Week 6- Max Ma (A03)

Ethan Watter’s article, “The Americanization of Mental Illness” caught my eye. As an advocate for mental health, I felt excited to read this and learn more about the history of factors that have contributed to and shaped our current approaches to mental health.

In his article, Watters contends that the world’s knowledge of mental health and illness are largely Americanized. He explains that the presentations of mental health and our approaches to them have aggressively been spread by Western knowledge and that “we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures” (1). In making his argument, Watters provided an example of Dr. Sing Lee who studied anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong. Dr. Lee found that anorexia in Hong Kong looked uniquely different than how anorexia looked like in America. When a girl in Hong Kong collapsed and died due to anorexia, local media and even mental health experts relied on American approaches to the disease rather than local, culturally relevant approaches. “Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature” (6). Each culture has its own assumptions towards the causes of mental illness and Watters fears that in a world where the universality of American diagnosis, with its “official” categories and standards, reigns supreme, we are losing that cultural uniqueness. Every person is different and mental illnesses are experienced on a wide spectrum. The example of how differently the West approached curing schizophrenia versus how the religious beliefs of the Swahili culture approached curing schizophrenia just goes to show that the categorization of mental health is not so black and white. It is difficult to organize into cookie cutter approaches.

            However, in order to move forward, I do not think that we should completely disregard either side. Both matters. It seems as if Watters has a large disdain towards Western approaches, despite the importance of that research. He even states that we are “trampling on indigenous prescientific superstitions” (6). I do not think that it is this drastic and that mental health illnesses may only be resolved through collaborative efforts in research and approaches. There is still much exploration and learning needed to effectively approach the diversity of mental health and illness, but articles like these foster honest, much-needed reflection towards the importance of culture and scientific research.

Question: 

Does someone’s cultural environment affect the way a person displays his mental health illness or are the symptoms something that cannot be controlled?

References:

Watters, E. (2010). The Americanization of Mental Illness. The New York Times. 

Retrieved on October 29, 2017. (n.d.) [digital image]. Retrieved from  https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-YSPenTBL1rE/VhmQGDTUTYI/AAAAAAAAARg/MsBwRpBxOKI/w909-h1083/How%2BCan%2Brace%2C%2Bethnicity%2C%2Bculture%2C%2Binfluence%2Bmental%2Bhealth.png