Week 6: Charlene Chan, Section 2

Charlene Chan

Section 2

May 7, 2017

Week 6: Pathologizing of Asian Americans and The Americanization of Mental Illness

This week’s reading, “The Americanization of Mental Illness” by Ethan Watters, confronted the issue of increased exportation of Western knowledge regarding mental illness as the standard across countries with differing cultural backgrounds.

Watters uses the case study of Charlene Hsu Chi-Ying’s collapse and death due to anorexia to demonstrate the tie between culture and expression of mental illness. “‘Culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology...’” (Watters, 2), and by insisting that the Western standard be the standard of medical knowledge, we export not only our ideologies but also the diseases themselves. It’s another case of the white man’s burden: the West, meaning to help with their seemingly superior repertoire of knowledge, instead does more harm than help by inadvertently dismissing the cultural context surrounding another country’s problems.

I believe that a complete understanding of mental illness in Asian communities requires more than the surface-level understanding of cultural ideologies described in the article “On Some College Campuses, a Focus on Asian American Mental Health”. The article primarily discussed the harmful effects of the model minority stereotype and the pressures of family expectation. While this is a good segue into open discussion of mental illness in the Asian community, it’s dangerously to become placated by this bare minimum understanding of its roots.  This does not mean that the experiences of those who struggle with parental expectations and the pressure to succeed are invalid, but rather, we should consider the acknowledgement of these struggles as a starting point for deeper exploration of the development and progression of mental illness in Asian and Asian-American individuals.

The image below is from a series by photographer Yuyang Liu about mental illness in China. Caption: “Jiagui Su remembers his severe mental illness of the past. He felt he was headless. When he feels better, he picks leaves for a living. He wants to find a new job. Zhaoqing, China”.

Question: How do we reverse the globalization of American/Western mental illness and replace the “standard” treatment method with a more culturally nuanced method?

References:

Liu, Y. (n.d.). Series: At Home With Mental Illness. Retrieved May 07, 2017, from http://www.yuyangliu.com/