I recommend a book called Crazy Like Us. It doesn’t delve into this phenomenon in particular, but it could still be illuminating. Basically, clinical psychology, like economics, inevitably shapes the very things it claims to study impartially. The specific manifestations of mental illness that we categorize and treat are never t only largely products of our culture, but are directly influenced by the very act of classifying them and attempting to treat them in a particular way. Many of these mental illnesses never existed in other parts of the world until western trained psychologists showed up and started looking for them.
Essentially there is so much subjectivity, both in classifying and diagnosing mental illness and in evaluating the success or failure of treatment, that effects like this shouldn’t be surprising.
