fuckyeahgenderstudies:

I’ve pretty much finished this book and i would heartily recommend it to everyone. It’s definitely the best book i’ve read this year. I found the portions on anorexia nervosa and depression (having personal experience with both and having undertaken academic research on AN) particularly compelling and ultimately persuasive.

US link
UK link

“This fascinating book reports on the impact of Western trauma counsellors in post-tsunami Sri Lanka who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering and healing. In Hong Kong Watters retraces the last steps of a teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters also reveals the truth about the multimillion-dollar campaign by one of the world’s biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression”.

Here’s a poignant quote:

We ask people diagnosed with schizophrenia and those who love and care for them to adopt a brain-chemistry narrative without consideration of the cost: the devaluing of the perceptions that make up the ill individual’s sense of self. Indeed… the fact that healthy people do not dwell on the ‘brain chemistry’ story as an explanation for their own mood and feelings should be an indication of how unappealing and dehumanizing the idea is. When we fall in love, get jealous, feel the joy of playing with a child, or experience religious ecstasy we do not describe the experience to friends as a fortunate or unfortunate confluence of brain chemicals. Yet we continue to suggest that the narrative of brain chemistry will be useful in lessening the stigma associated with a mentally ill person. What could be more stigmatizing than to reduce a person’s perceptions and beliefs to the notion that they are ‘just chemistry’? It is a narrative that often pushes the ill individual outside the group, allowing those who remain in the social circle to, as Mehta observed, view the ill person as ‘almost a different species’.

Watters, Ethan. Crazy Like Us. London: Robinson. 194-5.

It’s a really interesting book. Check it out.

I just cited this book in a moodle post the other day.  It’s really excellent.

Source: fuckyeahgenderstudies