Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters

Author:Ethan Watters [Watters, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2009-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

Those who tended to agree with statements such as the first two were thought to have an internal locus of control. They were the type of people who thought of themselves as captains of their own destiny, able to shape their future through force of will. Those who agreed with statements similar to the second two were thought to have an external locus of control, meaning they believed that the course of their lives was largely influenced by factors outside themselves.

Hooley found that relatives who were highly critical of the mentally ill family members were those with an internal locus of control. Their critical comments to the mentally ill person didn’t mean that they were cruel or uncaring; they were simply applying to their relative the same assumptions about human nature that they applied to themselves. “An internal based locus of control reflects an approach to the world that is active, resourceful, and that emphasizes personal accountability,” concluded Hooley. “Thus, far from high criticism reflecting something negative about the family members of patients with schizophrenia, high criticism (and hence high EE) was associated with a characteristic that is widely regarded as positive.”

Widely regarded as positive, that is, in the United States. It has long been noted that countries and cultures differ in their shared beliefs about locus of control and related measures such as scales of individualism versus collectivism or egocentric versus sociocentric conceptions of self. In many cross-cultural studies, the cliché that Americans are more individualistic proves to be true. In a masterful meta-analysis of dozens of cross-cultural studies performed over the past fifty years, professor of psychology Daphna Oyserman and colleagues from the University of Michigan concluded that, compared with other groups around the world, European Americans are indeed “more individualistic—valuing personal independence more.… To contemporary Americans, being an individualist is not only a good thing; it is a quintessentially American thing.”

Viewed in the most positive light, these highly emotionally involved relatives were more hopeful about the disease because they remained convinced that the ill family member should be able to overcome the symptoms with an application of personal will. “It is plausible to speculate,” Hooley and a colleague in another paper on the topic concluded, “that certain cultural values (e.g., fatalism) in traditional groups might engender more benign and less blaming attributions toward those with mental illnesses. In contrast, cultural values that emphasize individuality, achievement, and personal accountability might be expected to facilitate more attributions of responsibility and control in the context of disturbed behavior.”

In his book Crazy: A Father’s Search through America’s Mental Health Madness, Pete Earley vividly documents a common response among Western parents when faced with the onset of a severe mental illness in their child. One typical father described his reaction to the schizophrenic break of his son: “I went to the library and began reading books about mental illness.… I thought: ‘No, I’m going to fix this.’ That is your first instinct as a parent. You’re going to fix it. I thought, ‘I can get him help.

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