Santa Clara University

CRAZY LIKE US The Globalization of the American Psyche

Date: Thursday, May 5th
Time: 5:15 pm
Location: Sobrato B – just a short walk down the Alameda from Loyola right behind the Fine Arts Building

For any questions, please contact Elizabeth Heuser at eheuser@scu.edu.

Q&A and refreshments to follow!

Over the past 30 years, Americans have been industriously exporting our ideas about how to treat mental illness and how to achieve mental health. In CRAZY LIKE US: The Globalization of the American Psyche, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters reveals that in teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been, for better and worse, homogenizing the way the world experiences afflictions.

Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, Watters witnesses firsthand that as we sell our drugs and popularize our mental health treatments, attempting to modernize other culture’s understanding of a mental illness, we often end up steamrolling indigenous expressions of malady and replacing them with our own.

The untold story of globalization, CRAZY LIKE US urges us to consider the loss of diversity in the world’s concept of mental illness in the same way we worry about the loss of biological diversity. We are driving into extinction approaches to mental health and illness that could be helping us. We erase this cultural diversity at our own peril.