Though the five weeks of vacation have left me no excuse, a certain reticence bound me until I could find something to post that I felt compelled to put my stamp on. In this case, I am moved by the force of an increasingly re-occuring, unpleasant feeling: my American guilt
New York Times, January 8
"It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host."
I strongly encourage you to take ten minutes out of your day to read this article, for I know I will not do it justice. No matter if you find mental illness a topic worthy of those ten minutes, you will find that its theme captures the essence of America's footprint on the rest of the world.
Here are three truths I held prior to reading this article; following the colon are quotes from the article challenging those truths. I urge you to do the same.
- An almost incontrovertible trust in Science:
"Mental-health professionals in the West... create official categories of mental diseases and promote them in a diagnostic manual that has become the worldwide standard. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. The assumption is that these remarkable scientific advances have allowed modern-day practitioners to avoid the blind spots and cultural biases of their predecessors."
- Mental Illness is a disease like any other and the adoption of this perspective alleviates stigma:
"Once people believed that the onset of mental illnesses did not spring from supernatural forces, character flaws, semen loss or some other prescientific notion, the sufferer would be protected from blame and stigma... [However,] in numerous studies around the world, those who adopted biomedical/genetic beliefs about mental disorders were the same people who wanted less contact with the mentally ill and thought of them as more dangerous and unpredictable. [Cross-cultural studies on schizophrenia revealed that] besides keeping the sick individual in the social group, the religious beliefs in Zanzibar also allowed for a type of calmness and acquiescence in the face of the illness rarely witnessed in the West."
- Constant reflection and rumination of ourselves and life's events give us meaning:
"Westerners share evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence...deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body"
I am well aware of the repercussions Western colonization and globalization. I worry and fret over my guilt by association. But perhaps due to my curious attraction to mental health, this particular footprint is like a hiking boot. Even though it is worn with good intentions, it is wide and strong, leaving deep marks in the mud and easily trampling on the beautiful flora.
1 comment:
ALthough I've never thought about it until this article, it makes complete sense that our cultural perception of the self/mind/soul affects the way we perceive mental illness... and that that perception is not universal. This passage stood out to me: "Because our culture so highly values . . . an illusion of self-control and control of circumstance, we become abject when contemplating mentation that seems more changeable, less restrained and less controllable, more open to outside influence, than we imagine our own to be.” But a culture that doesn't emphasize our "illusion of self control" would of course view the effects of mental illness differently.
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