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Needless to say there's only one of those categories you'd want your book to land in. It seemed to take my Iphone about 3 minutes to download the Time Magazine webpage to get the verdict. Thank you AT&T for those long moment of anxiety. -Ethan
The Skimmer
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
By Ethan Watters
Free Press; 306 pages
The U.S. exports plenty of things that much of the world would gladly send back: the Golden Arches, Jerry Bruckheimer movies and Baywatch, to name a few. But in addition to the cultural flotsam that drives the rest of the world crazy, America is literally exporting its mental illnesses. "In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been, for better and worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad," writes journalist Ethan Watters. He traces how conditions first widely diagnosed in the U.S., such as anorexia and PTSD, have spread abroad "with the speed of contagious diseases." The growth of Big Pharma and the widespread adoption of U.S. health standards have made the ailing American psyche the primary diagnostic model. By 2008, for example, GlaxoSmithKline was selling over $1 billion worth of Paxil a year to the Japanese, who didn't know they had a problem with depression until drug marketers informed them. Though Watters' indignation can be wearying at times, he is on to something worth pondering.
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----BTW. Anyone who knows me will tell you that my indignation is anything but wearying. - e.
I think the reviewer meant 'wearying' to her/him, NOT that your indignation is wearying......so I agree with you, it's just that I think you got her wrong....
I saw you tonight on Book TV and was very intrigued by your premise. I consider psyche from a Jungian point of view and do not obligate my own psyche to the type of inchoate influence you indicate from an anthropological stance seems to be occurring. Are there, in your estimation, a few alphas who remain above the fray, as it were, and who refrain from imbibing the imprint of their times.....? My query does not in any way dispell or lessen the impact of your premise; it's just that I find that my greatest influences have come from individuating my past lives into my current psyche, familiarizing myself with 'the last death' and even one or two deaths before that. I am NOT a Scientologist, though I have been accused of thinking like one. My concept of the 'fully individuated psyche' stems from a close study of Jung, and does not involve the stilts
provided by Scientology--which may be
valid or not, as the case may be-- In the case of a disaster like Haiti, or the tsunami in Samoa, I would say that
the psycho-social work carried on in those situations WOULD resemble more the anthropological style, rather than the psycho-analysis style. I think Jungian 'individuation' works best for those of us from European descent, primarily because we have such a detailed history. In a third-world setting, the enjambment of lives lived in succession seems to be quite severe, or concentrated, and not spread out with much historization going on in between, as in the European or long-lived model....
At any rate, your talk (the microphone left you a little garbled) at Booksmiths gave me a new view of this material and so I will be on the lookout to force my 'intake' through the new lens you have provided...
And you might want to take another look at possible assistance to anthopology-in-action that Jung and the other phenomenologists of the early 20th century can provide, e.g. Merlu-Ponty, Husserl, et al.....
Sincerely, EBartScribe
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