Exporting Psychology

I had the opportunity to meet with Ethan Watters a few years ago when he had written a very interesting article on PTSD in refugee populations. He has a new book out Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche."

Here is an excerpt via NPR Talk of the Nation:

Author Ethan Watters thinks that America is "homogenizing the way the world goes mad." In Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, he describes how American definitions and treatments of mental illness have spread to other cultures around the world.

"[McDonald's] golden arches do not represent our most troubling impact on other cultures," Watters writes. "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."

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.