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...
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…
