Allan Wallace writes :
Many mental health care professionals today concur with Freud’s
assessment of the human condition, arguing that mental disease can be traced primarily to brain chemistry, genes, and the physical and social environment. There is also widespread belief in the scientific objectivity of our drugs, diagnostic categories, and theories of the mind, in the assumption that they transcend cultural trends and beliefs. But recent research by anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists indicates that mental illnesses are different throughout the world, because they are always conditioned by the views, values, and ways of life of specific cultures.
Clinicians in the West create the diagnostic classifications of mental illnesses, which are published as worldwide standards, and pharmaceutical companies invest enormous sums of money to develop and market medications to treat them. This globalization of Western ideas about the nature and treatment of mental illness is sadly reminiscent of European global imperialism from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, in which Europeans exploited those whom they conquered, spreading their worldview— considered as immutable, universal truth that surpassed all other beliefs—along with their diseases, which wiped out entire societies.
Cross-cultural psychiatric research shows that the Western understanding of all mental illnesses, such as depression, is profoundly influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations. Mental health care providers, drug companies, and patient-advocacy groups typically regard mental illnesses as “brain diseases” in which the patient has little choice or responsibility.
As journalist Ethan Watters comments,
“The mental-health ideas we export tothe world are rarely unadulterated scientific facts and never culturally
neutral.”
Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry in London
writes, “Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory, and a secular source of moral
authority. None of this is universal.
From a Buddhist perspective, the materialist view of the human mind—reduced to a composite of electrochemical processes occurring
unconsciously in the brain—is profoundly alienating and depressing precisely because it is essentially delusional.
Watters writes:
If our rising need for mental-health services does indeed spring from a breakdown of meaning, our insistence that the rest of the world think like us may be all the more problematic. Offering
the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments, and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a
solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart
of much of the world’s mental distress.