Posted on 01/11/2010 4:49:17 PM PST by lbryce
AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental 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. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
(BIG GRIN!) You’re welcome!
(BIG GRIN!) You’re welcome!
How can they TELL? /sarc>
Cheers!
!!!!!!!! - love it!
yes I have a similar mental illness myself. Its caused by the delayed stress syndrome of being lied to.
evidence for diagnosis : I walked in the house last night to wash up from intalling spark plugs in my old pick-up and the TV was on , it was Obama....AGAIN ! .... AGAIN ! ! ! , I threw my dirty cap aginst the wall in anger , and a huge black stunned spider fell out of the hat onto hardwood floor
But the yarmulke just becomes a landing pad for birds. They can’t resist. So it’s like out of the pan and into the fire.
(btw your fly phobia is hilarious)
but my phobia is only with the flies, the birds I welcome:
Oh pointy birds, oh pointy pointy
anoint my head, annointy 'nointy
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