Becoming Victims, Being Victims: Narratives of Collective Illness

This joint session between RC15 and RC25 will focus on the narratives of victims, using examples of collective health damage caused by pharmaceuticals. In postwar Japan, rapid industrialization led to significant social problems, particularly environmental pollution, such as air and water pollution. Additionally, human-made disasters arose from issues in drug development by pharmaceutical companies and government inaction regarding health damage caused by pharmaceuticals. These damages were long neglected, and obtaining compensation required lengthy lawsuits. In Japan, the collective health damage caused by pharmaceuticals is referred to as “Drug-Induced Suffering (D.I.S.),” a concept used to understand collective health damage, including cases such as SMON, thalidomide, and AIDS. This session aims to examine the discourses victims used to articulate their experiences of D.I.S., specifically the narratives employed to unite and seek compensation. This involves both the process by which individuals who have suffered health damage become part of patient groups and litigation movements, termed “Becoming Victims,” and the process of “Being Victims” itself. We will introduce cases with narratives of D.I.S. in Japan, and include similar instances of collective health damage from other countries for comparative analysis. In this perspective, we invite scholars to submit paper proposals on topics related to, although not limited to, the following topics:

- illness narratives of victims

- collective suffering and illness

- health damage caused by pharmaceuticals