[Mother-infant mental health from viewpoint of relationship disturbance]

Infants can adapt themselves and their relationship with their caregivers in a way incomparable to any other stage in life. Infants are innately motivated to communicate with people and to actively take part in human social interaction. The question is how to provide an environment that facilitates such potentials for each particular infant and its family. Japan strove to improve the physical aspect of maternal and infant care after the second World War and yielded a nation-wide perinatal and infant screening system that produced a world minimum infant mortality rate and more than 80% compliance rate of infant checkups. Instead, infant abuse and infants with development disorders and psychosomatic symptoms has alerted the professionals to improve their approach. In addition, the increasing incidence of child abuse, juvenile crimes, eating disorders and other emotional and behavioral problems of children and adolescents has alerted the government and public to reconsider the importance of early intimate relationship. Creating a secure base for families to enjoy nurturing companionship with their infants is now common goal of infant mental health in Japan. As professionals we try to introduce a more dynamic, natural, non-judgmental empathic approach to support troubled infant care-giving systems. Whichever problem an infant may suffer, whether a problem of body or mind, its mother is bound to suffer and much more so in Japan with its old values for divine motherhood, stigmas associated with abnormality and new demands for perfect mothering. It should be acknowledged more and more that a well-meant effort on the side of infant workers cannot yield beneficial outcomes for mothers and infants unless we take into full account the importance of the complex intertwining of diverse factors, including the infant's predisposition, the mother's upbringing and past trauma and quality of the attachment system supporting the mother and family interaction. It is here that an urgent need to introduce infant mental health exists. Health professionals exchange, having shown their clinical attitudes and knowledge to their trainees, mutual nurturing companionship among workers, infants and families, which is the spirit of infant mental health. The dawn of infant mental health is steadily breaking in Japan.