NY Times article on mental illness

In case you missed it, you might enjoy, or be provoked by, a recent article in the NY Times: “The Americanization of Mental Illness.”

The article argues two points:

1. There are important cultural differences in how mental illnesses are expressed, described, diagnosed and understood. And further, these differences suggest that mental illnesses do not translate unproblematically across national and cultural borders.
2. That recent efforts to explain mental illnesses as caused by biochemical imbalances, or to locate other physical causes, have had deleterious effects on how we as a society treat people suffering from those illnesses.

The article should provoke interesting discussion.