Ethan Watters on America's crazy exports

[n2doc]

Julian Guthrie, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, February 8, 2010

Ethan Watters' first book was an indictment of the recovered-memory movement. His second book exposed a lineage of mistakes in psychotherapy dating back to Freud. In his new book, "Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche," the San Francisco author takes on something bigger: How America peddles its treatment of mental illness across the globe and in doing so, shapes those illnesses themselves.


From Africa to China, Japan to Sri Lanka, Watters looks unflinchingly at how Western mental health experts often trample on the beliefs and customs of other cultures.

"I was acting very much like an anthropologist, looking at how other cultures think of the human mind and human self," said Watters, a journalist for 20 years who co-founded the San Francisco Writers' Grotto in 1994.

What Watters found is that the golden arches of the United States are hardly the most damaging of the West's exports.

"Rather," Watters says, "it is how we are flattening the landscape of the human psyche itself. We are engaged in the grand project of Americanizing the world's understanding of the human mind."



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/08/DDRI1BNOGC.DTL&type=books

[madrchsod]

1. interesting.....