Psychopathology and Psychotherapy

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History of our laboratory

The history of our laboratory began in April 1991, when Professor Toshihiko Takahashi was appointed as a professor at the Nagoya University Research Center of Health, Physical Fitness and Sports, where he led Department of Mental Health Medicine. After Professor Takahashi’s retirement in March 2004, Professor Toyoaki Ogawa succeeded to the administration of this laboratory and changed its name to Department of Psychopathology and Psychotherapy. Following Professor Ogawa’s retirement in March 2019, Associate Professor Tadaaki Furuhashi, together with specially appointed Professor Ogawa, took over the administration of the laboratory. When Professor Ogawa concluded his term as specially appointed professor in March 2024, Akiyoshi Okada, who was appointed professor at the Research Center of Health, Physical Fitness and Sports in April 2024, assumed responsibility for managing the laboratory alongside Emeritus Professor Toyoaki Ogawa, Associate Professor Tadaaki Furuhashi, Associate Professor Shiori Ogawa, and Assistant Professor Nagashima.

Professor Takahashi is both a psychiatrist and a psychopathologist recognized as a leading expert on delusion. Professor Ogawa is a psychiatrist and a training psychoanalyst, who studied psychopathology in both Japan and France, and received psychoanalytic training in Japan and the United Kingdom. Associate Professor Furuhashi is a psychiatrist and a psychopathologist known as a leading researcher on hikikomori in both Japan and France. Associate Professor Shiori Ogawa is a child psychiatrist with extensive experience in international student support and school mental health. Assistant Professor Wataru Nagashima is a psychiatrist with extensive expertise in liaison-consultation psychiatry.

Our laboratory is one of the cooperative courses in Health Promotion Medicine in the field of basic medicine at the Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya University. Faculty members belonging to our laboratory are based in the Health Administration Office of the Research Center of Health, Physical Fitness and Sports, where each applies their professional expertise to the mental health care of university faculty, staff, and students.

What is Psychopathology?

According to Emeritus Professor Yomishi Kasahara of Nagoya University, psychopathology is a methodological discipline within psychiatry that aims to understand psychoses and other mental disorders from a psychological perspective. Psychopathology includes several approaches:
- Descriptive psychopathology (e.g., ICD, DSM), which seeks to describe, classify, and name mental symptoms and disease entities as objectively as possible, minimizing subjective or theoretical bias.
- Dynamic psychopathology, based on psychoanalytic theory, which posits the unconscious and illuminates the inner world of the human mind.
- Humanistic psychopathology, which seeks to understand patients’ pathological experiences and mental disorders from the standpoint of the fundamental question, “What is a human being?”
- Phenomenological psychopathology, which, by suspending preconceptions and judgments, focuses on phenomena as they appear to consciousness and seeks to understand the subjective experience of patients’ symptoms.

What is Psychotherapy Studies?

Psychotherapy studies is the academic discipline concerned with psychotherapy—psychological treatments conducted by professionals who have received specialized training in psychiatry or clinical psychology. In Japan, there is a customary distinction: when practiced by physicians it is called seishin-ryōhō, and when practiced by psychologists it is called shinri-ryōhō, but they are essentially the same.

Traditionally, psychotherapies have been classified by their mechanisms of action—for example, expressive psychotherapy, supportive psychotherapy, and insight-oriented psychotherapy. Today, however, there are a wide variety of approaches. They may be distinguished by duration (short-term psychotherapy, long-term psychotherapy etc), by target (individual psychotherapy, group psychotherapy, family therapy, couples therapy etc), or by setting (outpatient psychotherapy, inpatient psychotherapy etc).

According to the training program requirements of the Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, psychiatrists are expected to be competent in supportive psychotherapy, and to gain supervised experience in at least one of the following: cognitive behavioral therapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, or Morita therapy/ Naikan therapy. Meanwhile, individual therapies grounded in psychoanalytic theory have diversified to include psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, and other dynamic approaches.

RESEARCH PROJECTS

Akiyoshi Okada, MD., PhD.

I began my medical career in the treatment of psychosomatic illness, where I studied the biopsychosocial model (Engel, 1977) and psychosomatic medicine. Building on this foundation, I expanded my expertise into the field of social medicine, with a particular focus on occupational and school mental health. Since then, I have gained extensive practical experience as a physician responsible for occupational and school mental health at a university health center. In parallel, I have engaged in clinical practice in dynamic psychiatry and adolescent psychiatry at a psychiatric hospital and an outpatient clinic. I completed formal training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy primarily through the Japan Psychoanalytical Association (JPA) and subsequently fulfilled the training curriculum at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Japan Psychoanalytic Society (JPS). My research interests focus on case studies and practice-based research grounded in psychoanalytic understanding across diverse fields, including medicine, industry, education, and welfare. A distinctive feature of my work is its interdisciplinary orientation, integrating perspectives from the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences.

Furuhashi Tadaaki, MD., PhD.

In my case, I have been studying French psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and have stayed in France often. As I did so, I found that there were young people also in France who withdraw from society (i.e. “Hikikomori”) just like the socially withdrawn students I usually consult at Nagoya University. Thus I have been indicating that they could be explained more with the word “Hikikomori”. In France, there were young people who had socially withdrawn from before, however, there was no term to refer to them. Currently, there are many French Hikikomori that I regularly follow-up, and there are times I am asked to give lectures for professionals and public lectures in various parts of France. It is necessary to have some kind of traditional base of existing psychiatry to academically describe what kind of new phenomena it is. Therefore, it can be said that I am extremely fortunate to have a foundation of both psychopathology and psychotherapy.

Shiori Ogawa, MD., PhD.

I graduated from the Nagoya University Faculty of Medicine and completed my Ph.D. at Nagoya University. I then trained in psychiatry and conducted research as a fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. My work bridges child and adolescent psychiatry and clinical neuroscience. I focus on school mental health, neurodevelopmental disorders, psychiatric comorbidity, and the psychosocial determinants of functioning and well-being. These determinants include problematic internet and gaming use and child abuse prevention. I have received competitive funding from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) from April 2023 to March 2025 and from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI (C) from April 2019 to March 2024. I work as a board-certified child mental health medical specialist at a child development and rehabilitation center. I also work as a school psychiatrist for Nagoya City and am mainly involved in providing mental health support for international students.

Nagashima Wataru, MD., PhD.

My specialty is consultation-liaison psychiatry. My main areas of focus are psycho-oncology, collaboration between psychiatric services and HIV care teams, and collaborative treatment with dentists for orofacial pain. I also work in multidisciplinary collaboration in university student counseling.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MESSAGE

Our laboratory is not an experimental laboratory conducting biological research. Therefore, faculty members, graduate students, and researchers in our laboratory are expected to approach their research areas and subjects based on their previous clinical experience and practice when conducting research related to psychopathology or psychotherapy. In other words, they are required to secure their own research subjects and areas of study.