nuclear-news

Discrimination, mental health issues, among Fukushima’s brave clean-up workers

Doctors: Japan Nuclear Plant Workers Face Stigma By MALCOLM FOSTER Associated Press abc News, TOKYO August 5, 2012 (AP) A growing number of Japanese workers who are risking their health to shut down the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant are suffering from depression, anxiety about the future and a loss of motivation, say two doctors who visit them regularly.

But their psychological problems are driven less by fears about developing cancer from radiation exposure and more by something immediate and personal: Discrimination from the very community they tried to protect, says Jun Shigemura, who heads a volunteer team of about ten psychiatrists and psychologists from the National Defense Medical College who meet with Tokyo Electric Power Co. nuclear plant employees.

They tell therapists they have been harangued by residents displaced
in Japan’s nuclear disaster and threatened with signs on their doors
telling them to leave. Some of their children have been taunted at
school, and prospective landlords have turned them away.

“They have become targets of people’s anger,” Shigemura told The
Associated Press. TEPCO workers — in their readily identifiable blue
uniforms — were once considered to be among the elite in this rural
area 230 kilometers (140 kilometers) north of Tokyo. But after the
March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at the
Fukushima plant, residents came to view them as “perpetrators,”
Shigemura said.

Many TEPCO families in the area now hide their link to the company for
fear of criticism, local doctors and psychiatrists say.

Shigemura likens the workers’ experience to that of U.S. Vietnam
veterans returning home to hostility in the 1960s and early ’70s.

“They both worked for (the good of) their countries, but they got a
backlash,” he said.

About a dozen nuclear workers approached by the AP declined to be
interviewed for this report. Except in rare cases, TEPCO has
repeatedly declined requests to interview workers, and the workers
themselves have shunned virtually all media attention, so these
doctors’ accounts provide an unusual glimpse into their lives……
More than a half-century ago, many Japanese survivors of the U.S.
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were stigmatized due to fears about
their exposure to radiation. But the Fukushima disaster has thrown up
a completely new kind of discrimination because of the workers’ links
to TEPCO, a company widely despised throughout Japan for its
mishandling of the disaster.

Some 3,000 TEPCO employees and other contractors continue to labor
daily at the plant in one of the world’s riskiest jobs — keeping three
melted-down reactor cores as well as spent fuel pools cool through a
makeshift system of water pipes.

They face a long haul: Removing the fuel and completely shutting down
the plant could take 40 years……
Eighteen years after that crisis, Chernobyl clean-up workers
experienced higher rates of depression, anxiety disorders,
post-traumatic stress disorder, headaches and suicidal thoughts than
the general population, according to a 2008 study in the journal
Psychological Medicine.

Many TEPCO workers now live in a temporary barracks at a soccer
stadium called J-Village, several kilometers (miles) south of the
Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. Workers at J-Village approached by a
journalist refused to talk, and other contractors said they would get
in trouble with the utility if they did…… A growing number of the
workers tell the visiting psychiatrists of sagging motivation and
hopelessness, and Shigemura warned that such attitudes could lead to
“misconduct or human error or sabotage.” He also said the workers are
drinking more alcohol and smoking more.

His team started to receive some research funding from the Health
Ministry in April.

Shigemura predicts that the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder
among Fukushima workers 2-3 years after the disaster will surpass the
rate among 9/11 rescue and recovery workers, which a 2007 study in The
American Journal of Psychiatry said was 12.4 percent. ….
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/doctors-japan-nuclear-plant-workers-face-stigma-16932520#.UCCEEfZlT4Z

August 6, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Fukushima 2012, Japan, psychology - mental health, Reference, social effects