Ethan Watters – författare

On a personal quest to find out why he is still single well into his thirties, Ethan Watters goes searching for answers, and along the way makes an extraordinary discovery about his generation. Rather than settle down into traditional families, he and his friends have formed an Urban Tribe-an intricate community of young people who live and work together in various combinations, form regular rituals, and provide the same kind of support as an extended family. Across America and much of the rest of the world, tight-knit groups of friends are filling the increasingly wide gap between college and married life. While social commentators and parents wring their hands about the plight of 'never-marrieds', the real story is that these young adults are spending those years living happily in groups of their own making. In the process, they're changing the landscape of modern cities, as well as their own prospects for the future. As Watters sees it, the 'tribe years' represent less a failure to mate than a new kind of community, and a stage of personal development that makes later partnerships that much more mature and successful.

It is well-known that US culture is a dominant force and a world-wide phenomenon. But it is possible that its most troubling export has yet to be accounted for? America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories: it exports psychopharmaceuticals and categorises disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health. The outcome of these efforts is just now coming to light: it turns out that the US has not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- it has been changing the mental illnesses themselves.Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is the US: as Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses are introduced, they are is fact spreading the diseases and shaping, if not creating, the mental illnesses of our time.