Crazy Like Us isn’t a recent book, and it is certainly not an academic one. But maybe that’s good, for Watters makes statements about the state of the global PTSD industry that an academic might hesitate to make, at least in plain English.
Crazy Like Us isn’t just about exporting PTSD. It’s about exporting anorexia nervosa to Hong Kong, and a medicalized diagnosis of depression to Japan. But the chapter on the tsunami that brought PTSD to Sri Lanka is the one I’m interested in here.
Watters isn’t anti-psychiatry (his wife is a psychiatrist), and he isn’t against the diagnosis of PTSD per se. His point is that psychiatric categories are cultural categories, and particularly responsive to social change. As the medical anthropologist Allan Young put it, a diagnosis of PTSD “can be real in a particular place and time, and yet not be true for all places and times.” (101-102).
His most important insight is that PTSD is a diagnosis that fits a modern Western world, in which people see themselves as autonomous individuals first, and members of groups and social networks second. In a so-called traditional culture, the diagnosis just doesn’t make sense. So much the worse for us, Watters seems to be saying, but perhaps it’s not so simple.
