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The most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture across the globe has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters, but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself. American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
- Sales Rank: #35930 in Books
- Published on: 2011-03-22
- Released on: 2011-03-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x .70" w x 5.50" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
From Publishers Weekly
If you thought McDonald's and strip malls were the ugliest of America's cultural exports, think again. Western ideas about mental illness-from anorexia to post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, general anxiety and clinical depression-as well as Western treatments have been sweeping the globe with alarming speed, argues journalist Watters (Urban Tribes), and are doing far more damage than Big Macs and the Gap. In this well-traveled, deeply reported book, Watters takes readers from Hong Kong to Zanzibar, to Tsunami ravaged Sri Lanka, to illustrate how distinctly American psychological disorders have played in far-off locales, and how Western treatments, from experimental, unproven drugs to talk therapy, have clashed with local customs, understandings and religions. While the book emphasizes anthropological findings at the occasional expense of medical context, and at times skitters into a broad indictment of drug companies and Western science, Watters builds a powerful case. He argues convincingly that cultural differences belie any sort of western template for diagnosing and treating mental illness, and that the rapid spread of American culture threatens our very understanding of the human mind: "We should worry about the loss of diversity in the world's differing conceptions of treatments for mental illness in the same way we worry about the loss of biodiversity in nature."
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From Booklist
During the last quarter-century, America’s cultural influence on foreign countries has become all too visible, with a McDonald’s opening on Tiananmen Square and remote African tribes sporting jeans and T-shirts. Perhaps less obvious, but no less worrisome, is the American exportation of mental illness documented in this unsettling expose by the coauthor of the recovered-memory critique, Making Monsters (1996). Watters emphasizes that different cultures have long had their idiosyncratic ways of handling stress that don’t necessarily conform to descriptions provided by the American Psychological Association (APA). Yet, because the APA’s treatment guidelines are increasingly being subscribed to and Western medicine’s recommended drugs prescribed by other countries’ health-care workers, such illnesses as anorexia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are appearing in cultures previously unfamiliar with them. In making his case, Watters provides four carefully dissected case studies, those of anorexia in Hong Kong, PTSD in Sri Lanka, schizophrenia in Zanzibar, and depression in Japan. Ultimately, Watters argues, the loss of cultural diversity consequent upon this peculiar form of Americanization will be keenly felt. --Carl Hays
Review
"Ethan Watters has traveled the world to look at how globalization reaches far beyond economics and into people's very conceptions of what constitutes health and sanity. I find his book provocative, original, and convincing." -- Adam Hochschild, author of "Bury the Chains" and "King Leopold's Ghost"
""Crazy Like Us" is both groundbreaking and shocking...Whether Watters' book will be sand in the engines of the bulldozers remains to be seen. At least it proves the West, despite its best intentions, does not possess all the answers."--"The Boston Globe"
"Watters commands attention with his repartee and conversational manner while drawing much-needed attention to the consequences of Western intrusion. This fascinating book deserves attention from mental health workers and Americans interested in the reach of their culture's psyche across the globe."-- "Library Journal"
"Ethan Watters has a truly original take on the way our country shapes the expression of mental illness around the globe. His is one of those books you can't stop thinking about or referring to in conversation, that permanently changes your perspective on beliefs you took for granted." -- Peggy Orenstein, author of "Waiting for Daisy"
"I couldn't put it down. "Crazy Like Us" is a fascinating and provocative intellectual travelogue, and Watters is a fearless guide." -- Alan Burdick, author of "Out of Eden"
"Searing, startling, and utterly unforgettable. Ethan Watters brilliantly surveys the stark interior cost of globalization, from our export of stress disorders to Sri Lanka to our marketing of depression in Japan as 'a cold of the soul.' "Crazy Like Us" is a grand tour of the new global psyche, distorted and darkened by the export of the American dream." -- Jason Roberts, National Book Critics Circle finalist for "A Sense of the World"
""Crazy Like Us" is a blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering America's role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healing." -- Po Bronson, author of "NurtureShock"
"In crisp journalistic style, Watters argues convincingly that what the American psychiatric industry exports is not so much drugs as diseases." --"Mother Jones"
".".."in addition to the cultural flotsam that drives the rest of the world crazy, America is literally exporting its mental illnesses...[Watters] is on to something worth pondering." --"Time" magazine
"A devastating account of America's psychological adventures abroad. The stories Watters tells will move you, surprise you, and occasionally infuriate you, and they will change the way you think about culture, human nature, and the mind." -- Paul Tough, author of "Whatever it Takes"
Most helpful customer reviews
63 of 65 people found the following review helpful.
Eye-opening
By Karen Franklin
A successful virus is adaptive. It evolves as needed to survive and colonize new hosts. By this definition, contemporary American psychiatry is a very successful virus. Exploiting cracks that emerge in times of cultural transition, it exports DSM depression to Japan and posttraumatic stress disorder to Sri Lanka.
Journalist Ethan Watters masterfully evokes the heady admixture of moral certainty and profit motive that drives U.S. clinicians and pharmaceutical companies as they evangelically push Western psychiatry around the globe. On the ground in Sri Lanka following the tsunami, for example, hordes of Western counselors hit the ground running, aggressively competing for access to a native population "clearly in denial" about the extent of their trauma. Backing up the foot soldiers are corporations like Pfizer, eager to market the antidepressant Zoloft to a virgin population.
Watters has done his homework. Each of his four examples of DSM-style disorders being introduced around the world is rich in historical and cultural context. Despite their divergences, each successful expansion hinges on the mutual faith of both the colonizers and the colonized that Western approaches represent the pillar of scientific progress.
It is ironic that Americans are so smugly assured of the superiority of our cultural beliefs and practices, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Do we really want others to emulate a country with skyrocketing levels of emotional distress, where jails and prisons are the primary sites of mental health care? Does our simplistic cultural metaphor of mental illness as a "chemical imbalance, " with human minds reduced to "a batter of chemicals we carry around in the mixing bowls of our skulls," represent true enlightenment?
Our implicit condescension is made explicit if we imagine the converse, one of Watters' interview subjects points out: "Imagine our reaction if Mozambicans flew over after 9/11 and began telling survivors that they needed to engage in a certain set of rituals in order to sever their relationships with their deceased family members. How would that sit with us?"
Not only is our missionary zeal condescending, it may be harmful. Watters provides evidence to suggest that the "hyperintrospective" and "hyperindividualist" model of Western psychiatry can be destabilizing to time-worn, tried-and-true indigenous healing practices, in some cases even producing the problems we naively believe we are combating.
"What is certain," Watters cautions in his conclusion, "is that in other places in the world, cultural conceptions of the mind remain more intertwined with a variety of religious and cultural beliefs as well as the ecological and social world. They have not yet separated the mind from the body, nor have they disconnected individual mental health from that of the group. With little appreciation of these differences, we continue our efforts to convince the rest of the world to think like us. Given the level of contentment and psychological health our cultural beliefs about the mind have brought us, perhaps it's time that we rethink our generosity."
Perhaps it is already too late to turn back the tide. Thanks to the exportation of Western diet and lifestyle, 19 out of 20 inhabitants of the tiny island of Nauru in the Pacific Islands are now obese. Previously hardy islanders are stroking out in their 20s and 30s. The globalization of the American psyche is more insidious, but perhaps in the end it will prove equally catastrophic.
Reading Crazy Like Us left me with a nightmare image of a homogeneous future world with McDonald's and Starbucks (see my review of Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture) on every corner, obesity gone wild, and Western psychiatry reigning supreme.
75 of 81 people found the following review helpful.
eye opening and heartbreaking
By B. Allen
Four thoroughly reported chapters make a devastating case. Many well-meaning people (who for instance flew to Sri Lanka right after the tsunami to help) and some straight-up money-driven forces (big pharma) have really failed to try to understand non-western ways that cultures deal with serious mental illness. It's a hubris very much in line with our other exports -- "democracy" to the Middle East, say -- but one that you'd think would be a little less egregious because of all the scientists involved. Hopefully this book, which was a smooth yet very detailed read, will spark a long-overdue debate. As a psychologist in training, I'm glad I read this book.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Yikes-An Eye-Opening must read
By Dr. Jan B. Newman
Crazy Like Us- The Globalization of the American Psyche
This is a well researched , well written expose of the repercussions and folly of well intentioned and not so well intentioned (big pharma) in changing the world view of the rest of the world out of ignorance and for profit.
This is an eye opening call to attention, must read for anyone who is interested in meme theory, psychologists, psychiatrists and anyone interested in the wealth offered by other cultures. This is psychiatry and medicine gone very wrong.
Watters begins with anorexia in Hong Kong. There is a western educated psychiatrist who notices that anorexia in Hong Kong doesn't match the Western paradigm. He presents the idea that there may be no value in categorizing a disease by its manifestations when there are different origins. He quotes another author about glamorizing a disease as it causes imitation which is what starts to happen. The Hong Kong psychiatrist Lee notes" the only hope lies in deep understanding of each patient's subjective experience". Unfortunately, he feels that the rest of the world is being steamrolled by DSM.
Next example was the well-meaning do-gooders who brought PTSD to Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankans had coped well with adversity in the past. They understood things in terms of karma. They had their own ways of dealing with any aftermath. The Westerners came over with dubious therapies stomping on cultural sensitivities and most probably left Sri Lanka worse than it would have been. This chapter is particularly interesting in exploring the culture and beliefs of Sri Lankans.
Next is schizophrenia in Zanzibar and last and most frightening is depression in Japan which was literally a creation of big pharma.
The lessons of this book are profound not only in relation of the described events, but also how we can be manipulated by clever PR. Read it and shiver.
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