Every now and then I will post something interesting that I found on the web and I would like to share with y'all. This time is an article in the New York Times about the social and cultural construction of mental disease, and the spread of American conceptions of mental health, not just in terms of standards of diagnosis and use of medication, but also in terms of the repertoires of outer manifestations, implications for the sense of self, etc. It is based mostly on the work of cross-cultural psychologists, but it resonates nevertheless with similar conversations in anthropology. What I found most interesting was their question of whether locating disease in the brain (giving it a biological definition) reduced the social stigma associated with mental health problems. The answer, surprisingly, was no!
I would like you to think about the practical implications of these findings. Should, for example, anti-depressive medication be made available to the rest of the world? What about medication-based treatments to schizophrenia?
Anyway, I just wanted you to have the opportunity to read this, esp. those who took my globalization class and still remember Larkin's article of the global "liquidity" of DNA information linked to mental disease. (I can email the article to whoever hasn't read it and is interested in reading it.)
Savage Minds is dead! Long live anthro{dendum}!
7 years ago
Wow. Really interesting article. I thought the following was especially intriguing:
ReplyDelete"It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host."
It seems the "scientific" study of human behavior is not so straight forward. While we can isolate and analyze individual chemicals and even areas of brain activity, I do not see how we can assume to such such few pixels from Western science to map the human brain and behavior. While I still personally feel that everything could theoretically be explained on a chemical level- given the proper technology, time, and expertise- I wonder if this perception is at all relevant and if it is leading me to judge others unfairly.
I wonder if Western drugs work the same way/have the same effects on patients outside the confines of Western culture. Also, does ADHD occur outside developed nations? Is the increasing prevalence of ADHD analogous to the increasing prevalence of (western-style) anorexia seen in Hong Kong?
"The Western mind, endlessly analyzed by generations of theorists and researchers, has now been reduced to a batter of chemicals we carry around in the mixing bowl of our skulls." I wonder, is the Western-mind batter different than elsewhere....on a chemical level? Surely our experiences, our quotidian neuroses have had some chemical effect on our brains. Despite the American desire for individuality and uniqueness, perhaps our brains have grown quite alike.....
This is fascinating, isn't it? What you're saying opens some interesting possibilities. It makes us reconsider not just "science" and the access that it gives us to "truth," but also the very relationship between nature and culture, with nature--even at the level of brain chemistry!
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