Ethan Watters

Ethan Watters, 2016

Ethan Watters is an American author. He writes u. a. for the New York Times Magazine, Spin , GQ and Mother Jones and lives with his family in San Francisco .

Services

Watters deals in his texts with psychiatric, psychological and psychotherapeutic issues.

Together with his co-author, Professor of Sociology Richard Ofshe , he was one of the first science journalists to educate the public about the questionable nature of the "recovered memory" movement in psychotherapy. The "recovered memory" movement made repressed sexual abuse responsible for many forms of mental illness, such as lack of self-confidence, depression, lack of concentration or eating and sexual disorders.

In their book Making Monsters False Memories, Psychotherapy & Sexual Hysteria, Watters and Ofshe showed inconsistencies in the disorder and therapy concept of the "recovered memory" therapy based on findings from psychological memory research. So the assumption of quasi-realistic and at the same time completely repressed memory traces is scientifically not tenable. Watters and Ofshe contributed to the demise of this approach through their book. In their book, Watters and Ofshe presented the influencing mechanisms (such as hypnosis and questioning techniques) with which psychotherapists had implicitly instructed patients to develop symptoms similar to dissociative identity disorder .

Watters deepened his criticism of forms of psychotherapy that work primarily with unconscious processes, as originally postulated by Sigmund Freud , in his 1999 book Therapy's Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and the Exploitation of Today's Walking Worried . As an alternative, Watters sees pharmacotherapy in this book , an approach that he is much more critical of in his later work.

His current book Crazy like us: How America drives the rest of the world crazy was also published in German in 2016. A preprint of the American edition appeared in the New York Times Magazine. In Crazy Like Us , Watters extends his critical approach to the unreflective application of psychiatric concepts. In this book, Watters addresses a broad audience. Partly written in the style of a travel report, the book describes Watters encounters with mentally ill people, psychiatrists and psychotherapists around the world. Watters traces the ways in which psychiatric diagnoses spread across the globe through magazines, newspapers, specialist magazines and opinion leaders - often driven by campaigns by the pharmaceutical industry .

Watters relies on the work of the medical historian Edward Shorter . Shorter assumes that psychiatric diagnoses work like offers of meaning. They give people the opportunity to express their suffering in a form that is accepted in their time and culture.

The pharmacist psychiatrist David Healy summed up the main point of Crazy Like Us as follows: “Creepy epidemics like Ebola or AIDS will probably never affect you personally. This book is about much more dangerous diseases. You are from America. Someone in your family and friends certainly already has these diseases. Or maybe you too. "

Watters himself writes in Crazy Like Us about the conceptions of mental disorder prevalent in the West: "When you look at them from far shores, you see with breathtaking clarity the social prejudices and certainties that shape our own image of mental illness and the human mind From this point of view, our own assumptions about madness and the self suddenly seem quite strange. "

Works

• Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, And Sexual Hysteria. University of California Press. 1996. ISBN 0-520-20583-9 .
• The misused memory dtv. 1996. ISBN 3423305568 .
• Therapy's Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and the Exploitation of Today's Walking Worried. Scribner. 1999. ISBN 0684835843 .
• Crazy like us: How America drives the rest of the world crazy, dgvt-Verlag, Tübingen 2016, ISBN 3-87159-222-6 .

Web links

• Homepage of Ethan Watters

Individual evidence

1. ↑ CRAZY LIKE US. In: madinamerica.com. Retrieved February 24, 2016 . 
2. ^ Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, And Sexual Hysteria. Andre Deutsch Limited. 1995. ISBN 0-233-98957-9 .
3. ↑ Ethan Watters: The Americanization of Mental Illness. In: nytimes.com. Retrieved February 24, 2016 .