GSK and the exporting of mental illness

January 26th, 2010

After writing about Naomi Klein yesterday and the superbranding of politics. I came across a thought piece in New Scientist called Invasion of the mind snatchers by Ethan Watters.

His story is one that around the world in different cultures, we experience depression, and describe mental trauma in a rich variety of ways, for example a,

Nigerian man might experience a culturally distinct form of depression by describing a “peppery” feeling in his head, while a Chinese farmer might speak only of shoulder or stomach aches. Salvadorean women refugees suffering psychological trauma after a long civil war, on the other hand, often experience something called calorias, a feeling of intense body heat.

For a long time, psychiatrists and medical anthropologists studying mental illness in different cultures found that mental illnesses are not evenly distributed globally, and do not take the same form from place to place. Unfortunately, mental health professionals in the US, who dominate the global discussion about how mental illnesses are categorised and treated, have often ignored or dismissed these differences.

Watters argues that what big pharma is doing is reaching to the world and describing peoples well-being in their own terms for their own benefit.

local versions of mental illnesses are now being homogenised into American versions at an extraordinary rate.

This for me is when one can refer to the dysfunctional nature of an industrial system – mass markets no longer defined by ones territory, and that’s OK – but when the corporation becomes more important then those that it is meant to serve you kind of think the game is up. Watters expands his thinking in Crazy Like US. Laurence Kirmayer wrote

The clinical presentation of depression and anxiety is a function not only of patients’ ethnocultural backgrounds, but of the structure of the healthcare system they find themselves in and the diagnostic categories and concepts they encounter in mass media and in dialogue with family, friends and clinicians,” Kirmayer wrote later in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

In other words, there is a great deal here about the context of identity, in relation to the culture one lives in etc., All a bit of a pain in the backside when all one wants to do is shift vary large quantities of something. Watters tells to the story of how the pharmaceutical giant GSK redefined mental health issues in Japan to sell its drug Paroxetine. The result, as reported by Watters and Kirmayer was,

“What I was witnessing was a multinational pharmaceutical corporation working hard to redefine narratives about mental health,” Kirmayer said. “These changes have far-reaching effects, informing the cultural conceptions of personhood and how people conduct their everyday lives. And this is happening on a global scale. These companies are upending long-held cultural beliefs about the meaning of illness and healing.”

Now is that a good thing? As we have witnessed when people are cut adrift from culture (here) and (here) that they can identify with, when they face a world in which they are unsure and uncertain – terrible things can happen, as people struggle to make sense of a world in which they are fearful. For example until postmodern times, we dealt with problems that had their origins in relation to the other or the outside in a concrete way and in imagination problems tended to come from people with psychosis or personality disorders. A friend of mine, a clinical psychologist, says, we are still getting those problems but what has changed for some people are the triggers to illness, in so much as people who do not have a strong inner sense of self tend to feel more fragmented more easily and the idea of self construction is very threatening to these types of people. She goes on

These people seem to need more direct human contact to help them to define themselves and years ago would have been defined and lived within the confines of their families, villages, social classes or friends, with daily personal interaction reinforcing that. So, for instance, we see a lot of phobias and depressions, particularly problems such as social phobia that are linked to this fearfulness of how to be in the world and whether one is acceptable or not.

So I wonder what makes it a good idea to help other cultures be more like us – its appears that we have enough problems of our own?

Bookmarks: