Assignment Problem:
Why 'Good Intentions' are Not Enough
"If you're doing the mental health equivalent of applying a compress to someone's injured head, why would you need to share his or her religious beliefs, traditions or social structures" (The Wave that Brought PTSD to Sri Lanka, p. 75)?
1) Why should you share his or her religious beliefs, traditions or social structures? Why do psychologists such as Amatruda, stress the importance of counseling as "non-political and non-denominational"? What cultural assumptions are embedded in this stance? By arguing that people, at root, are the same in their emotional experience and expressions, how do global agencies reproduce particular ideas about persons? Why is the notion of "psycho-social aid" fraught with difficulties in actually being carried out? What assumptions and practices surround the treatment foreign expert's offer? How might particular therapeutic techniques actually impose new kinds of violence within populations? In what ways does this response resemble indoctrination?
2) After hearing about your interest in this book, Crazy Like Us, your friend--an American psychiatry student--interrupts you. He says that his job is to focus on his patients' behaviors, arrive at correct diagnoses, and prescribe appropriate treatment regimens. He claims he doesn't have time to worry about the loss of diversity in the world's differing conceptions and treatments of mental illness.
For this exit ticket, I would like you to state a short sentence in which you convince your friend why this loss of diversity should matter to him, based on your understanding of the book so far.