The Americanization of Mental Illness

[elleng]

AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?hpw

[midnight]

1. The U.S. shapes our particular time and place by this mantra-Money trumps peace.

"These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places."

[proteus_lives]

2. My Vietnam Vet dad has said this sometimes:

"There's a KFC in Hanoi, choke on that Uncle Ho."


Mental illness? You'd think there would less in the world now that there are so many types of pills available.

But it is an interesting article. I wonder if there many books about the history of mental illness?