It is my great pleasure to introduce to you Mejiro Sola Clinic. I have opened this clinic after many years working as a psychiatrist and educator in Japan and overseas. Based on a deep appreciation and understanding of cultural diversity, this clinic is for those facing mental health difficulties.
A psychiatrist since 1984, I graduated from the faculty of medicine at Chiba National University and later entered the post-graduate psychiatric program at British Columbia University in Vancouver, Canada. During my four-year residency, I treated Canadian and Japanese patients from many ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I returned to Japan in 1989 and worked as a psychiatrist at Tokyo Musashino Hospital for ten years. My special interest was in psychiatric rehabilitation, an unfamiliar concept in Japanese psychiatry at that time. Promoting community rehabilitation of mentally ill patients, we discharged hundreds of long-stay inpatients. This result was published as “Community discharge of patients with Schizophrenia: A Japanese experience” in Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal in 2004.
As a clinical assistant professor and adjunct professor of British Columbia University for fifteen years, I visited several times a year to treat Japanese-speaking patients at the Vancouver General Hospital. In 1999, I started to work at Taisho University to teach psychiatry to psychiatric social work students. At the same time, I organized Japanese Society of Transcultural Psychiatry with the help of mental health professionals interested in cross-cultural issues. It is an organization dedicated to promoting mental health of immigrants, refugees, and foreign residents in Japan as well as Japanese people living overseas. Along with academic work at the Taisho University, I continued medical practice at Hasegawa Clinic and Yotsuya Yui Clinic.
I will finish my work at Taisho University in March 2014 to focus on my work at Mejiro Sola Clinic. With my expertise in general psychiatry and life-long commitment in transcultural psychiatry, I would like to offer a place of safety and recovery for those who are facing mental illness and emotional difficulties.