Ethan Watters: The Globalization of the American Psyche, crazy like us

We are homogenizing how citizens in other cultures lose their minds and in that process we disconnect people from their cultures. American belief about psychiatry is a violent intrusion on other people’s cultures. Ethan Watters looks at how we impose our ideas on other parts of the world.

There is a really wonderful full-length video on ForaTV with Ethan Watters right now. I created this post to share it and am revisiting some of his other work I’ve shared on Beyond Meds too. I can’t embed the ForaTV video due to wordpress limitations unfortunately, but I highly recommend you click through and watch it.

Ethan Watters is talking largely about trauma in the video but touches on many other issues too, both domestic and global.

I think it’s important to note that psychiatry also impose ideas on our own people in the mental health system. These habits cause harm here in our country too. All of us dealing with various forms of iatrogenic injury know this all too well.

The film. See here. Highly recommended:

● Ethan Watters: The Globalization of the American Psyche — video on ForaTV

The below video is a little taste of his book.

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There are several more posts on this blog that looks at Ethan Watters work. His voice is very important. If you’re not familiar with his work please take a look.

● Is The U.S. Making The World ‘Crazy Like Us’? cut and pasted below as an intro to some of his work:

From “Talk of the Nation” (NPR) today:

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.”

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.” Archive available here

● Exportation of American mental illness and evidence showing the “disease model” makes stigma/prejudice against those labeled worse (cut and pasted below):

In the New York Times Magazine today, an essay adapted from a new book: Crazy Like Us:

A very damning excerpt:

But does the “brain disease” belief actually reduce stigma?

In 1997, Prof. Sheila Mehta from Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama decided to find out if the “brain disease” narrative had the intended effect. She suspected that the biomedical explanation for mental illness might be influencing our attitudes toward the mentally ill in ways we weren’t conscious of, so she thought up a clever experiment.

In her study, test subjects were led to believe that they were participating in a simple learning task with a partner who was, unbeknownst to them, a confederate in the study. Before the experiment started, the partners exchanged some biographical data, and the confederate informed the test subject that he suffered from a mental illness.

The confederate then stated either that the illness occurred because of “the kind of things that happened to me when I was a kid” or that he had “a disease just like any other, which affected my biochemistry.” (These were termed the “psychosocial” explanation and the “disease” explanation respectively.) The experiment then called for the test subject to teach the confederate a pattern of button presses. When the confederate pushed the wrong button, the only feedback the test subject could give was a “barely discernible” to “somewhat painful” electrical shock.

Analyzing the data, Mehta found a difference between the group of subjects given the psychosocial explanation for their partner’s mental-illness history and those given the brain-disease explanation. Those who believed that their partner suffered a biochemical “disease like any other” increased the severity of the shocks at a faster rate than those who believed they were paired with someone who had a mental disorder caused by an event in the past.

“The results of the current study suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in disease terms,” Mehta wrote. “We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise.” The problem, it appears, is that the biomedical narrative about an illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though life events. “Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.” (read the whole article here)

I’ve been saying this for years. I love validation.