Okay, I put this off for several days because of life stuff, and just…everything happening so much, all the time, always. But I’m actually in a unique position to talk about this, because I was living in Japan in 2010-2011 (so right between Ritalin becoming restricted and the events of Mob Psycho taking place), and I was actively pursuing ADHD treatment at the time. So lemme give you a little insight on what Reigen would have been dealing with and how much it would have SUCKED.
So when I first got offered a job in Japan, I asked the recruiter what I should do about my ADHD medicine. His answer? “You either figure out how to do without it, or you don’t go to Japan.” I chose the former option.
A couple months into my extremely stressful eikaiwa job, and I was STRUGGLING. The manager of my school took me to see an English-speaking doctor, and I mentioned the intense anxiety and overwhelm I’d been dealing with. I asked him if he could prescribe me Ritalin…and he told me he’d literally never heard of it before.
He looked it up in his little physician’s desk reference, read the entry, and said: “Absolutely not. This is only for narcolepsy.” (Which, fair enough—if you were having problems with randomly falling asleep, stimulants would definitely wake you the fuck up.) Then he saw that the recommended dosage was 10 mg (insanely low, for those who don’t know), and asked how much I used to take. I said 20 mg, and he scoffed, “My god, Americans take so much medicine!”
I broke down crying. “What am I supposed to do without stimulants?” I asked.
He looked me in the eye and said, very sternly: “Nipponnomad. To be healthy in your body and your mind—it is you DUTY.”
Shockingly, shaming me into not being ADHD anymore did not work. I begged him for a referral to a psychiatric clinic. He initially refused. “No,” he said. “You will be so uncomfortable and scared there. It will be full of schizophrenics.”
“Schizophrenics don’t scare me,” I told him.
With a look of profound incredulity, he wrote me a referral to a psychiatric clinic.
A few days later, I had my appointment with a psychiatrist. He was extremely kind, but spoke no English. My Japanese was really shit at the time, but I managed to convey to him that I had ADHD and wanted stimulant meds.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I do know what ADHD is, but I’m not allowed to prescribe stimulants.”
He wrote me two prescriptions instead. One was for 50 mg of Zoloft, which was the most he felt comfortable giving me. The other was for benzos.
“Holy shit,” you might be saying. “Aren’t benzos way more dangerous and potentially addictive than properly-managed stimulants?”
They sure are. Especially the one I was prescribed, which has such high potential for addiction that it is actually illegal in the United States! But it was much easier, by Japanese law, to prescribe me THAT than it was to give me even 10 mg of Ritalin.
Months later, I had a performance evaluation at work. My manager—the one who’d originally taken me to the English-speaking doctor—marked me down in just one category.
“I had to,” she explained, “because you didn’t tell me from the beginning that you have brain problems.”
In conclusion, being ADHD in Japan in the era in which Mob Psycho takes place was a demoralizing, humiliating hell-ride, and Reigen might not even have dared to tell anyone, for fear of social and professional repercussions.
Epilogue: I was recently talking to a friend of mine who still teaches over there, and I asked him if attitudes toward ADHD have changed at all in recent years.
“You’re not gonna like this,” he told me, “but ADHD is still basically a slur.”
