Ethan Watters The Rising Risk Of Losing Individual Freedom

“The Rising Risk of Losing Individual Freedom”

In different societies, people have their own way of living and thinking. Individual freedom allows each person the opportunity to make the decisions that control their life, and makes the quality of their life greater because it provides them the power to follow their visions. In a world where the importance of the individual to act or think on his or her own is being jeopardized by corporations convincing them into thinking the similar way as others is where danger lurks. Medical advances has allowed for a great increase of potential to cure diseases. However the psychological aspect of medicine can also be ineffective in different parts of the world based on local culture. Ethan Watters,

Whilst looking at mental illnesses in people, the important thing to understand is their background. These problems may be conveyed differently based on ones society, which makes it challenging to identify the source. Depression in different societies shows this idea as one society understanding and treatment of the disease is different than how another society perceives it. Having depression in Japan was shameful because Japanese have stereotyped this disease as “a rare disorder” (Watters 516). Additionally, the status of psychiatrists remained very low so many did not prefer to go into this profession. Watters piece outlines how many cultures may experience depression differently and how their cultural upbringing plays a role. Osamu Tajima explains “…a Nigerian man might experience a culturally distinct form of depression by describing a peppery feeling in his head. A rural Chinese farmer might speak only of shoulder or stomach aches…someone from Iran might talk of tightness in the chest, and an American Indian might describe the experience of depression as something akin to loneliness,” (517). “The peoples attitude towards depression was very negative,” explained a spokeswoman for Eli Lilly to the Wall Street Journal. She was referring to the fact that the Japanese had a fundamentally different conception of depression than in the

However, categorizing any form of depression and giving one medication to all is not the answer. Most illnesses, such as the common cold, or fever are curable by a common treatment such as cold medicine ore getting rest. “By applying a one-size-fits-all notion of depression around the world, Kirmayer argued, we run the risk of obscuring the social meaning – the communication the symptoms are meant to impart” (518). Depression varies from person to person and giving the same medication to all does not cure everything. This is one of the many negative ways multinational corporations are trying to alter the way of thinking on depression. “The major problem GlaxoSmithKline faced was that Japanese Psychiatrists…translated the diagnosis of “depression” as…an incurable and inborn depression of psychotic proportions.” (524) Here it is shown that the word depression is associated with a negative connotation not only by the general public but also by doctors in Japan and that was the number one problem any company faced when trying to release a medicine that was associated with the