To travel internationally is to become increasingly unnerved by the way American culture pervades the world. We cringe at the new indoor Mlimani shopping mall Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We shake our heads at the sight of a Mcdonald's on Tiananmen Square or a Nike factory in Malaysia. The visual landscape of the world has become depressingly familiar. For Americans the old joke has become bizarrely true: wherever we go, there we are. We have the uneasy feeling that our influence over the rest of the world is coming at a great cost: loss of the world's diversity and complexity. For all our self-incrimination, however, we have yet to face our most disturbing effect on the rest of the world. Our golden arches do not represent our most troubling impact on other cultures; rather, it is how we are flattening the landscape of the human psyche itself. We are engaged in the grand project of Americanizing the world's understanding of the human mind.
This might seem like an impossible claim to back up, as such a change would be happening inside the conscious and unconscious thoughts of more than six billion people. But there are telltale signs that have recently become unmistakable. Particularly telling are the changing manifestations of mental illnesses around the world. In the past two decades, for instance, eating disorders have risen in Hong Kong and are now spreading to inland China. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has become the common diagnosis, the lingua franca of human suffering, following wars and natural disasters. In addition, a particularly Americanized version of depression is on the rise in countries across the world.
What is the pathogen that has led to these outbreaks and epidemics? On what currents do these illnesses travel?
The premise of this book is that the virus is us. Over the past thirty years, we Americans have been industriously exporting our ideas about mental illness. Our definitions and treatments have become the international standards. Although this has often been done with the best of intentions, we've failed to foresee the full impact of these efforts. It turns out that how a people in a culture think about mental illnesses — how they categorize and prioritize the symptoms, attempt to heal them, and set expectations for their course and outcome — influences the diseases themselves. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been, for better and worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
There is now a remarkable body of research that suggests that mental illnesses are not, as sometimes assumed, spread evenly around the globe. They have appeared in different cultures in endlessly complex and unique forms. Indonesian men have been known to experience amok, in which a minor social insult launches an extended period of brooding punctuated by an episode of murderous rage. Southeastern Asian males sometimes suffer from koro, the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their body. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a mental illness related to spirit possession that brings forth dissociative episodes of crying, laughing, shouting, and singing.
The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. Because the troubled mind has been perceived in terms of diverse religious, scientific, and social beliefs of discrete cultures, the forms of madness from one place and time in history often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another. These differing forms of mental illness can sometimes appear and disappear within a generation. In his book Mad Travelers Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in Victorian Europe of a fugue state in which young men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles. Symptoms of mental illnesses are the lightning in the zeitgeist, the product of culture and belief in specific times and specific places. That thousands of upper-class women in the mid-nineteenth century couldn't get out of bed due to the onset of hysterical leg paralysis gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women's social roles at the time.
But with the increasing speed of globalization, something has changed. The remarkable diversity once seen among different cultures' conceptions of madness is rapidly disappearing. A few mental illnesses identified and popularized in the United States — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultural boundaries and around the world with the speed of contagious diseases. Indigenous forms of mental illness and healing are being bulldozed by disease categories and treatments made in the USA.
There is no doubt that the Western mental health profession has had a remarkable global influence over the meaning and treatment of mental illness. Mental health professionals trained in the West, and in the United states in particular, create the official categories of mental diseases. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM (the "bible" of the profession, as it is sometimes called), has become the worldwide standard. in addition American researchers and organizations run the premier scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Western universities train the world's most influential clinicians and academics. Western drug companies dole out the funds for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. Western-trained traumatologists rush in wherever war or natural disasters strike to deliver "psychological first aid," bringing with them their assumptions about how the mind becomes broken and how it is best healed.
Excerpted from Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters. Copyright © 2010 by Ethan Watters. Excerpted with permission by Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. 9(MDM3NjYwMjA5MDE1MjA1MzQ1NDk1N2ZmZQ004))