Overview

It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible that America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness--we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves.

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9781799989325

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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.-- Kirkus

Author Information

Ethan Watters is the author of Urban Tribes, an examination of the mores of affluent never marrieds, and coauthor of Making Monsters, a groundbreaking indictment of the recovered memory movement. A frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Discover, Men's Journal, Details, Wired, and PRI's This American Life, he has appeared on Good Morning America, Talk of the Nation, and CNN. He is a cofounder of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a cooperative writing workspace in San Francisco. Patrick Lawlor, an award-winning narrator, is also an accomplished stage actor, director, and combat choreographer. He has worked extensively off Broadway and has been an actor and stuntman in both film and television. He has been an Audie Award finalist multiple times and has garnered several AudioFile Earphones Awards, a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and many starred audio reviews from Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews.

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