Crazy Like Us or Are They (On Culture and Treatment)

Over the past 30 years, Americans industriously have been exporting our ideas about how to treat mental illness and how to achieve mental health.  Acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters reveals that in teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been, for better or worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad.  Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, Watters witnesses firsthand that as we sell our drugs and popularize our mental health treatments, attempting to modernize other culture's understanding of mental illness, we often end up steamrolling indigenous expressions of madness and replacing them with our own.  American versions of depression, post traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders are spreading around the world like contagions and the virus is us.

Following Ethan Watters' presentation of his book "Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche," panelists will discuss the influences of culture on diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in the US and abroad through the lenses of their clinical work.

For more information and registration: http://www.wspdc.org/CrazyLikeUsOrAreThey.htm