America’s Imperial Mental Illness

[Benko]

HUBRIS.  We know everything/are sure of everything and wish to impose "our" will on everyone.

[clacy]

I guess it's human nature to look at the problems that exist for people in other cultures/regions and apply solutions as you would treat them if they were your own problems.

Examples would be Bush trying to bring democracy to the Middle East, or the WH's narrative that Middle East terror is due to lack of jobs and poverty in the Middle East.

[stone]

I thought this was interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prognosis_ ... ernational

The World Health Organization conducted two long-term follow-up studies involving more than 2,000 people suffering from schizophrenia in different countries. These studies found patients have much better long-term outcomes in developing countries (India, Colombia and Nigeria) than in developed countries (USA, UK, Ireland, Denmark, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Japan, and Russia),[40] despite the fact that antipsychotic drugs are typically not widely available in poorer countries, raising questions about the effectiveness of such drug-based treatments.

In many non-Western societies, schizophrenia may only be treated with more informal, community-led methods. Multiple international surveys by the World Health Organization over several decades have indicated that the outcome for people diagnosed with schizophrenia in non-Western countries is on average better there than for people in the West.[41] Many clinicians and researchers hypothesize that this difference is due to relative levels of social connectedness and acceptance,[42] although further cross-cultural studies are seeking to clarify the findings.

Several factors are associated with a better prognosis: female gender, acute (vs. insidious) onset of symptoms, older age of first episode, predominantly positive (rather than negative) symptoms, presence of mood symptoms and good premorbid functioning.[23][24] Most studies done on this subject, however, are correlational in nature, and a clear cause-and-effect relationship is difficult to establish. Evidence is also consistent that negative attitudes towards individuals with schizophrenia can have a significant adverse impact, especially within the individual's family. Family members' critical comments, hostility, authoritarian and intrusive or controlling attitudes (termed high 'expressed emotion' or 'EE' by researchers) have been found to correlate with a higher risk of relapse in schizophrenia across cultures.[25]

The Wellcome Trust (a UK based foundation) is also now funding a large study looking into psychosis in developing countries.
http://www.intrepidresearch.org/about-the-project

INTREPID is a programme of research designed to: a) develop robust, comparable methods for the study of schizophrenia and other psychoses in diverse settings (Phase 1); and b) implement these in a three-country study of the epidemiology, phenomenology, aetiology and outcome of psychoses (Phase 2).  INTREPID is being conducted in defined catchment areas in three countries: Chengalpet talk (near Chennai), India; Ibadan South East and Ona Ara, Ibadan, Nigeria; and Tunapuna-Piarco, Trinidad.

I suppose the ideal situation might be if we were able to learn something from such cultures to get better outcomes for psychotic illness over here.

I've suffered from psychosis myself. To me it seems so much more mysterious and to be honest frightening then purely bodily illness (such as cancer). I sort of see our thoughts as being what makes us ourselves; so it is humbling when the thought process so utterly screws up. But I guess the effect of hormones on mood is an everyday experience we are all familiar with so it ought not to be such a surprise that we are sometimes not capable masters of our minds. A further layer on this is that I'm convinced that conscious effort to direct our own thoughts can play a vital role in recovery from mental illness. I don't think that's a controversial opinion.

[stone]

Watters has two main explicit insights. First: People in every culture experience trauma and stress, but they find different ways of expressing and understanding their suffering—lending it meaning by embedding it in a narrative—based on the “symptom pools”? provided to them by their cultures. When a new disorder enters the cultural “symptom pool,”? people in distress will begin to manifest the symptoms of that disorder, whether it’s the day blindness of Victorian hysterics or the body dysmorphia of (some) American anorexics. Shifts in cultural narratives will shift the symptom pool, and thereby change the ways people manifest their suffering. Importantly, cultural narratives also shift how people relieve suffering, if and when they do relieve it. When it comes to mental illness, not only the diseases but the cures are culturally-conditioned.

Something I thought was interesting was that a certain rare genetic defect caused a vastly increased risk of mental illness BUT it manifested as any of the smorgasbord of different mental illnesses that afflict people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC1#Clin ... plications