Profile of psychiatry in Japan

During the Edo period in Japan (1603-1867), people with mental illness were not excluded from society. Upon the introduction of European psychiatry around the 1870s, Japanese society became more discriminatory, however. In 1900 a primary law was introduced to regulate the custody of patients. In 1919 another law was approved to facilitate the establishment of public psychiatric hospitals. In 1950 the Mental Hygiene Law was enacted to prohibit home custody. However, these regulations did not assure quality of care or protect service users' rights. Also, after the Second World War, many private psychiatric hospitals were built, but this expansion of the sector was not well thought out or well coordinated. In Japan, the government regulates the private health sector only insofar as it sets standardised fees for treatments and carries out basic quality assurance.