PSA: Give us your sick, huddled masses -- we'll make them sick the AMERICAN way.

According to this week's NYTimes magazine article "The Americanization of Mental Illness," definitions of mental illness around the world are being -- well -- Americanized.

There's a fascinating example of how anorexia used to present in Hong Kong patients, and how that changed after Hong Kongers were exposed to American definitions and interpretations of anorexia. The problem of anorexia got worse, and new patients gave different self-reports on why they were anorexic than they had before, saying they were afraid of being fat where previous patients had cited "bloated stomachs" as the reason for not eating.

This does sound American.

In fact, diagnosing mental illnesses with the DSM at all is very American. If we can pin down the constellation of symptoms for any given "disease" (some deserve this title; I'm not impugning the word's usefulness in every case), we can medicate it, and if we can medicate it, we'll eventually be able to cure it. That's the idea, anyway. Americans diagnose, medicate and cure. (Scientifically!)

A few years ago, I went to a medical conference on the mental disorder with which my mother was long-ago diagnosed. I read books about the disorder. I felt better, because researching and learning facts makes me feel prepared for the future and better able to interpret the past -- just like a good, educated American.

But I felt better despite the fact that this conference, and these books, all agreed that there was no definitive criteria for either diagnosing or treating this disorder. In fact, there are no prescription medications that are not off-label for it. It's known as "the garbage can diagnosis," one conference speaker admitted, and not only because doctors have to throw every medication available at it, and in different combinations, to try to "treat" the patient; since part of the diagnostic criteria for the illness is that patients are uncooperative with doctors, pretty much anyone who won't cooperate with diagnosis, the hospitals, the drug regimen, or anyone associated with the medical establishment, can be diagnosed as having this illness -- even when their uncooperativeness is not pathological (just annoying), or not diagnostically relevant and hiding a different illness.

No wonder there are no on-label drugs for this disorder. People who suffer from it are in the "misc." category, rattling around with other people who likely have completely different things.

So this is where our culture's take on mental illness and its treatment both succeeds and fails: I researched this illness and felt better, because research often makes educated Americans feel better; yet, the illness itself was not affected by my research, and the fact that it remains the "garbage can" diagnosis indicates that our tendency to "diagnose" every symptom is inadequate -- in at least this case, and probably many others.

Diagnosis gives the mentally ill an identity, and a goal (improving, or being cured); but it also identifies them in perhaps inaccurate ways.

Having lived in China, albeit several years ago now, I can see how this approach to life, spread over the whole world, might be highly problematic. China, and its lack of planning, and its "meiyou banfa," and its ridiculously overloaded bicycles that defied physical law, cured me of some Western illness: I stopped planning so meticulously, stopped trying to take responsibility for everything and let some things be, stopped trying to figure the limits of what was possible. It was lovely.

If we colonize the mental illnesses of people around the world, we may eliminate our own cures. We may eliminate the perspective that has to come with labeling anyone. We're endangering the species of preventive and ameliorative medicine that can come from cross-cultural encounters. It's the same as razing the rain forest without knowing whether one of its plants contain a cure for cancer.

I'm not sure what we can do about it. But I'm beginning to think anthropologists, sociologists and cultural studies students may soon become vital, as historians of diverse cultures that we need to carry on into the future, if only synthetically.

That's good news for me, I guess.