Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
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It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America’s most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and shame of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness — we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves.
For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties. Crazy Like Us documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change persons indigenous beliefs, regularly at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.
In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar battle by one of the world’s largest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression — factually marketing the disease along with the drug.
But this book is not just about the hurt we’ve caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in additional cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we start to know how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes makes the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world’s therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from additional cultures’ beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.
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I have not read this book. I read the lengthy New York Times article. The article starts with a sneer at McDonalds Restaurant being at Tiananmen Square. What horror! The world can conceive of no worse evil. We are supposed to reflect like that. But, some of us remember that there was a massacre of dissidents there some years ago. I am sure the families of the victims and the political prisoners would rather that they were sitting in McDonalds chowing down on a Huge Mac. Will liberals admit that a massacre is worse than a Huge Mac?
This is what I gather from the article and from additional reviewer’s comments. The books starts and ends with the assumption that the US is incorrect. The book pleases simple minded liberals in being the usual thing, terrible America, excellent rest of the world (at least the nonwestern part). The leader should have inquired why others turn to the American model. As a replacement for he just assumes that our way is terrible and that the additional way is superior lacking asking about the implications of both.
The way that mental disease is treated in non western cultures is very conservative. The leader and additional liberal reviewers like to imagine they are being revolutionary. Look, we despise America! We are so cool! But they are endorsing very much conservative views of life. This is the kind of thing that makes me reflect that liberals despite what they say never really examine additional cultures. They come with a bias, America terrible, non western culture excellent, and go from there.
A woman in an African village is beaten by her spouse for not having dinner ready. She then refuses to cook for her spouse or take care of her baby. Her spouse beats her again. This does not change her. As a replacement for, she starts to act “crazy.” She runs about screaming, professes to see things that are not there, covers her body with dust, does not wash, uses foul language. Do people say she is miserable with her life or her marriage or because her spouse beats her? No, they say she is possessed. Treatment ensues. The aim of the treatment is to restore her to health, which means building her a conventional reliable member of her society who is able to resume her duties and who may weep after a beating but who will not rebel. That is the aim of all treatment. That used to be the way in the west. Society is permanently excellent and right. It is the individual who has become possessed of foreign agents, demons or imps, that are causing the problem. The agents must be driven out so the person can become normal again.
Mind you, I am not adage this way is incorrect. Perhaps it is better that the woman conform. No doubt it is. Our way of looking at the situation would be very destabilizing for the culture. But let us not pretend that this leader is being courageous and rebellious. He is telling the woman, go and behave yourself. In our culture, it is considered evil to give women that message.
For persons persons in third world cultures who are looking for an “out” this book will be very disturbing. The US is not forcing anyone to adopt our standards of mental illness. People do it because they want to because they find something attractive or beneficial to them. They are looking for change. The change may be excellent or terrible, probably a mixture. Isn’t it up to them to choose?
Many cultures have taken a fantastic deal of distress to stamp out what they regard as harmful superstition and to teach such things as the importance of washing hands, or allowing menstruating women to place the hut as a replacement for of being in darkness for four or five days, not beating the wife, not pressing on the woman’s stomach during labor, no human sacrifice, no accusations of witchcraft, allowing children to be vaccinated (which is why smallpox no longer exists and polio too should be gone in a few years). This book is based on the myth that all tradition of non western pre literate cultures is excellent and superior. This is simply not right. If it was incorrect for us to make accusations of being a witch, is it not incorrect for others?
This leader (at least in the article) gives the impression that in non western cultures all the ways of dealing with people who act “crazy” are kind. They are not kind. Regularly such people are treated with fantastic cruelty. They are beaten. Women may be regarded as “loose” woman who have forfeited claims to respect and may be raped with impunity. They may be abandoned in the forest like Hansel and Gretel. The treatment itself may be cruel and may occupy degradation. The person may be place in the middle of a circle and berated and exhorted to behave himself. The process of driving out the demons may occupy burning and additional painful treatments, such as cutting the flesh. If he continues with his “craziness” he may deprived of a bed or even food. It is not all sweetness and light.
This leader assumes that everyone is locked permanently into their culture. But cultures change.
Millions of people live in villages and go to the cities. If life in the villages is so fulfilling why do they do that? They do it not just in the hopes of wealth and a privileged standard of living and education and perhaps a job that is not deadly routine and being able to buy new sneakers or a CD with their favorite composition or a hair ribbon for their child (and don’t you dare sneer at them for wanting these things). They do it looking for freedom, freedom from the weight of tradition and the ancient ways, freedom to be an individual. Does this bring new problems? Yes. But is it our business to tell them what to do?
Imagine a person living in a tiny village somewhere. They have been taught that they are going to live exactly as their forefathers did before them. But they don’t want to marry their father’s choice or work in a meadow all day or perform the same rituals. They want something different. They are diagnosed as mentally deranged. Western style medicine offers an escape from the usual prescription which is to return them to the fold. This book says, force that person into the fold. There is no escape.
When dealing with western culture, all liberals agree that everything conventional or traditional must be challenged and changed, even ruined. When it comes to additional cultures, we take the opposite tack, even when the people themselves may want something different.
I am not arguing that people should be allowed to escape. Western style freedom has some benefits and many drawbacks. It is destructive in many ways. Freedom has a cost, but so does lack of freedom. So does denying people change. I mean to make this point, that everything is not as liberals reflect, black and white.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I have not read the book but listened with an open heart to Mr. Ethan Watters on C-span. Mental illness has a long history of dread. Dread and ignorance can be treacherous.
People who have veteran or have been diagnosed with a mental problem either because of a life circumstance and or genetic component are stigmatized.
I challenge everyone to look at how chemicals, specifically, free processed glutamate acid or MSG, can hurt the human brain. Processed foods are building us sick, both physically and mentally.
Many western diseases, including mental illness are a result of or worsened by foods laden with toxins that kill neurons in the brain.
I have had many ‘marks’ slapped on me and believed in a medical system that knew more than I did. I was incorrect. I took control of my physical and mental health and for that I am a more pleased, in excellent health person. I live drug free and feel better.
The FDA, like additional Government bodies are ineffective and controlled by huge companies. We cannot rely on Government to take care of us. Stand tall, do the research and look into how you can change your own health.
I judge there is room for both conventional, and alternative medicines in dealing with mental illness. Complimentary medicine, which includes a nutritional component, which eliminates treacherous chemicals from a person’s diet would momentously improve how the medical community approaches mental illness.
Sorry to say, changing from a diet that is full of addictive, quick food is not well loved with corporate America or people in all-purpose. People are busy, eat on the run and judge that conventional medicine will one day have that magic pill for all their ills. It takes work to become healthy. Is America ready to work?
Corporations, like the quick food industry give huge bucks to well loved Charities, including Charities for Children. How does one change that?
I judge one person at a time. People are changing their life styles which may include conventional medicine. It is time for individuals to take responsibility and take back their health. I have read it takes people 20 years to judge that something delightful can be treacherous. (cigarette smoking)
Our society has become, “I want it and I want it now” lacking thinking of the treacherous consequences to this attitude.
I judge people will become angrier, number and sicker, both physically and mentally if individuals do not change their life style.
Are you up for the challenge?
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The leader is highly biased. But, he makes some thought-provoking points about the American culture of/in psychiatry that I did not previously reflect about. Trained as an engineer, I have had small exposure to anthropology. I wish he had cited his references throughout the text; he does include them in the appendix. In synopsis, a decent book to check out of the library or buy at a steep discount, but for me, not worth the buy fee.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
In 1994 I took a 2-month psychiatric stint in Christ Church NZ. I had some learning to do, including the tradition of native Maoris to avoid eye contact and passively tolerate interminable staff exegesis. Many in-uncomplaining in that public hospital (“Sunnyside”} were maltreated with excess psychotropics, regularly administered by a defiant night-time nursing cabal, and my protests brought me before the official Board of Review. Non-conforming natives generally were theme to caste stereotyping and the kiwi-in-the closet, Axis II “personality disorder,” a catch-all for treatment failure with presumed native “abuse of service.” Banned down-under, I have uncovered similar professional arrogance/blindism in in-uncomplaining services for hispanic farm-workers, developmentally disabled, and maximum-security prisoners. “Crazy Like Us” You betcha! [For a fuller treatment of the issues, Google "Snakepit in Eden."]
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Fascinating, painstakingly reported and just a fantastic read. Sort of changes the way you reflect about the way you reflect. Highly recommended.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5