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Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. Ethan Watters. New York, NY: Free Press, 2010, 306 pp., $24.38 (hardcover).
American culture is pervasive, so much so, that wherever Americans go in the world, part of our culture will already be there. McDonald's is the largest growing fast-food chain in the world, and most of America's best known brands are made overseas. Where can't our culture penetrate? Ethan Watters, in his book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, attempts to answer that question, as he travels to four countries researching four different diseases and uncovering the hidden symptomology of mental illnesses which appears to sharply diverge from accepted American standards. The United States relies on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for identification of all mental illnesses, but Watters argues that labeling without consideration to culture may negatively impact patients and patient outcomes. Watters paints a foreboding picture of American psychiatry by illustrating the shortcomings of asserting American mental illness definitions and understandings into other countries, yet he fails to ask the most pressing question: If mental illnesses are constructs of culture alone, then how valid are these diagnoses in any other country than the one where it was originally defined?
Watters opens his text by introducing readers to a patient with eating disorder in Hong Kong via her doctor, Dr. Sing Lee. The patient's symptomology is nothing like that of the American prescription for an eating disorder label: There was no body dysmorphic disorder, desire to lose weight, or obsession with food or calories. Yet, the young, 20-something woman was just 60 lb. The disease manifested itself in the patient's inability to eat or swallow and pain or fullness in the abdomen. It wasn't until this young girl died in the streets of Hong...