Down with the sickness


A while back I told a friend of mine who is studying for her masters in clinical psychology that common people should not have access to the Diagnostic-Statistical Manual (DSM) because we are all hypochondriacs and we would start diagnosing ourselves with random, stupid shit that we didn't have. Now a friend of mine (who is more introspective than most, granted) has diagnosed himself with something called "histrionic disorder" based on information he got in a book about Borderline Personality Disorder (which he has diagnosed two ex-girlfriends of his with, by the way.) Now, is it just me, or does "histrionic disorder" seem to hail back to the days of Victorian psychology, where women who were upset with their husbands were diagnosed with "hysteria" and given laudanum to combat it?
I suppose my issue with all of this is that there is a sort of general feeling of ill over the better part of the world, and if everyone's feeling it, it can't really be sickness, can it? I think that a combination of a fucked up society (see my last post) with an obsessive need to know that everyone falls within a certain standard deviation, contributes to the idea that we're all sick. It seems to me that not too long ago, things such as fetishes were relatively rare. Now everyone's got one, and you can't find a date if you tell someone you don't have a kink, because they think you're lying. Small talk has come to include a frank discussion of how and why you are fucked in the head, and what you're doing to deal with it. Or rather, what you're taking to deal with it.

Of course, in the midwest, they don't talk about it, they just depress themselves with liquor and burn their brains with meth and beat the shit out of people who dare to act differently. I nearly cried the other night, watching the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, not because of what the flower children lost, but because of what they have since made unavailable to us. They are the ones shipping jobs overseas now, and taking our future from us. They let the world get fucked up, and are leaving it up to us to fix it, while they tell us that we're crazy.