WHY DO AMERICAN SOLDIERS SUFFER FROM HIGHER RATES OF PTSD? “American writer Ethan Watters’s recent book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Psyche, offers a highly subversive answer. It is that American society has been permeated by psychoanalytical beliefs about the fragility of the human mind. This creates an expectation, he argues, that people who have been through horrible experiences will be traumatized. The veterans are simply falling in with that expectation, and exhibiting the symptoms that the theory says they should be showing. . . . Is PTSD really caused by what happened to veterans while they served in the military, or by the expectations of the civilian society they returned to afterwards? Suddenly, there is a case to answer.” Hmm.

UPDATE: Ethan Watters emails that this doesn’t quite capture his original piece, which is here.