A kind of prostitution

Within Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters explains many ways in which Western biomedicine has incorrectly pushed an essentialist way of treating certain mental illnesses onto other cultures. This essentially means that Western medicine presumes that all people, no matter what culture they are from, react to trauma in the same way. The situation Watters goes most in depth on is the tsunami that struck Sri Lanka. He describes a huge rush of Western psychiatrists to the area where they counseled victims in an “assembly-line” manner (81).

In contrast to the psychiatrists who were very unknowledgeable about the culture they immersed themselves into, Watters describes how Western biomedicine manipulated the Japanese people by getting to know their culture all too well. These are two contrasting ways in which knowledge, or lack there of, of a culture can cause harm or be helpful. Getting to know and understand a certain culture before rushing in and helping them is going to helpful in some situations, while it may cause damage in other situations.

It is our obligation as people of our own culture to understand each situation and assess whether or not it is our duty to go to these other countries and give them aid. Watters’ assertion that “the mistake in applying Western notions of trauma without consideration for local beliefs goes beyond just being ineffective: there is real danger of doing harm”, certainly gets his point across (107). Although the support teams had good intentions for helping the victims in Sri Lanka, the outcome was largely ineffective Home Page.

They had no understanding of the culture’s religion, burial rituals, history of civil war, and most important they had no knowledge of the language (75). One could hardly imagine trying to go through a therapy session with a translator, as there is a disconnection with the person you are expressing your feelings to. It could also be said that there was no time to understand their culture and they needed assistance right away.

However, the assistance they most likely needed right away was as Dr. Athula Sumathipala put it, “not ‘therapy’ but provision of basic needs, care with dignity, respect, reassurance” (124). While their basic needs are being taken care of, that same time could have been spent better understanding their culture. The people of Sri Lanka have different religious beliefs, speak a different language, have rituals, and carry on their everyday lives in a much different way than Westerners do. Thus, it seems only logical that they grieve in a different way than Westerners are used to.

Knowledge of another culture is beneficial during times of trauma, but that knowledge can sometimes be used in an unexpected way. In Japan, GlaxoSmithKline created a market for anti-depressants by utilizing anthropologists and other intellectuals who knew the culture well. People in Japan used to see depression as something elite citizens would obtain from over-working, but with the help of drug companies, depression is now seen as a common ailment (224).

Watters states the fact that “everyone in the world deserved access to the fruits of our scientific discoveries as a human right”, which is very true, however, it is the truth behind the discoveries that brings up questions (232). Even though these drug companies went through a whole new set of testing on Japanese people, their results were swept under the rug. What their results really found was that their anti-depressant drugs worked hardly better than the placebos (222-224). It is amazing and almost disturbing as to how willing these intellectuals were to help out these drug companies.

The anthropologists even referred to their actions as “a kind of prostitution” (248). These drug companies and people who work in the medical field claim to want to help people with these anti-depressants, but it is clear that their only incentive is money. Thus, knowledge of another culture can also be detrimental to citizens. Knowing how understanding a culture can be harmful to a population, it is easy to see that we should “rethink our generosity” (255). It makes us question whether we are truly helping people or unintentionally globalizing the human psyche.

It is important to understand how other cultures function before rushing to them thinking we have all the right answers. In reality, there is no right or wrong way to treat different diseases. No culture has the “better” treatment, but what cultures do have is their own way of dealing with certain crises, which works for them. Gaining more information about other cultures in the beginning will help to stop us from pushing our solutions and medications onto them. We also need to rethink our generosity even if we do have good intentions.