| Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche | 
| Author: Ethan Watters
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $13.53
as of 9/9/2010 08:04 CDT details
New (35) Used (7) from $13.53
Seller: BRILANTI BOOKS
Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 4,841
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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 31
 Misrepresented & unresponsive September 6, 2010
Calex Thomas
This group claimed to have a book I ordered in stock. The provider is one state away and a week after I ordered a book needed for school I have not received it. I sent an email requesting the order be shipped promptly and hoping to at least receive a status update and so far I haven't heard anything from them.
I would definitely NOT recommend them to anyone else!
 Thoughtful Primer on a Controversial Topic September 5, 2010
Lisa Marie (NJ)
Let me state up front I am not a huge fan of non-fiction books such as this. However my book club recently read it for our group discussion and I was pleasantly surprised how 'readable' the book was. I expected a very dry - and confusing - dissertation on today's East/West approach to mind and medicine. What Watters delivered was much more powerful thanks to the way he divided the topics into credible, relatable and (in a few instances) high profile examples. He did alot of data as background, but they didn't detract from the overall impact he was striving to create.
Whether it was anorexia in Hong Kong, or post-traumatic stress from the tsunami in Thailand, the author has harsh words for how Western cultures try to force Western cures on Eastern communities -- without bothering to learn about the cultures they are dealing with. Whether Western societies truly mean well or are trying to impose their 'superior' knowledge when helping out these countries, the result is the same: failure from the get-go.
While I felt this was a worthwhile book to read, it seems best to approach it as a primer to raise awareness, not as a "how to" guide. Watters provides plenty of details and information about the existing problems, but not the practical next steps in how he would go about solving them.
 Imperfect But Important Book August 15, 2010
David DN (Haight Ashbury, Earth)
I've been familiar with Ethan Watters since his expose' of so-called recovered memory, "Making Monsters." That book was also a collection of true (and documented) stories highlighting the serious problems with phony baloney court testimony stemming from allegedly recovered recollections of horrific incidents that supposedly took place in the witness's childhood, producing convictions of innocent people for crimes as serious as murder and child rape. That book, whatever it's flaws, was vitally important. Around the same time another book came out on the subject by Elizabeth Loftus, a trained and certified professional in this area, which supported and in many ways perfectly complimented Watters' take on the issue.
While professionals search for the truth it is the journalist's important job to question the experts, in this case the mental health professionals and the mental health industry. As a society, we would do better to more consistently scrutinize the pronouncements of those who have the degree, the certificate or the badge, and I'm deeply thankful we still have a few writers like Watters around who are willing to dig, question, and take the time to clearly document what they find. (A couple of the comments found here on Amazon, while straining to sound balanced, seem primarily designed to undermine Watters' observations on the corruption of professional organizations like the APA. One reviewer here seems to like the book but then merely states, without elaboration or supportive argument, that the author overemphasizes the influence of PHRMA-to which I would reply fiddlesticks, any rational person who reads the evidence presented would say the opposite, Watters bends over backwards to avoid sounding like a harsh critic in the face of some very unpleasant evidence.)
Watters should probably have interrupted his narrative with more pointed thoughts about what the evidence says, what it leaves open, and what we might do about the situation. However, he has conducted research and interviews that document a real process of exporting to the rest of the world not just American or European expertise but half-baked hypothesis and metaphor presented as fact, cultural biases, corporate exploitation, and the whole feed bag of diverse stuff that passes as Western wisdom. Though some important questions cry out for further investigation, "Crazy Like Us" is much more than just a small collection of anecdotes; the chapters of the book would be better described as well-chosen case studies.
My hope is that this basically excellent book may help encourage a few of the psychologists, cultural anthropologists and other experts who are witnessing the foolishness, excesses and tragedies that Watters reports on, to come forth with their own published accounts in the mainstream press.
An important issue only lightly touched upon in "Crazy Like Us" is that regardless of what's going on in other cultures, we need to spend a lot more time looking at what's wrong with the American perspective of the mind and mental illness. How does the current picture presented by experts relate to our increasingly shallow media culture and the circus of false dichotomies (liberal/conservative, blue/red, sick/well, work/play), our corporate dominated economic system, our political system, our bloated and violent "correctional" system, etc.? Watters states on page 254, "...I have tried to avoid making the cliched argument that other, more traditional cultures necessarily have it right when it comes to treating mental illness...My point is...that they have it different." This is well said. Unfortunately a little further down the page he dismisses the American brand as just extremely introspective and individualistic. That's not only cliched, it comes off like pair of nearly opposite ideas stuck together to make the author sound clever; it misses a heck of a lot of stuff, complex and multifactorial, that needs acknowledgment and examination. Buddha and Max Stirner are hardly the dual cores of our problem. As Watters well highlights, in reality, established illness are transitory and often in some large part fad diagnoses, from nineteenth century female hysteria, twentieth century PTSD, the shifting of normal exhaustion and reactive depression (or other emotions) into the realm of pathology when those feelings conflict with production or the interests of some power elite...all the way to amnesia stemming from satanic abuse.
As individuals and as a collection of groups that make up our American society, this book, as it demonstrates how silly and inappropriate our supposed truths can look from another perspective, should help us see ourselves a little more clearly and cut through a bit of the endless bull heaped on us by both the media, and unfortunately, our trusted professionals; it should encourage readers to more thoroughly question whose agenda is being best served by each new paradigm, pronouncement and product.
I'd give the book 4 and 1/2 stars if possible. Thank you Ethan.
 The Export of Mental Health August 5, 2010
Coasting in Neputne Beach
What is Mental Heath and how do different cultures address issues of the Psyche around the world? Ethan Waters's raises awareness and provokes a thoughtful reflection on the issues surrounding depression and America's biomedical model to treat such a condition with pharmaceuticals. He explores what makes Depression or other illness definable in alternative cultures. He informs on the export of the American idea of the human emotional condition to other regions of the world.
Crazy Like Us invites an exploration of the cultural influence in American studies, understandings, values, and marketing that promote change in the views of Metal Health, treatment and outcomes in cultures around the globe. As is his usual style, Ethan Waters will leave you with more questions to ponder and a belief that the subject was never as simple as it first appeared. I would recommend this interesting works as a way to raise consciousness on social shifts both within our communities and our community's connections with the rest of the world.
The Crazy Cultural Differences in Crazy August 2, 2010
Olga Werby
"Crazy Like Us" is an amazing book. Ethan Walters, a San Francisco native, researched the impact of globalization of mental health care and the perception of psychological disease and diagnosis on the patients and their community. Walters examines several cases: instances and treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder post 2005 tsunami; cases of Anorexia in the East; treatment of depression in Japan; and living with schizophrenia in Africa. In all of these situations, there has been a cultural shift due to the influence of modern Western medicine. For all those interested in how information and attitudes of the West transform culture and beliefs in other cultures it is an indispensable book.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
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