“Categories of Mishegas” and Other Medical Craziness

A new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is coming out, the fifth such.

The DSM gives your “mental health provider” a code for your “adjustment disorder” or whatever, so that he or she may bill your insurance carrier, and if he or she is an MD, prescribe suitable psychotropic drugs.

The new version continues the trend of medicalizing everything. If you don’t feel happy happy happy all the time, then you need drugs and therapy. Some people disagree, but they are standing in front of a pharmaceutical bulldozer. (Sell more drugs! Sell more drugs!)

At least there is a Yiddishkeit parody of the whole mess:

Mishegas Minor: This category refers to most of us most of the time. We’re all a little mishugah, right? For example, a young woman who worries because the young man she is engaged to is more excited by a New York Knicks victory than oral sex.

Yes, we’re all a little mishugah, but once you have been diagnosed and coded, your civil, parental, and other rights start slowly to disappear because some social worker thinks you are “disordered.”

2 thoughts on ““Categories of Mishegas” and Other Medical Craziness

  1. Maybe one of the afflictions of modern living involves trying to put every thing into too strict an order? So if somebody’s not arrayed as part of the order, they must be compelled into the array.

    And for reasons unknown to me, my immediate responseto the DSM Manual is–A profusion of PRIMARY COLORS in the mindscape!!!

  2. The other day, while listening to my car radio, I learned of an exciting breakthrough. Apparently medical science has discovered that if you work rotating shifts, over time you can develop problems with sleeping at the end of your workday and remaining alert while on the job. This bit of news from the files of Captain Obvious was followed by the reassurance that it’s a medical disorder and there is a drug to fix it. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that the list of side effects is as long as the wingspan of a California Condor and most of them are WAY worse than anything coffee can do to you.

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