Purchase
The Globalization Of The American Psyche
Free Press
January 2010
On Sale: January 12, 2010
320 pages
ISBN: 141658708X
EAN: 9781416587088
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
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 stigma
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
those indigenous beliefs, often 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 campaign by one of the world's biggest
drug companies to change the Japanese experience of
depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the
drug.But this book is not just about the damage we've caused
in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of
people in other 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 begin to understand how our own
culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates 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 other cultures' beliefs about the mind as
we have to teach.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy