Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters
Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
Club: $8.99

Crazy Like Us
The Globalization of the American Psyche

Author: Ethan Watters

Narrator: Patrick Lawlor

Unabridged: 8 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/29/2016


Synopsis

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 that 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.


About Ethan Watters

Ethan Watters is the author of Urban Tribes, an examination of the mores of affluent "never marrieds," and coauthor of Making Monsters, a groundbreaking indictment of the recovered memory movement. A frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Discover, Men's Journal, Details, Wired, and PRI's This American Life, he has appeared on Good Morning America, Talk of the Nation, and CNN. He is a cofounder of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a cooperative writing workspace in San Francisco.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Thomas

A wonderful book for those interested in how culture influences mental health. Ethan Watters crafts a strong argument against how the western world's imperialism dismisses other people's diverse lived experiences, medicalizing their struggles in ways that do more harm than good. He writes in-depth a......more

Goodreads review by Kate

Well, this was certainly interesting. From studying anthropology to working in international public health to studying psych nursing, this is right up my alley. I appreciate some of what he is trying to say, in that transcultural treatment options are often not adequately tailored to each new specif......more

Goodreads review by matt

Kudos to my friends on goodreads who feel inspired enough to write full-fledged reviews; I simply can't muster the energy. However, this book enraged me in a way few do and I feel compelled to share at least some of my thoughts. Watters caught my attention with the pot-shots he threw at the DSM in t......more

Goodreads review by Kater

I read a lot of books about psychology and mental illness, but this book took what I already knew to a new level. It discusses four different illnesses in four different cultures: anorexia in Hong Kong, schizophrenia in Zanzibar, PTSD in Sri Lanka, and Depression in Japan. One of the fascinating prem......more