Crazy Like Us: the globalisation of the American psyche

Crazy Like Us: the globalisation of the American psyche

Layla Amawi reviews Ethan Watters’ exploration of the flaws in Western ideas about mental illness

In Crazy Like Us, American journalist Ethan Watters recounts case studies from his journeys throughout Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Zanzibar and Japan. At face value, the stories he tells of mental health in these countries are fascinating, but beneath the surface lurks a serious warning.

Watters argues that Americans have been mass producing and exporting ideas about how mental illnesses exist and how they should be healed. “The golden arches do not represent the most troubling impact on other cultures; rather, it is how the Americans are flattening the landscape of the human psyche itself.” Essentially, that categorizing mental illnesses in the way that has become standard for experts in the west, prioritizing certain symptoms, and laying out a particular prognosis can negatively influence the course of illnesses.

‘he asks readers to challenge their own core beliefs’

To what extent is mental illness a cultural, intimate phenomenon? Should we be making universal assumptions about how the mind works and how best to fix it? And how do we tackle cultural diversity in experiencing mental illness?

The book is divided into four main chapters, each tackling a mental health epidemic in a different country. The first looks at the dramatic rise of eating disorders, namely anorexia, in Hong Kong in the 1990s, a place where previously self-starvation existed as a rare and separate phenomenon. The second chapter discusses the 2004 tsunami that swept through Sri Lanka, bringing the notion of PTSD to the country. Its third sees the changing view of schizophrenia in Zanzibar, a country where schizophrenia is seen as a form of possession by djinn, whilst the fourth chapter presents the commercialisation of depression in Japan where pharmaceutical giant Glaxo-Smith-Kline (GSK) pushed Japanese psychiatrists to change the Japanese word describing depression from melancholy to ‘cold of the soul’, proposing the idea that depression is like a cold; common and curable.

‘Americans have been mass producing ideas about how mental illnesses exist’

Armed with evidence from the literature and conversations with mental health experts, anthropologists and patients, Watters offers a panoramic view of the nature of the mental health issues in these countries and presents a refreshingly curious way of thinking about fundamental ideas. He does not tell these stories as simple tales, but asks readers to challenge their own core beliefs through them. Crazy Like Us is a clever, fresh take on old assumptions. Watters does not just explain concepts of cultural diversity, but embodies them by completely engrossing himself, and the reader with him, in intimate local experiences of mental health. Most notably, he reminds the reader that ideas get outdated, but constructive criticism never gets old.