Reporting From Canada, #1: Have Americans Turned Into Zombies?

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

As usual, my wife and I were planning our annual summer trip to Canada, focusing on going to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the Shaw Festival. However, this time we were concerned about how we might be greeted as Americans, what with the tariff conflict and threats of making Canada our 51st state. We even imagined that our car would be at risk for being vandalized with its US license plate.

As an aside, it always feels imperialistic to me that we claim to be the Americans, while it seems that Canadians could make an equal claim for that, as we are already both considered to be part of North America, and specifically we are the United States of America.

So far, no problems. No one has mentioned that issue. Even when I brought it up, it was ignored. No real surprise, as Canadians in general are so polite, though there could be other reasons for the silence.

Maybe there has been 1 exception. We were about to hear a classical new music piece titled “Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine,” based on the steampunk novel Boneshaker (the Clockwork Century #1). In the verbal introduction to the piece, it was said to be based on the story of Dr Blue trying to reach gold in Alaska during the Civil War, but his new drilling invention not only fails, but caused the earth to collapse, and Americans were turned into zombies! Zombie Americans? Was that so in the story or a veiled reference by the presenter to present day America, I wondered?

After all, it seems like many of us are now zombie-like, cultishly emerging in a daze from both sides of the political spectrum. I tried to find out more about the novel’s story and, indeed, it mentioned that blocks of Seattle were destroyed. Is that enough to justify referencing “Americans”?

I also recalled hearing about zombies not only in many other stories, but also in psychiatry. It is a culture-bound syndrome, especially for some traditional Haitians. It consists of the belief that homeless individuals and those with mental illnesses are thought to be returned lost loved ones. In the DSM-5, culture-bound syndromes have been replaced with “cultural concepts of distress.”

Whether as a culture-bound syndrome requiring cultural humility to treat, or a metaphor for how many of us are walking around in a traumatized daze needing a creative political response, zombies hard to treat, but we must try.

The reports from Canada will continue in upcoming columns.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.