Is Mental Illness Contagious? - Ethan Watters February 11, 2010

Favorite:

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2010/02/04/Ethan_Watters_The_Globalization_of_the_American_Psyche

Journalist Ethan Watters speculates about the contagiousness of mental illness, citing the hysteria that afflicted thousands of women during the Victorian era. "This is a matter of the unconscious mind, at any moment of time and culture, looking to speak the language of suffering for its moment in time," he says.

-----

American culture is homogenizing the way the world goes mad. Our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But neither our golden arches nor our bomb craters represent our most troubling impact on the world: the bulldozing of the human mind itself.

In Crazy Like Us, leading trend-spotter and science writer Ethan Watters shows that we are not only changing the way the world treats and understands mental illness, we are actually changing the symptoms and prevalence of the diseases themselves. - Hillside Club

Ethan Watters is the author of Urban Tribes, an examination of the mores of affluent "never marrieds" and the coauthor of Making Monsters, a groundbreaking indictment of the recovered memory movement. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Discover, Men's Journal, Details, Wired, and NPR, he has appeared on such national media as "Good Morning America," "Talk of the Nation," and CNN. His latest book is Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.