Modern social renouncers : A new idiom of distress ?

This paper will present an ongoing research on what we have called « social renouncers », that is to say reclusive people who have withdrawn from social life. Behaviors of this kind are seen as a growing phenomenon among young people that our pluridisciplinary and comparative study, comparing French cases to the exemplary phenomenon of Hikikomori in Japan, intends to understand. Our view is that, even though some cases might be understood under the concept of social phobia, it is unlikely that all cases of social withdrawal, even in its most extreme form – self-reclusion at home, or pure « virtual life » – boil down to nothing but to a mental disease. As much as it is also unlikely that all cases could be explained by economical issues and changes in the job market in our modern societies. Instead, we inted to discuss the hypothesis that social withdrawal could be becoming, like depression, addiction or trauma, an « idiom of distress ». Such an idiom should be understood as a way to confront modern constraints linked to the collective imperative of autonomization and the changing paths to adulthood. The fact that such attidudes are linked to withdrawal or renunciation has to be addressed : why withdrawal rather than other forms of behavioral reactions (addiction, violence, etc.)? Social renouncers could be therefore a new profile of mental suffering. This is why we will be interrogating, from a sociological perspective, meanings and normative backgrounds of such a phenomenon (adulthood and autonomy, standard emotions, cultural meanings of the domestic spaces). Following this path, and based on the analysis of clinical cases and testimonies both from the japanese and the french field works, we will examine how social withdrawal tends to have become a normative way to feel and express malaise or social misfitness.