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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. |
✖ Via Harpers Magazine: “The Encyclopedia of Insanity - A Psychiatric Handbook Lists a Madness for Everyone.” by Lawrence J. Davies, February 1997 [PDF] L.J. Davies is the author of A Meaningful Life (1971). Read more about it over at The New York Times. |
• Jun 03, 2010 link notes tagged:
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Perhaps a thorough investigation will reveal the “real” reasons for the murders. Perhaps Amy Bishop is mentally ill, or perhaps she is, quite simply, evil. |
✖ Via National Review Online: “Don’t Over-Generalize From the Huntsville Murders” by David French, Feb. 18, 2010 David French starts by arguing against what he believes to be an overstatement published in a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education website: “Academic life as a “petri dish for madness”? We may have a winner for overstatement of the year. At this point, we don’t even know if Amy Bishop was mentally ill. Nor do we know if academic life had anything to do with her killing spree.” On one hand, French is right : to suggest that academic life alone can explain Bishop’s behavior is to give way to much importance over this single factor while ignoring others. Though it’s true there has been at least one other similar incident (Valery Fabrikant) one needs to take into account multiple factors when trying to understand Bishop’s behavior (she killed here brother in 1986, was charged with assault on another woman in 2002, etc.) On the other hand, while French condemns what he sees as the “overstatement of the year”, he goes on suggesting that Bishop is perhaps quite simply evil… Looks like a self-contradictory argument. More importantly, it’s emblematic of what Dana L. Cloud calls a “therapeutic discourse” that is the “dislocation of social problems into a private, familial or psychological frame”. “Such discourse”, adds Cloud “emphasizes individual responsability for and the necessity of private rather than societal response to social problems.” (“Deranged Loners and Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973–2001” by Kristen E. Hoerl, Dana L. Cloud & Sharon E. Jarvis, Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 2, no 1, p. 84, March 2009). Dana L. Cloud’s book Control and Consolation in American Politics and Culture: Rhetorics of Therapy (London, Thousand Oaks: Sage Press, 1998) is available online free of charge. |
• Feb 22, 2010 link notes tagged:
communication
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