Essay 4

Essay #4: The American Brand of Crazy

Globalization is one of the most important social forces in our lives today. More than ever before in human history, people all over the world are listening to the same kinds of music, eating the same kinds of food, wearing the same kinds of clothing. Many of the lifestyles and fashions that people worldwide are adopting originated in the world’s wealthiest countries, especially the United
States. America has a huge influence on the culture of other places: just think of the places all over the globe where people eat McDonald’s hamburgers and drink Cokes, where people wear Nike shoes and watch Hollywood movies.

In an article in New York Times Magazine, Ethan Watters argues that America has another important export for the other countries of the world: our view of mental illness. According to Watters, Americans commonly assume that mental illnesses like depression are the same all over the world. However, Watters contends that these conditions are in fact culturally constructed—that is to say, different cultures view depression very differently. And, for better and worse, the American concept of what depression means has started to dominate the whole globe.

For your final out-of-class essay, I’d like you to read Watters’ argument carefully. The name of the article is “The Americanization of Mental Illness,” and it appeared in New York Times Magazine on January 8, 2010. Once you have read the piece, I’d like you to write an essay evaluating and responding to a claim Watters makes in the end of his article: “Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering.” What does this claim mean? Is it true? What evidence does Watters produce to support it? Can you find evidence from other sources that also supports this claim (or that undercuts it?)

In grading this paper, I will evaluate your performance on all six criteria from your “What Makes a Good English 101 Essay?” sheet: focus, development, audience awareness, organization, correctness, and effective research. Regarding the last two criteria, I’m expecting that your paper be as clean and as well edited as you can make it. I expect your paper to be word processed with 12 point type, double-spaced, in an academic font such as Times New Roman, with no spelling errors, and proofread. Regarding grammar, I will be evaluating your performance on all of the issues we’ve talked about: complete sentences, comma use, subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, pronoun reference, pronoun case, parallelism, and minor punctuation. Regarding citations, you will need to refer to between three and four recent (2006 or later) periodical articles from EBSCO or ProQuest, (you should include the article from New York Times Magazine as one of these). Both the in-text citations and works cited page should appear in correct MLA format. The length of this paper should be substantial; however, I will grade your work on its development rather than its length. In order to be able to devote time to each of the many students writing a paper on this topic, I ask you to limit yourself to a maximum of 1600 words (excluding works cited). I will return ungraded any paper longer than this.