Crazy like us : the globalization of the American psyche / Ethan Watters.

The rise of anorexia in Hong Kong -- The wave that brought PTSD to Sri Lanka -- The shifting mask of schizophrenia in Zanzibar -- The mega-marketing of depression in Japan -- Conclusion : the global economic crisis and the future of mental illness.

In this book, the author claims that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself. We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche, exporting psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that American biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties. This book documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. The author travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that as we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.