El trastorno conocido como "la teta asustada" ha sido estudiado por la antropóloga de Harvad U, Kimberly Theidon. A continuación una reseña al libro donde explica sus teorías.
Fragmento de reseña del libro Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru by Kimberly Theidon Pennsylvania, 461 pp, £49.00, November 2012, ISBN 978 0 8122 4450 2
"After the war ended, Ayacucho experienced an invasion by well-meaning NGOs. Although Theidon collaborated with a number of them, she is caustic about what she calls ‘the trauma industry’. She writes of the ‘enormous market for … trauma experts deployed to postwar countries to detect symptoms of PTSD via the use of “culturally sensitive” questionnaires.’ Her complaint is that the trauma experts don’t listen to the people they set out to help and impose a set of values that have more to do with their own priorities than local needs. At times Theidon found the NGO workers explicitly racist. On one occasion, she went to Lima to meet the head of a prominent NGO who explained to her that the indigenous population had already forgotten the violence. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we are capable of abstract thought. That’s why we have suffered so much. But they only think in a concrete way – they only think about their daily food and their animals. They don’t think beyond that. That’s why they haven’t suffered the way we have. They aren’t capable of it.’
There were also examples of a more subtle but more pervasive racism. At a meeting of the mental health team in Lima, Theidon gave a presentation in which she mentioned a variety of postwar afflictions she had documented in her interviews with indigenous Peruvians. These included, among others, what Quechua-speakers refer to as llakis, or painful thoughts affecting them both intellectually and emotionally; la teta asustada (‘the frightened breast’), whereby people believe slow-wittedness or even epilepsy can be transmitted to a baby; and susto, a condition of extreme fright. Her presentation was followed by an awkward silence. Eventually, a colleague told her that, with the exception of susto, no one had heard of any of these conditions. Theidon’s concern, as she puts it, is that when Western categories become ‘normative’, they have a tendency to reduce ‘other theories (generally called “beliefs and customs”) to little more than local deviations of a universal truth’."
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