An Analysis of the Chapter The Globalization of the American Psyche
"The Wave That Brought PTSD to Sri Lanka" is a chapter of "Crazy Like Us. The Globalization of the American Psyche", written by Ethan Watters and published in 2010. Judging from the content and title of the book it is likely targeted. Toward people interested in psychology and anthropology who do not necessarily work in those fields. In the specified chapter. Watters explores the history of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And how the idea of PTSD was introduced to Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami, and the effects that introduction has had and those that may be yet to come. As the text criticizes (sometimes harshly) many western medical practices especially. wWen it comes to the globalization of those practices, it is likely to make many enemies of western medicine. And psychiatric practitioners. As well as with the psychological relief organizations criticized in this chapter.
The chapter's main spacial and temporal focus are on the relief. Efforts immediately following the 2004 Tsunami in Sri Lanka. But many of the events in this region are used to support ideas regarding western medicine. And healthcare ideas as they relate to a global context that has perpetuated itself into the present time. The primary comparison in this chapter. Is between traditional western reactions to traumatic events. And the specific reactions to the Tsunami by residents of Sri Lanka.
The primary argument of the writing is that the assumption by western medical practioners. That all peoples and cultures react to traumatic events in the same way is not only fundamentally wrong but also dangerous- this argument is explicitly stated. To support the first part of this argument (that this assumption is inherently wrong), Watters uses quotes and findings from interviews to show that there is a distinct difference in how Americans and Sri Lankans react to these events; in support of the latter an account is given on how stability is maintained by the Sri Lankan people in the face of violence and how the adoption of western ideas threatens the practices that maintain this stability.
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Enthnography and interviews and some statistics were all used to generate data. Interviewees were asked to give accounts of someone they knew who had experienced trauma and recovered wel, and another of someone who had experienced trauma and had not recovered well- these stories were analyzed to find common threads that signified distress. By doing this, people were categorized into those who had recovered and those who had not- and then eventually categorized again based on what kinds of distress signifier they showed. Knowing what the signifiers ended up being would have strengthened the text, by ways of making clear the difference between the signifiers of distress we as Americans are used to and those used by Sri Lankans.
The analysis of the history of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and how it has evolved from a way of showing how the events of a single war affected people uniquely into a universal disorder that can be applied to anyone who has suffered from a traumatic event was especially interesting to me (114-123). It seems to me tragic in some ways how it played out: in an attempt to understand how soldiers returning from Vietnam were suffering uniquely, instead a diagnosis was produced that smothered investigations into the unique aspects of how anyone suffers. In turn, this may have hamrd the effectiveness of western psychiatry as a whole: in Sri Lanka treatments for PTSD cannot be expected to work because the interaction of trauma and culture produces different symptoms and requires different kinds of care; However, can this not also be said to be true to a lesser extent even in America? No people are exactly alike, nor are the traumatic events they experience; to say the experience of a man born on the east coast who experiences trauma in a war and a woman born on the west coast who experiences the trauma of being caught in a fire are near enough to be treated with the same guidelines seems almost ridiculous.
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