From Catherine:

"[M]ental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either 
in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by 
the ethos of particular times and places."

"Mental-health professionals in the West, and in the United States in 
particular, create official categories of mental diseases and promote 
them in a diagnostic manual that has become the worldwide standard. 
American researchers and institutions run most of the premier 
scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of 
psychology and psychiatry. Western drug companies dole out large sums 
for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental 
illnesses. In addition, Western-trained traumatologists often rush in 
where war or natural disasters strike to deliver "psychological first 
aid," bringing with them their assumptions about how the mind becomes 
broken by horrible events and how it is best healed. "

"The problem, it appears, is that the biomedical narrative about an 
illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that 
a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more 
thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though 
life events. ... 'Biochemical aberrations make them almost a 
different species.' "

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html 






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