Mental illness does not exist in a bubble, it is shaped by social, cultural, and historical context.  Sara Lewis published an article in 2013 about “Trauma and the Making of Flexible Minds in the Tibetan Exile Community” that spent over a year doing ethnographic research in Dharamsala, India, challenging the notion that trauma is a universal experience. The way that the Tibetan exile community views trauma and suffering, despite the hardship they have endured, is very different from Western ideas of trauma. They believe that “it is the way one interprets negative events that causes one to suffer. In other words, suffering comes from one’s own mind” (313). This is a reorientation towards suffering. Someone in the West might argue that this is victim-blaming or self-blame for what they have endured, but that is a misinterpretation of a very Buddhist idea. Instead, it is the belief that they have endured suffering, but that they can distance themselves from their suffering and with a flexible mind, transform the suffering into something more productive. Anthropologists critique the universalization of PTSD because of how new it is, and that PTSD can look very different in different parts of the world. In Dharamsala, the Tibetan Exile Community do not experience distress in the way the biomedical community conceives of it, and instead utilize their trauma as a political narrative to gain sympathy for their situation. Juxtaposed against this is their cultural and personal response to trauma: supporting one another “by encouraging a ‘letting go’ of negative emotions and distress” (316). They also interpreted their own trauma differently, finding that “witnessing the destruction of religious temples and being forced to denounce one’s religion was more upsetting than even imprisonment and torture” (317). Refugees and torture survivors were rarely in hospitals because they were not considered sick, and what they had endured was normal among this community. Ultimately, this means that the personal Tibetan experience of suffering is inconsistent with how they utilize that trauma to engage in human rights discourse. In the West we would consider the proper treatment to be therapy and to talk about how they feel, but this is antithetical to Tibetan notions of healthy coping. Their attitude works, however. Despite the high prevalence of traumatizing events they have endured, rates of psychological distress are extremely low in part thanks to coping activities such as the expectation of suffering, and the idea that the suffering they have endured are opportunities for purification from karmic seeds from their past lives. One mom even said that “it is good to have all this suffering now in this life because then it is purified and we won’t experience it much later” (324). While this carries an undertone of that “life circumstances are earned” (319) or deserved, it allows them to let go of their negative emotions. There is also the idea that talking about their problems is “something one does when one is young and not yet mature enough to cope” (320). Instead, they cultivate emotional maturity via Buddhist mind-training, which argues that they should “drive all blame into oneself”, something utilitarian for those seeking enlightenment (325). They do not want to burden their community, and think that dwelling on negative emotions leads to illnesses, and this is an idea I personally disagree with. On one hand, I understand the idea that dwelling on suffering only hurts the person involved, but on the other hand, I think that moving past suffering is much easier with the support of a community that you can talk to about your problems. Here we see how different PTSD is in a non-western community; under the DSM or biomedical practices, most of the people involved would not display any symptoms of PTSD, but their methods for overcoming suffering would be considered unhealthy despite leading to fulfilling lives for the people involved. It is a radically different mindset, that instead of worrying about the situation they are in, they modify how they think about the situation.