A Case for Preserving the Diversity of Madness

Summary

Watters questions the universality of mental illness and warns of the harms that accompany the exportation of Western typologies to non-Western cultures. He is particularly concerned that these effects will be exacerbated by the upcoming revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Building on his examination of non-Western practices, Watters exposes the historical instability of mental health classifications in North America to question the validity of current DSM categories. Although Watters' warnings about the dangers of the globalisation of the DSM are persuasive, they may be overreaching as our examination of the successful incorporation of Western created autism services, information, and interventions in the developing world suggests.

Notes

¹American Psychiatric Association DSM-5 Development (2010). Retrieved March 17, 2010, from http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx

²American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. Text Revision (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

³Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965); Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

⁴Ronald D. Laing, The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock, 1960).

⁵Klaus Doemer, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Society, trans. by J. Neugroschel and J. Steinberg (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981); David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971); Robert Castel, The Regulation of Madness: The Origins of Incarceration in France, trans. by W.D. Halls (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1988); Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1979); Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

⁶Gerald N. Grob, The Mad Among Us: A History of Care of America's Mentally Ill (New York: The Free Press, 1994); German E. Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms: Descriptive Psychopathology Since the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997); Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: Wiley, 1997); Howard I. Kushner, ‘Beyond Social Construction: Toward New Histories of Psychiatry’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 7 (1998), 141–9; D. Tatum, ‘The Anti-psychiatry Movement’, in 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841–1991, edited by G.E. Berrios and H. Freeman (London: Gaskell, Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1991), 333–47. Norman Dain, ‘Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry in the United States’, in Discovering the History of Psychiatry, edited by M.S. Micale and Roy Porter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 415–44.

⁷Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Margaret Lock, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980); Edward Lock and Margaret Lock, Health, Illness and Medical Care in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987); Allan H. Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Allan V. Horowitz, Creating Mental Illness (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003); Allan V. Horowitz, and Jerome C. Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

⁸Horowitz and Wakefield, Loss of Sadness (note 7).

¹⁰Edward Shorter, ‘Paralysis: The Rise and Fall’ (note 9), 549; see also Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue (note 9), 267–324.

⁹Edward Shorter, ‘Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a “Hysterical” Symptom’, Journal of Social History, 19 (1986), 549–82: Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: The Free Press, 1992); Edward Shorter, From the Mind into the Body: The Cultural Origins of Psychosomatic Symptoms (New York: The Free Press, 1994).

¹¹Allan Young (note 7); E.M. Brown, ‘Between Cowardice and Insanity: Shell-shock and the Legitimation of Neuroses in Britain in World War I’, in Science, Technology, and the Military, edited by E. Mendelsohn, M.R. Smith and P. Weingart (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988).

¹²David Dobbs, ‘The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap’, Scientific American, 300 (2009), 64–9.

¹³A. Jablensky, N. Sartorius, G. Ernberg, M. Anker, A. Korten, J. Cooper, J., et al., ‘Schizophrenia: Manifestations, Incidence and Course in Different Cultures. A World Health Organization Ten-Country Study’, Psychological Medicine. Monograph Supplement, 20 (1992), 1–97.

¹⁴Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, ‘Too Lonely to Die Alone: Internet Suicide Pacts and Existential Suffering in Japan’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 32 (2008), 516–51.

¹⁵Elliot S. Valenstein, Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health, (New York: The Free Press 1998); David Healy, The Anti-Depressant Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

¹⁶Gary Greenberg, ‘Manufacturing Depression: A Journey into the Economy of Melancholy’, Harpers Magazine, May (2007), 35–46; Gary Greenberg (note 7).

¹⁷Margaret Lock, ‘Displacing Suffering: The Reconstruction of Death in North America and Japan’, in Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader, edited by A. Robben, (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 189–204.

¹⁸Irvin Kirsch, The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

¹⁹Elliot S. Valenstein (note 15).

²⁰Roy R. Grinker, Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

²¹Tamara C. Daley and Marian D. Sigman, ‘Diagnostic Conceptualization of Autism among Indian Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Pediatricians’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 32 (2002), 13–23; Tamara C. Daley, ‘From Symptom Recognition to Diagnosis: Children with Autism in Urban India’, Social Science Medicine, 58 (2004), 1323–35.

²²Tamara C. Daley, ‘From Symptom Recognition to Diagnosis’ (note 21).

²³Michal Shaked and Yoram Bilu, ‘Grappling with Affliction: Autism in the Jewish Ultraorthodox Community in Israel’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 30 (2006), 1–27.

²⁴Shaked and Bilu (note 23).

²⁵Howard I. Kushner, ‘The Other War on Drugs: The Pharmaceutical Industry, Evidence-Based Medicine, and Clinical Practice’, Journal of Policy History, 19 (2007), 49–70.