Madness, I Tell You

Today I read a fascinating article called The Americanization of Mental Illness. Here are a few key quotes for your consideration:

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.
[...]
Cross-cultural psychiatrists have pointed out that the mental-health ideas we export to the world are rarely unadulterated scientific facts and never culturally neutral. “Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory and a source of moral authority. None of this is universal,” Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry in London observes. He has also written: “The problem is the overall thrust that comes from being at the heart of the one globalizing culture. It is as if one version of human nature is being presented as definitive, and one set of ideas about pain and suffering. . . . There is no one definitive psychology.”
[...]
Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering.

Interesting stuff, yes? But as I read the article, I found myself thinking more about another Americanized idea that has been exported to the world, also with perhaps mixed results — Christianity.

Understand, I have no problem with people proselytizing on behalf of the religion I believe in (though I may not always agree with the methods employed to do so). No, what I really take issue with is the way Christianity has become co-opted by such uniquely American ideas as the pursuit of happiness in the form of material wealth and the manifest destiny, if you will, of the individual. Ideas, I might add, that are antithetical to the Gospel as presented in the New Testament. (Joel Osteen, I'm talking to you.) And I don't like the idea of this particular brand (ah yes, the language of commodity—also very American) of Christianity making the global rounds.

But hey, it's not just problematic theology that gets spread out into other cultures. What about our institutional formats? When I was in Thailand I went to a church service one day and it was both comforting and disheartening to discover that it looked and sounded just like so many services I've been to here in the States. I even recognized many of the worship songs as ones written by Westerners (if not Americans), though sung, of course, in Thai.

Er, but wait. I just realized I'm talking about Christianity and mental illness in the same post, and the same context. Which, granted, many readers may find perfectly appropriate, but which bums me out a little, even though it's my own fault. On the other hand, it also reminds me of a funny story. I was living in the Bay Area some years ago, and the church I attended at the time would usually include a traditional hymn along with a set of more contemporary tunes before each service. One Sunday morning, I looked at the program and was startled by the title of the hymn for the day: "Come, all Christians, be committed."

Freud would, no doubt, be pleased.