NYT: The Americanization of Mental Illness

From the essay:
'...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.

The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. In his book “Mad Travelers,” the philosopher Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in the 1890s of a fugue state in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles with no knowledge of their identities. The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century not only gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women’s social roles at the time but can also be seen from this distance as a social role itself — the troubled unconscious minds of a certain class of women speaking the idiom of distress of their time.'

Link

Wikipedia has an article about mental health diagnoses in China.

America is hooked on drugs, and a lot of them are made in China

Check out this link - and this.

The Globalization of Pharma

Click on image to enlarge
India, China Becoming Centers of Pharmaceutical R&D, Study Finds

Big pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson are increasingly relying on China and India for advanced research and development, a new study funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation finds.

According to the study, The Globalization of Innovation: Pharmaceuticals; Can India and China Cure the Global Pharmaceutical Market? (67 pages, PDF), Indian and Chinese scientists are rapidly developing the ability to innovate and create their own intellectual property as a result of multinational pharmaceutical companies moving R&D operations to their countries. The symbiotic relationships have enabled multinational firms to cut costs and broaden capacity while pharmaceutical firms in China and India gain revenue and develop expertise. In 2006, 5.5 percent of all global pharmaceutical patent applications named one or more inventors located in India, while 8.4 percent named one or more located in China — a fourfold increase from 1995.

In the study, the authors analyzed the business models, value-chain activities, partnerships, and technology capabilities of more than a hundred Chinese and Indian pharmaceutical firms. They found Indian and Chinese companies were making strides in the most lucrative segments of global value chains, while also prevailing in less lucrative segments, such as preclinical testing, animal experimentation, and manufacturing. However, since firms in those countries rarely have the capital and the regulatory expertise to develop a drug beyond phase II clinical trials, the commercial development of new intellectual property necessitates relationships with major multinational corporations.
from http://foundationcenter.org

pdf here