Concepts of madness and psychological extremity

Crazy Like Us

Mental illness is still misunderstood by much of the world, including by those who study the field. Many people have written about various mental illnesses, as well as how it might be treated or studied. Ethan Watters writes in his book Crazy Like Us that:

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. When someone unconsciously latches onto a behavior in the symptom pool, he/she is doing so for a very specific reason: the person is taking troubling emotions and internal conflicts that are often indistinct and frustratingly beyond expression and distilling them into a symptom of behavior that is a culturally recognized signal of suffering."

He asserts that people who have serious issues and traumas take up certain symptoms that they see exhibited either by other people they know or things that they have seen in media such as television programs or films. They develop symptoms of mental illness that they see expressed by others.

Watters find something remarkable, that mental illnesses which were more or less indigenous to the western world are spreading to other parts of the globe because they are portrayed via multimedia. Anorexia and post traumatic stress disorder were exhibited symptomatically by very definite characteristics. Anorexia in particular is believed to have generated in the western culture's idealization of thinness, something which was less common in the eastern world. Now that cultures intersect and communicate more often, this need for thinness is also being seen in those countries and young people are showing symptoms of developing anorexia as well. Not only has the culture been adopted, but so too has the culture of mental illness.

The concept of the symptom pool provides an opportunity for those studying the field of psychology in that it allows us to potentially see how people develop symptoms and why. Certain behaviors which are characteristic of certain mental illnesses, such as cutting or physical tics might be evident not because they are emblematic of the illness itself but because they are so often shown in media as being symptoms of the condition. Whereas before, psychologists and psychiatrists believed that behaviors where inherent to having a condition, using the concept of a symptom pool allows us to see that in mental conditions, although the disturbance is genuine, the symptoms might be a manifestation of their despair and distress but represented in a way that is affected by what they see and hear as opposed to something that is innate to having their mental illness.