Thank You for What the Doctor Dis-Ordered
Is it just me, or does every human behavior find it’s way into a Disorder Classification these days?
We invent and toss around terms to describe behaviors, and compart-mental-ize feelings that produce behaviors, to a degree that we can no longer express an emotion, a habit, or a thought, without finding a picture of ourselves in the big clinical handbook of Diagnosis.
Any self reflective person can easily discover familiar symptoms in the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders.
But the degree of the symptom is sometimes ambiguous.
You got your mental disorders, your behavioral disorders, your emotional disorders, your social disorders, and your thought disorders.
You got your attention disorders, your avoidant disorders, your personality disorders, and your dependancy disorders.
We live in a dis-ordered world.
I guess we are trying to order it by applying definitions to unpredictable humans.
Classification puts order in our lives, huh?
We like categories.
We like a good filing system so we can put our fellow persons into the right folders, in order, in our social cabinets.
It keeps us arranged in a system where it is easy for pharmaceutical companies to decide what drug to advertise most.
And it helps doctors order prescriptions to put us back in order.
I hope I’m not out of order here, but I think we’re getting carried away.
LEA KELLEY SAYING THANK YOU FOR... 
Pharmaceutical cartels provide the “higher education” that the “doctors” learn…scary. I agree w/you Lea, it’s insane!
I think you’re over-analyzing the situation. Clearly you have some Obsessive Compulsive Disorder of some kind.
It is definitely gone overboard! Disorders are used, now, as legal excuses for committing horrific crimes and get sentenced to a lesser degree or not at all depending on the situation! Outrageous!
Another of life’s two-edged swords. Imagine, just for example, if Howard Hughes and been properly diagnosed-treated-medicated how much less of a living hell his life would have been?
Phamas capitalizing on this new craze is one problem, but what really gets on my nerves the most is that everyone feels that with that manual in their hand they are qualified to diagnose everyone from the checker at the store, to someone they see on TV for a few minutes every week.
Once again, I find myself somewhere in the middle on this one. Grateful for the drugs and therapies that have helped so many people who might have just been locked away, or killed themselves, or worse–others. Disgusted with exactly what you describe above.
nice blog! 🙂
This needed to be said. Thanks. Oh, I’m thanking you!