The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

By Anne Fadiman
...see how the Hmong stacked up: Most depressed. Most psychosocially dysfunctional. Most likely to be severely in need of mental health treatment. Least educated. Least literate. Smallest percentage in labor force. Most likely to cite fear as a reason for immigration and least likely to cite a better life. - pg. 203

Most white families would institutionalize her in a second. - pg. 214

The doctors are very very knowledgeable, your high doctors, your best doctors, but maybe they made a mistake by giving her the wrong medicine and they made her hurt like this. If it was a dab that made Lia sick like this in Laos, we would know how to go to the forest and get herbs to fix her and maybe she could be able to speak. But this happened here in the United States, and Americans have done this to her, and our medicine cannot fix that -Foua, pg 258 It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of her infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I was unsure which had hurt her family more. ...you need to understand that as powerful an influence as the culture of the Hmong patient and her family is on this case, the culture of biomedicine is equally powerful. If you cant see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone elses culture? -Foua, pg 311