Crazy Like Us Quotes

“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. — Judi McGruder”
― Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

“Shorter believes that psychosomatic illnesses (such as leg paralysis at the turn of the twentieth century or multiple personality disorder at the turn of the twenty-first) are examples of the unconscious mind attempting to speak in a language of emotional distress that will be understood in its time.”
― Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

“Shorter believes that psychosomatic illnesses (such as leg paralysis at the turn of the twentieth century or multiple personality disorder at the turn of the twenty-first) are examples of the unconscious mind attempting to speak in a language of emotional distress that will be understood in its time. People at a given moment in history in need of expressing their psychological suffering have a limited number of symptoms to choose from—a “symptom pool,” as he calls it. When someone unconsciously latches onto a behavior in the symptom pool, he or she is doing so for a very specific reason: the person is taking troubling emotions and internal conflicts that are often indistinct or frustratingly beyond expression and distilling them into a symptom or behavior that is a culturally recognized signal of suffering.”
― Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

“Even anthropologists, who diligently train themselves to be nonjudgmental observers of cultural differences, have trouble when it comes to recognizing and allowing for cultural differences in emotions. Because our emotions come into our consciousness unbidden and often surprise us with their intensity, we often assume that they are not influenced by cultural cues or social scripts. But with careful study, anthropologists have learned that emotions are not like muscle reflexes; rather, they are communications with deep and sometimes obscure meanings. Cultures differ not only in their response to specific events... but also in more global ways.”
― Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

“The cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists featured in this book have convinced me that we are living at a remarkable moment in human history. At the same time they’ve been working hard to document the different cultural understandings of mental illness and health, those differences have been disappearing before their eyes. I’ve come to think of them as psychology’s version of botanists in the rain forest, desperate to document the diversity while staying only a few steps ahead of the bulldozers. We should worry about this loss of diversity in the world’s differing conceptions and treatments of mental illness in exactly the same way we worry about the loss of biological diversity in nature. Modes of healing and culturally specific beliefs about how to achieve mental health can be lost to humanity with the grim finality of an animal or plant lapsing into extinction. And like those plants and animals, the diversity in the human understanding of the mind can disappear before we’ve truly comprehended its value. Biologists suggest that within the dense and vital biodiversity of the rain forest are chemical compounds that may someday cure modern plagues. Similarly, within the diversity of different cultural understandings of mental health and illness may exist knowledge that we cannot afford to lose. We erase this diversity at our own peril.”
― Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

“In the cosmology of Western Christians, life’s challenges provide opportunities to become stronger and to have a closer relationship with God. The burdens God sends to Christians in the Western world are incitements to self-improvement. The comforts that Amina found in her religious belief, by contrast, were not in an encouragement to overcome or learn from hardships. Rather, simply accepting her burdens was a continuous act of penance.”
― Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

“Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lies a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature itself. Westerners share, for instance, 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 are certain that humans are innately fragile and should consider many emotional experiences as illnesses that require professional intervention.”
― Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche