| Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche | 
| Author: Ethan Watters
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $9.99
as of 7/30/2010 02:00 CDT details
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Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 32,141
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 141658708X
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.89
EAN: 9781416587088
Publication Date: January 12, 2010
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
 Interesting, but with flaws July 10, 2010
L. Lieb (Denver, CO)
Ethan Waters attempts to decipher a paradox of mental health: i.e. American psychiatry attempts to eliminate the stigma mental illness; however, this often has the effect of making existing stigmas worse. It is interesting to read about how other parts of the world define mental illness and the approaches they take towards treating it.
Waters makes a solid argument that American psychiatry's approaches are not always better: in some cases it is worse. The cases of Zanzibar and Sri Lanka are examples of the indigenous culture having better success rates than the American approach. Waters also makes a solid argument that mental illness is largely defined by the culture. The best example here is his section on anorexia and how different it was in Hong Kong, as opposed to the United States.
Overall, "Crazy Like Us" was interesting and provocative. However, it was not without its flaws. Waters had a tendency to overstate certain conclusions, especially ones about the influence of PHRMA and the problems of American psychiatry. At times Waters bordered on saying mental illness isn't real: i.e. everyone is in complete control.
 Develops our cross-cultural empathy June 15, 2010
Geoff H. Wing (San Francisco, CA)
Few writers communicate cross-cultural perspectives as well as Watters. His book is a pathbreaking and very readable coverage of cross-cultural ideas about mental health and human nature. His journalistic multidisciplinary approach is perfect because it illustrates vividly what mental illness looks like across cultures that hold mutually incomprehensible perspectives. For the American reader, Watter's most important contribution is his analysis and history of the assumptions and beliefs that underlie US mental health culture. Only by understanding our own cultural biases can we understand the biases and perspectives of others, and only then can we see how introducing our ideas and technology might create unintended consequences. Watter's quote from Derek Summerfield sets the stage for a book that develops our cross-cultural empathy: "Western mental health discourse introduces core components of western culture including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory, and a sense of moral authority. None of this is universal."
Eye Opening May 16, 2010
Courtney E. Flores (San Leandro, California)
I read a review of this book in the San Francisco Chronicle. The review captivated me from the start. Once I did buy the book and started reading, I had a hard time putting it down. Ethan Watters does a great job of walking the reader on the path of discovery. It was very eye opening and shocking to see how much influence the U.S. has on other countries in the area of mental illness. Its shameful how the U.S. mental health community is doing damage to other countries by forcing their opinions and "cures" on to other countries. After reading this book I feel many countries are in danger of losing an important element about what makes their culture unique. We all think different and relate differently, which means we should even approach mental health differently. I feel this is a must read book for anyone in mental health care and for people in general to understand how sometimes the U.S. isn't always right.
Must for Healthcare Providers May 14, 2010
C. Perry (Colorado)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a must read for all healthcare providers (not just mental health)and anyone interested in health policy. This book will have you thinking about how infectious our Western views of medicine are bring the rest of the world toward our model of the medical-industrial complex (sorry Ike). Share this book with your thinking friends.
Clever Descontruction April 8, 2010
J. Miller (LA, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Crazy Like Us is a brilliant, grandiose deconstruction of Western psychology and medical colonization. Watters compares himself to a biologist walking through the rainforest just a few steps ahead of the bulldozer, trying to chronicle all of the diversity of life (via forms of mental illness), before American imperialism exports all of its limited and biased diagnoses, prescriptions, and medications, taking over the psychological world and bringing to extinction many exotic, culturally-specific mental illnesses.
Watters uses four key examples. He talks about the diagnosis of anorexia in Hong Kong, PTSD in Sri Lanka, schizophrenia in Zanzabar, and depression in Japan. He puts together research and interviews to expose the fact that different cultures wrestle with different mental illnesses which have some but not all of the same symptoms, and American doctors are arriving ill-informed and biased to diagnose these illnesses according to the way the symptoms would be manifested and treated in America. To alert the reader to his blindness, he asks you to imagine what it would feel like if just after 9/11, people had shown up from a far away country telling us that if we practiced certain religious rituals to release the dead, we would no longer be in anguish.
This makes for a provocative, easy to read, compelling conspiracy theory.
Now bear in mind that Watters is not a psychiatrist (though his wife is). This is a research project for him, outside of a particular field of expertise (which I believe is writing). I think a professional psychiatrist might have written a more nuanced book. Watters looks at several specific cases, but then seems to make some grand leaps in terms of implication. For instance, when he cites a story of a girl dying of self-starvation, he then tells us (though never wholly demonstrates) that the story was in the air, that everyone was talking about it, and that's what led to widespread similar cases. Again, when he interviews a woman who went to offer assistance after the tsunami, he presents quotes from her that make her look foolish, but seems to imply that's indicative of American medical assistance overseas. A rhetorician could catalogue the straw men lining the pages of the book, the fallacious generalizations and category errors.
Nonetheless, I gladly recommend it as a thoughtful read and out-of-the-box critique of Western presumptions. Watters will only prove damaging if we come to the altruism is bound by national borders, which I don't think is likely. If it doesn't come to that, I think Watters appropriately sensitizes us.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
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