his sight goes red again

i have this homepage thing that gives me headlines, horoscopes, and comix in the morning. i come into work, check my voicemail, scan over my emails for anything urgent, make coffee and read this as a way to settle into my day. this morning i encountered an article in an online sanfrancisco paper extremely interesting, as it mirrors a)some of my own uneasiness with our current medical system and b)the sarcastic journalistic writing style i aspire to:

But you do not have to believe me. You merely need to glance at the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known to devotees as DSM-IV), the deeply creepy bible of the psychiatric profession.

The DSM, it is like a tumor. It is like a Christian megachurch. And while it has been, I'm sure, hugely helpful and necessary to many, it is churning and growing and seething all the time, swallowing all of humanity in its vortex of new and vaguely quantifiable suffering. To read any part of it is to come away convinced you suffer from at least a dozen happy disorders.

Which is just another way of saying we are aswim in a bizarre and surreal system, one in which shiny good-hearted doctors conduct well-funded studies and then write the descriptions of the resultant disorder they invariably find (and they always, always find something), then turn around and make a nice payment on their sweet new Mercedes SL with the money they made from the pharmaceutical company that paid them to identify the new disorder for which the pharmco can now invent fun, toxic, new behavior-modifying drugs to treat. See? Everybody's happy.

I am now enjoying this trend. Surely, the next major update of the DSM, in 2011, will include all manner of new conditions, including IED. But perhaps it can also include other common afflictions of the modern world.

Let us now suggest: Rumsfeld Hope/Joy Dysplasia, or Oozing Coulter Panic Arrhythmia, or Spasmodic Ben Stiller Recoil. Let us offer up, say, Sudden Leather-Whiffing Swoon Syndrome, or Fingerling Potato Polycystic Neuroplasmia, or Diastrophic Cervical Frat Boy Rejection Clampdown. Then there's always Hyperkinetic Eyeball Flutter Related to Excessive Images of Dead Innocent Iraqis (HEFREIDII).

GOP Colon Self-Knotting Disease. Jingoism Synapse Slaughter. Jesus Did Not Say That Repetitive Exclamation Fatigue. Vatican-Induced Blood-Boiling Soul Trauma. Lynne Cheney.

Why not define some of your own? Submit them to the DSM-V, laugh and watch your own tendency toward IED drop dramatically. Hell, who needs Prozac?
- Mark Morford

read the whole article here.