The Americanization of Mental Illness
The New York Times – January 10, 2010
Summary: The New York Times recently published an essay by Ethan Watters, adapted from his book “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.” In this essay, Watters argues that one of the effects of American-led globalization is “Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness.” Recent research has suggested that mental illnesses have never been the same throughout the world, but are “inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places.” According to Watters, “For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world.” The effect of this, he argues, has been to export not only the treatments, but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. He believes that “mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions – the idiosyncratic cultural trappings – of the mind that is its host.”