In early January Ethan Watters of the New York times wrote an article called the “Americanization of Mental Illness,” in which he explores the possibility that by exporting it’s modern knowledge of mental illness around the world, America may, in fact, also have exported many of its mental diseases. Researchers, he says, ” have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places.:
In short, this school of thought argues that some mental illness is culture dependent.
In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.
The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. In his book “Mad Travelers,” the philosopher Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in the 1890s of a fugue state in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles with no knowledge of their identities. The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century not only gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women’s social roles at the time but can also be seen from this distance as a social role itself — the troubled unconscious minds of a certain class of women speaking the idiom of distress of their time.
My take away from the article is that since mental illness is variable across time, this also implies that current events are apt to create new mental illnesses. So, when I saw that and the picked up on a story about a “mysterious HIV-like disease in China” that might be all in the mind, my first thought was that this could be a uniquely Chinese mental illness. How interesting. I just wonder how the modern mental illness science would classify it.
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D, you meant:
"mysterious HIV-liKe disease in China" (missing the "k" above)
I hadn't even considered this before, though it does remind me of an episode that I went through here once when I had a girl tell me: "You Americans, you have names for all of your psychological states and take medication for all of them?"
Thoughts?
The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century also gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women’s social roles at the time.