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zhelana's review
2.0
Ethan Watters argues that American psychiatry is being exported to the rest of the world, and that that is a bad thing. He argues that anorexia was unknown in Hong Kong before American ideas of thinness and body shaming came to the island. Then he argues that schizophrenics have better life outcomes in many parts of the developing world. Then he argues that depression was manufactured in Japan. Here's the thing - maybe anorexia wasn't common in Hong Kong before Hollywood, but I am sure these young women would have expressed their psychological distress in some way or another. Or they just wouldn't have been diagnosed with anything but they still would have died, like the first woman in the chapter. I also wonder if schizophrenics actually have better outcomes in the developing world or whether they are homeless or even murdered by their families. I mean, we're talking about a lot of places where they still murder their daughters for looking at an unmarried man. So who's to say they're not murdering their schizophrenics? And the idea that there was no depression in Japan prior to drug companies inventing it is laughable. Just because there's no word for the disease doesn't mean no one suffers from it. It means they suffer in silence because they're too ashamed of it. The high rates of suicide pointed to in the book when the stock market crashed are evidence of this. Maybe, maybe some people commit suicide when the stock market crashes just because they're now broke, but most people can weather a temporary set back and know that the market has always righted itself eventually. I feel like most of the people who committed suicide during this crash had long felt sad or depressed without having vocabulary to talk about it. And yes, we know that suicide has a social contagion factor, but I feel like most people who commit suicide are, in fact, mentally ill. If Japan lacked the vocabulary to discuss depression, maybe it's a good thing that our drug companies went in there and gave them that vocabulary and "permission" to see a doctor about it. I'd be interested to know how the Japanese suicide rate reacted to the 2020 market crash, but alas, this book was published before that. Anyway, I'm really getting tired of this anti-psychiatry bias in almost every book I try to read about the mentally ill lately. The anti-science bias is just as bad with this movement as the anti-vaxxers who won't let us move past Covid while screaming that they want a fucking hair cut.
kyladenae94's review against another edition
4.0
“If the irony isn’t already obvious, let me make it clear: offering the latest Western mental health theories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress caused by globalization is not a solution; it is a part of the problem.”
an intriguing & important consideration of how mental health conceptions, too, can be a site of cultural imperialism & globalization.
an intriguing & important consideration of how mental health conceptions, too, can be a site of cultural imperialism & globalization.