Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

Save for our popular culture and our fast food, there is little that the United States exports anymore. But move over Miley, Madonna and McDonald’s: America’s newest export is madness. At least, that’s the thesis of Ethan Watters’ Crazy Like Us.

Watters argues that Americans are as overbearing and influential in their treatment of mental health as they are with their other major exports. “In teaching the rest of the world to think like us,” he writes, “we have been, for better and worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad.” More specifically, American-born psychoses like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia are being taught to people in foreign countries. And because American drug companies stand to make billions from treating these worldwide maladies, they are encouraging this behavior.