Not especially outgoing? Prefer a day of fly-fishing to an afternoon of basket-foot-base-ball? That's a mental illness. There's a pill for that.
In the last thirty years, many normal conditions of the human experience have been relabeled. "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” - which is essentially the "bible" of "psychiatry" and which is routinely consulted by insurance companies, courts, prisons and schools as well as by physicians and mental health workers - has added around 200 "mental disorders" to its listings since 1968.
Curiously, Liberalism is not among the entries, despite considerable evidence that argues in favor of listing.
In examining the American Psychiatric Association archives, Lane -- who argues that psychiatry is using drugs with poor track records to treat growing numbers of normal human emotions -- even came across a proposal to establish “chronic complaint disorder,” in which people moan about the weather, taxes or the previous night's racetrack results.
“It might be funny,” he says, save for the fact that the DSM's next edition, due to be completed in 2012, is likely to establish new categories for apathy, compulsive buying, Internet addiction, binge-eating and compulsive sexual behavior. Don't look for road rage, however. It's already in the DSM, under intermittent explosive disorder.
Of course, you don't need to take medication for "road rage" - you just need to get over yourself and grow up a bit. Most of these "disorders" are really not due to biological issues at all. They are simply a by-product of shrinks and wannabes, experimenting upon kids. The constant focus upon "self-esteem" has produced, for the most part, a generation of weak NARCCISTS who feel genuinely put-upon if they don't receive praise for things like showing up at the workplace on time. They're irritating as hell, and as dumb as a box of rocks. You brought them into the world, but you didn't prepare them for the world. Well-intentioned though it may have been, all you've accomplished has fallen into the "negative" column.
The answer isn't pills.
