[The present state of Naikan in Japan].
I. Questionnaires concerning the state of propagation of Naikan therapy: comparison between 1984 and 2002 (1)


OBJECTIVE
I maintained that Naikan will be difficult to introduce unless it is known to and recognized by many researchers and therapists at the symposium titled "How Naikan should be introduced" in the 7th Conference of the Japanese Naikan Society in 1984 and carried out a questionnaire survey about how much knowledge about Naikan the respondents had, whether they had experienced Naikan or not, and whether they were willing to practice Naikan or not in April, 1984. This year, 18 years after the initial survey, I conducted a questionnaire survey with the same contents in similar subjects to evaluate whether Naikan had become more accepted and better known since the previous survey. (2)


METHODS
Since I thought that the attitudes of young assistant professors have the greatest effect on future trends of psychiatry, 80 assistant professors at psychiatric departments of medical schools of universities and medical colleges throughout Japan were selected as subjects. In the present survey, 80 professors were also included as subjects. Also, 3 hospitals were randomly selected in each prefecture from medium-sized private psychiatric hospitals with 200-300 beds, a size considered to be appropriate for practicing Naikan therapy, and the directors of the total of 141 hospitals were included in the subjects. II. RESULT AND SUMMARY (1) The response rate increased slightly in the assistant professors, more than doubled in the hospital directors, and was highest in the professors (67.5%). (2) Knowledge about Naikan therapy had scarcely spread among assistant professors since the previous survey. However, it markedly spread among hospital directors, and 37.6% of the hospital directors surveyed, a nearly 4-fold increase compared with the previous survey, were relatively well informed about Naikan. About half (46.4%) of the professors had considerable knowledge about Naikan. (3) Most of the assistant professors had little experience in the practice of Naikan therapy, but 28.9% of the hospital directors, more than double the percentage of the previous survey, had practiced or used Naikan. Few professors practiced it. (4) About whether the respondents are willing to practice Naikan in the future or not, a greater percentage of the assistant professors had no intention to practice it in the future, and the percentage of hospital directors who had no intention to practice it also increased while the percentage of those who wanted to practice it in the future increased simultaneously, showing polarization of the attitude. Of the professors, 53.7% hoped to practice it, but its realization was difficult due to the lack of cooperation by the staff and the restriction of time. (5) Factors that prevented spread of Naikan therapy were: [1] Young assistant professors were so preoccupied with their specialties that they took little interest in other fields, [2] research subjects of assistant professors are recently titled markedly to biological fields, [3] Naikan therapy is difficult to be accepted by young researchers because of the immaturity of its theorization, impreciseness of its indications, and the difficulty of evaluation of its therapeutic effects with the resultant ambiguity of the results, [4] it is difficult to gain support from hospital directors, because it is not covered by insurance policies so that its practice produces a large economic burden, because the place for its daily practice is difficult to secure, and because it requires a long time each day to both the patients and instructors. I hope that these factors that prevent propagation of Naikan are eliminated one by one and that it comes to be practiced worldwide to relieve many people of mental and physical ailments.
Takahiro
Takemoto
T
Ibusuki Takemoto Hospital.
D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D007564:Japan; D011613:Psychotherapy / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends*; D011897:Random Allocation; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires