Is the U.S. exporting mental illness?

Ethan Watters’s article in the New Scientist repeats many of the claims he made in the recent NY Times article (see this post).

In “How the US exports its mental illnesses” Watters is a bit more critical and pointed in his rhetoric, e.g.,

For a long time, psychiatrists and medical anthropologists studying mental illness in different cultures found that mental illnesses are not evenly distributed globally, and do not take the same form from place to place. Unfortunately, mental health professionals in the US, who dominate the global discussion about how mental illnesses are categorised and treated, have often ignored or dismissed these differences.

Worse, local versions of mental illnesses are now being homogenised into American versions at an extraordinary rate.…

In this most recent essay, Watters summarizes his arguments about how the U.S. exports both depression and PTSD. As before, the pharmaceutical industry is implicated in this process through the efforts to reduce mental illnesses to biochemical imbalances, and thereby to profit from them.

Once again, this essay might prove interesting.