Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters: A Brief Book Report

I’m not a doctor. No, I don’t play one on TV either. (I do look like a guy who might pretend to be a doctor without fooling anyone, though.)

I’m also not a patient, nor am I on any prescriptions. I have no connections to anything in the medical field, except for the yearly checkups the Korean government insists I have.

I heard this book being discussed on, of all things, an Australian paranormal podcast. (The paranormal is my science fiction.) The book has ZERO paranormal content, so don’t be put off by that. I was hooked from the beginning of the program.

The book asserts that Big Pharma et al. are basically exporting Western ideas of psychosomatic illnesses - if not the illnesses themselves - to the rest of the world. One example is anorexia, a rare condition that spread in the US like wildfire after Karen Carpenter’s death. Anorexia in the Far East was not seen as a disease of wanting to be thin, but rather as a result of trauma. The women affected by it fit a totally different profile than those in the West.

Watters asserts, with research backup, that schizophrenic patients in poor countries have better long-term outlooks and fewer episodes than those in wealthy nations, and explains how a Tanzanian family deals with multiple family members with schizophrenia.

One chapter shows how Western trauma counselors flocked to Sri Lanka after a tragedy and basically installed PTSD (a diagnosis originally created specifically for Vietnam War veterans) in the minds of the people, who had no concept of it before. There’s a startling anecdote about how the citizens who didn’t receive counseling were happier than those who did.

Another chapter deals with how drugs like Paxil were marketed in Japan for depression, but the market had to be created first.

There’s a lot of inside drug baseball to sift through. A lot of drug company research machinations. And real stories. Watters shows page after page of examples of how a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health is unproductive. I’m not saying it’s all true - just telling you what I read. I’m not anti-vax, and I’m not a Scientologist.

Here’s how it looks:

Soundtrack: