Americanization of Mental Illness

[Michael]

For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

Article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?pagewanted=1)

This is a very interesting article on the process by which all non-American definitions of mental illness are being replaced by American definitions of mental illness in places and cultures where the American definition of mental illness makes no cultural sense.

[Greendruid]

Yeah, this is a huge problem and a major topic of discussion in the field of medical anthropology. There are illnesses that don't exist in other cultures and there are likewise illnesses that don't exist in American culture. It is important here to mark the difference between illness and disease. The latter is observable, usually as an identifiable pathogen or an underlying cause in the body. The former is a state of suffering described subjectively by the sufferer. These are culturally constructed and bound by the rules that the culture has developed surrounding illness narratives. We all learn these as kids and we need look no further than the child faking illness to get out of going to school, church, etc., than to see an example of this cultural learning.