The Ethan Watters Phenomenon

Physicians and therapists are going to have to read Ethan Watters’s new book Crazy Like Us, if only to respond to friends and patients who have read it.

Watters is attracting attention across the press spectrum, from NY Times to Psychology Today, as well as international press stories. We have already pointed to some of this press in two earlier posts: Exporting Mental Illness and Is the U.S. Exporting Mental Illness?.

The latest article is “Crazy Like Us” in Psychology Today (9 February 2010). The author summarizes Watters’s study:

“Crazy Like Us’’ is both groundbreaking and shocking. By focusing on four countries and four disorders – anorexia in Hong Kong; post traumatic stress disorder in post-tsunami Sri Lanka; schizophrenia in Zanzibar, Tanzania; and depression in Japan – Watters shows how American mental health professionals and pharmaceutical companies, sometimes accidentally, sometimes insidiously, have actually hastened the spread of some Western disorders.

Despite this praise, the article finds fault with Watters’s style and command of the scholarship. Further, Watters is faulted for not investing his writing and argument with enough passion: “the book is thoughtful, contextualized reportage of a disturbing if not entirely surprising trend.”

Crazy Like Us’s approachable prose, engaging style, and authoritative tone guarantees that many people will read it and accept its conclusions as a valid critique of the mental health profession.