Notes
★ "In addition to the cultural flotsam that drives the rest of the world crazy, America is literally exporting its mental illnesses...[Watters] is on to something worth pondering." - Time magazine
★ "Crazy Like Us is both groundbreaking and shocking ... Whether Watters' book will be sand in the engines of the bulldozers remains to be seen. At least it proves the West, despite its best intentions, does not possess all the answers." - The Boston Globe
★ "Watters commands attention with his repartee and conversational manner while drawing much-needed attention to the consequences of Western intrusion. This fascinating book deserves attention from mental health workers and Americans interested in the reach of their culture's psyche across the globe." - Library Journal
★ "Ethan Watters has a truly original take on the way our country shapes the expression of mental illness around the globe. His is one of those books you can't stop thinking about or referring to in conversation, that permanently changes your perspective on beliefs you took for granted." - Peggy Orenstein
★ "I couldn't put it down. Crazy Like Us is a fascinating and provocative intellectual travelogue, and Watters is a fearless guide." - Alan Burdick
★ "Searing, startling, and utterly unforgettable. Ethan Watters brilliantly surveys the stark interior cost of globalization, from our export of stress disorders to Sri Lanka to our marketing of depression in Japan as 'a cold of the soul.' Crazy Like Us is a grand tour of the new global psyche, distorted and darkened by the export of the American dream." - Jason Roberts, National Book Critics
★ "A devastating account of America's psychological adventures abroad. The stories Watters tells will move you, surprise you, and occasionally infuriate you, and they will change the way you think about culture, human nature, and the mind." - Paul Tough
KIRKUS REVIEW
Americans may not be any more deranged than anyone else on the planet—but, says pop social scientist Watters (Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment, 2003, etc.), we are much better at universalizing our afflictions.
"We are engaged," writes the author, "in the grand project of Americanizing the world's understanding of the human mind." But who is we? There's the rub, for there is a strong cui bono element in the idea that our psychic well-being or lack thereof should be transportable across borders. But first, the evidence, about which Watters writes sympathetically and elegantly, of the rise of Western-style mental illnesses around the world. None of this should be particularly surprising, given the fraught nature of human life, but Watters adds a twist: The very idea of such maladies is often new, introduced from abroad. Thus, even though given the importance Chinese people traditionally place on food, something like "food refusal" should have been a natural form of rebellion, anorexia was rare until recently, when the Western clinical concept entered the Chinese medical literature at the same time the Chinese mass media began to pay attention to rail-thin Western celebrities and models. By Watters's account, when the great Indian Ocean tsunami struck Sri Lanka at Christmas 2004, Western clinicians imported the idea of "the kind of mental abscess that results in PTSD" instead of trying to understand the interpretations of the event in the survivors’ own terms. So who benefits? As the author writes, once Big Pharma managed to convince young Japanese that there was such a thing as "depression" —a notion not strictly alien, but bound up in other terms and with other remedies—then it was able to extract millions of new dollars from an untapped market. Throughout, Watters urges that we be concerned about the losses of native categories of mental health and illness in just the way that we lament the loss of other kinds of diversity.
Mental-health professionals should pay attention, and shrewd investors in pharmaceuticals may take interest in Watters's guess as to what disorder is likely to be big in the near future.
