Biology comes to mind. Because we know that certain medications act on our brains in such a way as to reduce some of the symptoms of mental illness. So, if medication “fixes” something, then that something must be broken.
This is what I call the back door diagnosis. Because we really can’t prove mental illness exits beyond the fact that some of us, maybe a lot of us, are better because of the medicine. Which brings me to the title of this little tome. I don’t intend to answer the question just so you know.
Every day millions of people are diagnosed with mental illness. The book of diagnosis’s for mental illness is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. According to Wikipedia, it provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders. It is used in the United States and in varying degrees around the world, by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and policymakers. In other words, it helps doctors, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies categorize all the crazies out there into more manageable groups- like chunking.
Recently, I had reason to be with about twenty-some-odd twenty- and thirty-somethings (I’m a 50-something, at the time of this writing). In the evening, some of us tended to congregate at the hotel pool and a light-hearted game of “I take more medications than you do,” and “What’s My Diagnosis?” would occur. A kind of spontaneous “What’s my Line?” for the millennium set.
But what I wonder about in all this game playing of who takes what, is have we forgotten that life is difficult and painful for everyone and the human, the decent thing to do is to try to rise above it and reach out a hand to the next guy, just for a moment to say, yeah, I feel that way too sometimes?
Odds, Ends, Beginnings. 