Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses are actually spreading them

[Olm the Water King]

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

by Ethan Watters

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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...

The New Eugenics: Why Genetic Theories of Mental Illness and Addiction Are a Damaging Dead End | TheInfluence

The New Eugenics: Why Genetic Theories of Mental Illness and Addiction Are a Damaging Dead End

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Meanwhile, “the most perplexing finding in the cross-cultural study of mental illness: People with schizophrenia in developing countries appear to fare better over time than those living in industrialized nations”—and this despite our advanced biomedical techniques!

A demonstration of cross-cultural imperialism regarding addiction was performed in 1999 by a committee of epidemiologists. The World Health Organization’s Cross-Cultural Applicability study was convened to judge the consistency of symptoms of alcohol dependence across cultures. Dividing symptoms of dependence into psychological and physical categories, they found, “Contrary to expectation, descriptions of physical dependence criteria appeared to vary across sites as much as the more subjective symptoms of psychological dependence.” Just as Watters describes with mental illness, the fundamental form that addiction takes, whether it occurs at all, is essentially determined by cultural factors.

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[Virtual ghost]

This is basically what I said on the forum a few months ago.
Americanized medicine in it nature is much more about money and influence instead of curing people. I truly don't want to insult anyone but in this forum can be seen how much American culture in general has become disconnected from reality. Everthing is possible, conspiracies are everywhere, everyone is expert even if they struggle with the most basic school level, media spread paranoia etc. Also people are sent to therapy and take all kinds of drugs without anyone thinking if the environment is healthy. I never give up on the idea that almost all psychological problems are environment/socailly based. Thereofore curing people without repairing the whole environment is basically impossible since this is from where the problem came in the first place. Instead X person will stay on medications for quite some time without real results ... how convinient. If there is a emergency drugs are ok but that can't be final solution.


I am also starting to feel the so called "Americanization" that is obviously messing with my head and people around me. It is comming from everywhere: paranoia in news, reality shows, toxic food, government on the edge of bankrupcy, counter productive laws, pointless materialism, evaporation of meaningful content, countless BS theories on internet ... and people simply lose it.

 

[Mole]

Of course it is not just mental illness it is also values.

American popular culture has taken the world by storm and nowhere is there any shelter from the storm.

American popular culture now forms a social environment that is taken for granted and is invisible, but being smart and clever we think we can act within it, we think we can use American popular culture, when American popular culture is using us.

The perfect example of American popular culture is mbti - not based on evidence and reason, a feel good experience with pollyanna values. It is self validating and so there is no way out, the perfect definition of a cult.