Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters
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 premises promoted by this book is that when Western psychologists describe a typical western mental illness to another culture, their incidence of that illness morph into a version closer to ours. I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ve always been fascinated by the existence of culturally-specific mental illnesses (like koro and amok and hysterical leg paralysis), and this presentation of our own culturally-specific mental illnesses flipped everything around. I genuinely felt my mind broadened.
The only other book I’ve read on this subject is The Culture of Our Discontent, but I think this book is better. I liked that Watters chose four distinct subjects to cover, and covered them in depth. I also felt that he managed to say “we don’t know as much as we think we know” without getting too much into “simple, primitive people have all the answers.”
