Week 6 - Joanne Agus

The Americanization of Mental illness is the reading that stood out to me this week, because it gives me a new perspective on how mental illness is diagnosed and treated in different cultures around the world. I couldn't agree more on the author's statement, that knowledge of mental illness in our society nowadays mostly come from west (the US), and has become the golden standard to a lot of cases (in different cultures) that can't even be represented by a single theory (Watters, 2010).

The thing is that Americans seem to always have a diagnosis for everything. Hence, why there's a name for every kind of fear, and a possible theory to why everything happens. In terms of mental illness, most cases are always associated with a certain chemical reaction in certain parts of the brain, which makes it easier for psychiatrist to prescribe certain medicines and call that the solution to every problem. Though my opinion is pretty biased - only sourced from information that I am exposed to- I think that mental illness is still approached differently in other countries, like Indonesia, because it is less politicized and corporatized than in the US. From my own experiences, medicines are not as easily prescribed to patients back home, and that there are various other healing methods that people would usually resort to, such as through mediation and therapy sessions. Due to that fact, adopting the US knowledge of mental illness to other countries can be more damaging than beneficial to the community if it is uncontrolled.

 

The screenshot above is from a light-read article by Therese Borchard, who reported an interview with Gayathri Ramprasad, the author to Shadows in the Sun, about mental illness in the Indian community in relation to American's approach to mental illness (Borchard, n.d.).

Q: Statistics show that there are more mentally ill people in developed countries, like the US, but is it because the US have a more widespread system in diagnosing its citizens for mental illness, while countries in South East Asia have a different approach to mental illness diagnosis??

Watters, E. (2010, January 09). The Americanization of Mental Illness. Retrieved May 7, 2017, from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html

Borchard, T. (n.d.) Mental Illness Across Cultures: An Interview with Gayathri Ramprasad. Retrieved May 7, 2017, from https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/03/26/mental-illness-across-cultures-an-interview-with-gayathri-ramprasad/