‘For more than a generation now, we in
the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental
illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science,
believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic
suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is
now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest
of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western
“symptom repertoire” as well.
That is, we’ve been changing not
only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other
cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders —
depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them
— now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of
contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua
franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental
illness.’
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