Abnormal Psyc Reading Response 1

Gabi Poisson Reading Response 1 In his article Ethan Watters provides an impassioned critique of the American obsession with globalizing what they believe is their expertise of the human brain and mental illness. While Watters demonstrates the rigidity and lack of sensitivity with which Americans force their understandings on others, he does not offer a solution but merely identify a problem. The problem he does identify is legitimate. As we’ve discussed in class, the United States categorizes mental illness in the DSM. While presenting mental illness in this way gives it legitimacy, it also suggests that anything not contained inside it is not real. That being said, the DSM has been significantly wrong before. For example, homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness until the DSM-III. Diseases such as amok or koro, specific to Southeast Asia are regarded in the DSM-4 as “culture-bound syndromes,” giving them an air of inauthenticity. Despite the United States’ unwillingness to validate such disorders, there are still records of their existence. One of the problems with the DSM-5, noted by Professor Joormann in class is that it relies too heavily on categorization. Because it is a prototypal classification of abnormal behavior and not a categorical approach, the specific diagnoses are not the ultimate and correct way of classifying illnesses. They are just a way of understanding a variety of “abnormal” behaviors. Our DSM is not so scientifically valid and reliable that every person with mental health issues falls exactly into a category and therefore requires the exact same treatment. Diagnoses vary from case to case. Therefore, it seems small-minded and egregiously westerncentric to argue that just because mental illness looks a certain way right in front of you, then that must be the only way in which that disorder manifests. If we acknowledge that genes operate in accordance with the environments in which they are placed, it seems reasonable to posit that different areas of the world with different cultures of people are going to function in different ways. This difference in functioning should, then, include psychological disorders.