Crazy like us
The most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture across the globe has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters, but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself. American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
17mentions
10people
2011–2025years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- This was a seminal review in psychiatry that I am fully in agreement with but there are a lot of easy to draw conclusions from this review that are false.
SRRI efficacy for one - The nature of SSRIs is that they are highly effective for some patients and useless/detrimental to others. This does not lend itself well to traditional measures of effect size. For those in the comments pointing out SSRIs low effect size, note that the effect size of morphine for pain is only 0.4 (SSRIs score 0.3). For instance, drugs that significantly improve 60-100% of patients are clinically insignificant under various guidelines. I can expound upon the various methodological reasons this is the case if there is interest.
This is not to say that SSRIs are good. There is no doubt they are overprescribed, have underdiscussed side effects, and are barely understood by their prescribers. I was severely depressed with suicidal ideation since I was 6 years old until I was young adult. I have pored over the psychiatric scientific literature for many years now, and I will say that understanding the sociological reasons for depression was much more effective at helping me than learning about the biological or pharmacological aspects. If you are in a similar position, I cannot recommend enough reading Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters as a starting point.
- A fair counterargument, but I think that the line delineating "psychiatric pathology" is not as clear as you imply. Many such pathologies are arguably socially constructed and sometimes even contagious in similar ways (see the book "Crazy Like Us").
I think "being vulnerable to social contagion to an extent that leads you to literally inflict harm on yourself" is definitely within the scope of being classified as a psychiatric pathology, even if it hasn't been yet. It seems like there's little difference between this and, say, anorexia.
- “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche” by Ethan Watters.
I have been chronically depressed since I was 6 years old. I have had suicidal tendencies as long as I can recall being sentient. I would estimate this book singlehandedly cured 90% of my mental “disorders”. If you have ever suffered from depression or any “mental disorder” you will thank me after reading it, trust me.
- If you are interested in this topic, I recommend "Crazy Like Us" by Ethan Watters - it describes how mental illnesses get exported by media coverage and cultural attitudes from Western countries, and how cultural expectations shape the manifestation of mental illness. It was also reviewed in depth by Scott Alexander: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like...
Self diagnosis waves on tiktok seem like the next evolution of this, but even faster and more globalised.
I've been wondering if this phenomenon could be harnessed to reduce the impact of mental illness: purposely spread content that encourages self-diagnosis with the mildest possible symptoms.
- I'm not so sure. It depends what you mean by "depression". If you mean exactly what's written in the DSM then you should be sceptical. See "Crazy like us" by Ethan Watters: a great book, only part of it about depression.
Remember that when Freud was active the main psychiatric ailment was "hysteria". Did hysteria exist? Does it still exist? To what extent is mental illness socially determined?
- No, they're making the point that anxiety is both sociological as well as biological, and that the sociological dimensions of anxiety have worsened. I'm not sure I agree either, but is that so hard to gleam from TFA?
Here's a book that adds to this point that mental illness "spreads" in a social contagion sense: https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization-American/...
