Ben Tour is a 28 years old Vancouver based artist. More of his illustrations along with a 2006 interview with him over at FecalFace.com
Used copies of this book can still be find online (e.g. AbeBooks).
 | Not content with the merely weird, the DSM-IV also attempts to claim dominion over the mundane. Current among the many symptoms of the deranged mind are bad writing (315.2, and its associated symptom, poor handwriting); coffee drinking, including coffee nerves (305.90), bad coffee nerves (292.89), inability to sleep after drinking too much coffee (292.89), and something that probably has something to do with coffee, though the therapist can’t put his finger on it (292.9); shyness (299.80), (also known as Asperger’s Disorder); sleepwalking (307.46); jet lag (307.45); snobbery (301.7, a subset of Antisocial Personality Disorder); and insomnia (307.42); to say nothing of tobacco smoking, which includes both getting hooked (305.10) and going cold turkey (292.0). You were out of your mind the last time you have a nightmare (307.47). Clumsiness is now a mental illness (315.4). So is playing video games (Malingering, V65.2). So is doing just about anything “vigorously.” So, under certain circumstances, is falling asleep at night. The foregoing list is neither random nor trivial, nor does it represent the sort of editorial oversight that occurs when, say, an otherwise reputable zoology text contains the claim that goats breathe through their ears. We are here confronted with a worldview where everything is a symptom and the predominant color is a shade of therapeutic gray. This has the advantage of making the therapist’s job both remarkably simple and remarkably lucrative. |
L.J. Davies is the author of A Meaningful Life (1971). Read more about it over at The New York Times.
| Hwabyeong or Hwabyung, literally “anger illness” or “fire illness”, is a Korean culture-bound somatization disorder, a mental illness. It manifests as one or more of a wide range of physical symptoms, in response to emotional disturbance, such as stress from troublesome interpersonal relationships or life crises. It most often occurs in females in their menopausal years. |
| The finding, published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that loneliness is not a character trait, as in “that person is such a loner,” but more of a state such as hunger, which evolved as a cue to motivate our ancestors to go find food. “We’re fundamentally a social species so we need others with whom we can cooperate and work,” Cacioppo said. As such, loneliness may have been a cue to look out for anyone who might ostracize you, he added. |
