Astral Codex Ten

Watters

6 min read

Watters

Article

Watters is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 15, 2021 and May 30, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “According Watters, pre-industrial Europe had the same pattern”; “According Watters, pre-industrial Europe had the same pattern of anorexia”; “Here Watters is working off a theory”. It most often appears alongside America, Crazy Like Us, Japan.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: July 15, 2021
  • Last seen: May 30, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Crazy Like Us
July 15, 2021 · Original source
We talk a lot about falling biodiversity. Sometimes we apply the same metaphor to the human world, eg “falling linguistic biodiversity" when minority languages get replaced by English or whatever. In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters sounds the alarm about falling psychiatric biodiversity. Along with all the usual effects of globalization, everyone is starting to have the same mental illnesses, and to understand them in the same way. This is bad insofar as greater diversity of mental illness could teach us something about the process that generates them, and greater diversity of frameworks and responses could teach us something about how to treat them.
Inline links: Crazy Like Us
Weirdly enough, all of this had happened before. According Watters, pre-industrial Europe had the same pattern of anorexia as Hong Kong - rare, extremely scattered cases, mostly for stress reasons unrelated to beauty standards (plus or minus a couple of weird nuns). At the dawn of scientific psychiatry in the 19th century, most neurotic illnesses among women were classified under the general heading of "hysteria". Common hysterical symptoms were nervous tics, sudden inexplicable paralysis of the limbs, on-and-off blindness, convulsions, amnesia, and inability to walk (none of which are typical symptoms of depression/anxiety today!) Around the 1850s, some hysterics started also having something like anorexia. Psychiatrists found this fascinating, wrote a bunch of well-received papers about it, and it became a common topic of discussion in Victorian salons. As interest in the disease spread, so did the disease itself, with anorexia going from one of the rarest hysterical symptoms to one of the most common. Incidence peaked around 1900, after which it slowly trailed off, until around 1940 it was vanishingly rare again. Watters quotes medical historians who attribute this to decreasing interest: once it became so dirt-common that doctors stopped writing papers about it and high-society types stopped talking about it in hushed voices, it became boring and gradually died out. The disorder came back in the 1970s and 80s, for a bunch of reasons. First, a famous singer, Karen Carpenter, collapsed on stage from anorexia, making the news in the same way as the Hong Kong schoolgirl case. Second, terrible 1970s feminists learned about it and started romanticizing it as some sort of brave hunger strike against the patriarchy. Third, and probably most important, US obesity rates went like this:
Inline links: a couple of weird nuns, romanticizing it
Here Watters is working off a theory, sometimes raised by psychiatrists and medical historians, that I think of as a kind of Kantian perspective on mental illness. Kant, remember, said that we have no idea what actual reality is; we see reality through the filter of our own preconceived notions and mental categories, and although there is an external world, we shouldn't claim to know very much about it. In the same way, Watters suggests, there probably is some base-level objectively-real mental illness. If you have to think of it as something, you can think of it as formless extreme stress, looking for an outlet. But the particular way the stress finds an outlet is based on the patient's cultural preconceptions. If you believe that stressed people go blind, you'll go blind. If you believe that stress people act possessed by demons, you'll act possessed by demons. And if you believe that stressed people become obsessed with being really thin and starve themselves, you might become obsessed with being really thin and starve yourself. A few people will have some natural tendency towards one outlet or another - there are a tiny handful of anorexics even in societies like pre-1990 Hong Kong that don't recognize anorexia, just as there are a few modern Westerners who still act possessed by demons. But unless you're especially predisposed towards some method or another, your stress will take the outlet already worn to a deep groove by your cultural milieu.
Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
July 21, 2021 · Original source
Something else about the book: Watters talks about exporting western psychiatry being equivalent to handing out smallpox blankets. But then he reveals that he's married to a psychiatrist. He's, uh, maybe working through some stuff here?
Watters has an analogy in the book that imagine if after 9/11, a whole bunch of people from Mozambique flew in and told survivors that they needed to learn rituals for disconnecting their psychic bonds with the spirits of dead relatives. His point was that we would find it weird and insulting, but I think he was also trying to point out that even if these rituals helped Mozambiqueans find peace, outside a larger belief structure they are useless. He also tells the story of a psychiatrist who learns all sorts of stuff about handling psychotic family members in Zanzibar. Then her own husband comes down with psychosis and none of the Zanzibar stuff works. They try religion for example, but you can't just use religion when you need it, it has to be ingrained in your life and beliefs.
Point I'm trying to make, the book could be read as either "American psychiatry sucks" or "American psychiatry works within the context of American belief systems but can't just be copied and pasted to other cultures, the same way you can't just start doing Mozambique spirit rituals tomorrow and expect much from them." I suspect Watters believes some of both.
Are Woo Non-Responders Defective?
May 30, 2023 · Original source
The cross-cultural psychologists sometimes claim that other cultures verbalize their emotions less than Westerners (and correspondingly have more psychosomatic complaints), whereas Westerners verbalize them more and have depression. Cf. Jaynes, Watters, Foulks.
Inline links: Jaynes, Watters, Foulks