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Berkeley Arts & Letters: ETHAN WATTERS / CRAZY LIKE US: The Globalization of the American Psyche / in conversation with Todd Oppenheimer

Hillside Club
Berkeley, CA

American culture is homogenizing the way the world goes mad. Our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But neither our golden arches nor our bomb craters represent our most troubling impact on the world: the bulldozing of the human mind itself. In CRAZY LIKE US, leading trend-spotter and science writer Ethan Watters shows that we are not only changing the way the world treats and understands mental illness, we are actually changing the symptoms and prevalence of the diseases themselves.

In CRAZY LIKE US, Watters reveals how:

American versions of depression, post traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders are spreading around the world like contagions -- and we are the ones spreading them.
Western trauma counselors rush to far off countries to save the day without taking into account that the psychological reactions to trauma vary dramatically from culture to culture. (What would we have thought if New Guinea shamans arrived in New Orleans to counsel Katrina survivors)?
Anorexia rose in Hong Kong over the last two decades not only because of western fashion and diet crazes but because we exported the idea of the illness itself!
Our Western biomedical conception of mental illness has been show to increase the social stigma placed on the mentally ill around the world.
America believes it has a rightful place as the therapist to the world. Given the state of mental health in our culture, Watters argues it is time to rethink our generosity.

Watters travels the world to illustrate the ways in which Western influences have changed mental illness. In Hong Kong, he meets teenagers who have learned from American culture that anorexia is the modern way to express distress, and who began refusing food after a wave of Western celebrities and researchers began raising awareness. In Zanzibar, he witnesses a much milder and more bearable form of schizophrenia than what we have in the States. In Sri Lanka, he sees western crisis counselors bungle the treatment of tsunami victims and actually cause the community more distress. And in Japan, he tells the story of the drug companies selling depression itself to create a market for a new drug.

Ethan Watters is the author of Urban Tribes, an examination of the mores of affluent ânever marriedsâ and the coauthor of Making Monsters, a groundbreaking indictment of the recovered memory movement. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Discover, Menâs Journal, Details, Wired, and NPR, he has appeared on such national media as Good Morning America, Talk of the Nation, and CNN.

Todd Oppenheimer works as a journalist at The Writers Grotto. During his 25 years as a journalist, Oppenheimer has won a variety of national awards for his writing and investigative reporting and has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including ABC's "Nightline." His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones, and an assortment of daily and weekly newspapers. He is the author of The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology, a finalist for the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award.

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