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A Mad World
Madness is exported for a healthy profit
When I was working in mental health, one of my side projects was to review books for a mental health publication. It didn’t pay but I got to keep the book. One of the books that made a big impression was Crazy Like Us: The Globalisation of the Western Mind by Ethan Watters. It chronicles how the Western approach to mental health has colonised the rest of the world. With the West’s predominantly biochemical approach to mental health issues, this globalisation has swelled the coffers of Big Pharma to an unprecedented collection of zeros on the companies spread sheets. Led by the US, the export of their mental health culture has had devastating consequences on other cultures. Cultures that traditionally held a different conception of their mental health needs. According to the book’s blurb,
It is the process of homogenising the way the world goes mad.
The presentation of madness has always been culturally determined. Although madness is ubiquitous throughout history and across cultures, how it presents itself within a certain culture at a certain time will be shaped by that time and place. For example neurasthenia was a mental health condition that was prevalent throughout the West in the nineteenth century. It was characterised by fatigue and anxiety with associated…
