japan is highly inadequate and restricted. This paper is an overview of the current state and challenges of provided multilingual mental health support in Japan. Furthermore, a few proposals are provided based on the current situation: first, clarifying the support needs of communities and increasing multilingual mental health support system matching the community need is critical; second, in order to increase multilingual services, education and training for nurturing young generation who can take the role is necessary; third, clarifying existing multilingual mental health support resources and reinforcing the effective collaboration between multilingual professionals and non-multilingual professionals is necessary; fourth, it is important that practicing multilingual mental health support should be considered as a professional competency more than only language ability.