Americanizing the global mind?

 The last few years in American mental health have been marked by a brutal public flogging. Revelations in 2008 and 2009 that drug research at Harvard  and the University of Texas was tainted by millions of dollars in drug company undisclosed payments to the researchers (which were subsequently condemned on the floor of Congress by Senator Chuck Grassley) was followed by high profile media coverage of problems with the practice of psychotherapy.

In October 2009, findings from an article in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, which chronicled how psychotherapists are notoriously ignorant of clinical advances in their field, were reported by Newsweek's Sharon Begley in a stinging criticism of the profession. In January of this year, a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) of the research on depression medication argued that studies suggesting that drugs are not effective result from unnecessary prescription. In other words, for the minority who are clinically depressed, medication is a godsend, but for the majority who receive it – people who are just sad – it doesn't do much.

Citing this and other research, Judith Warner called the entire field into question in the New York Times:

“This is the big picture of mental health care in America: not perfectly healthy people popping pills for no reason, but people with real illnesses lacking access to care; facing barriers like ignorance, stigma and high prices; or findings care that is ineffective.”

Now, this criticism has gone global with Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, by journalist Ethan Watters, a book that takes aim at “the grand project of Americanizing the world's understanding of the human mind.”

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