Mental Illness As Imperialism
The expression of psychological conflict is woven into normative behavior in a society. Even behavior that is damaging can be shuttled into its expressing itself in certain ways, based on consensus expectations.
“In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”
This article suggests that America is exporting its concept of mental illness to the rest of the world and that the world is the worse off for it.
Although the article itself seems mediated by its own cultural bias, the side stories are fascinating:
In Zanzibar, schizophrenics are believed to be suffering from intermittent bouts of spirit possession. …this belief affects those around them, especially family members, which affects how they treat the individual with the condition: …It turns out that interaction patterns with a person possessed by spirits are actually healthier than those of family members in the West who believe the individual has a ‘mental illness.’ In fact, with US families, the more they try to ‘care’ for the schizophrenic family member, the more they fall into an unproductive interaction pattern with the individual with the illness. The issue is not just the belief, but the emotional quality of family interaction with a suffering individual; treat them one way, and it’s not just that you believe they’re different — the individual actually becomes different.
There are fashions in approaching mental illness: In the 1960s outlier psychiatrists would sentimentalize schizophrenia. What are they telling us? They have a right to their reality…that sort of interpretive bias. It was meant as sympathy and respect. But they were ignoring the pain of the victims of these afflictions and affecting a morally superior, self-congratulatory stance.
There is probably a subset of emotional issues that are culture bound but American imperialism isn’t responsible for the interplanetary insane asylum known as Planet Earth.
