"Diagnostic Drift"

AOL gets my email, and when I go to it to see what's new , there is always some  headline to scare or amuse. On four hours of sleep, one is easily amused, or easily peeved, and AOL is always reliable.
.


"Cursing Baby Doll Outrages Parents" is one of today's stories. This might be funny, but I will never read it so I will never know. Instead I see another headline asking "Is it Borderline Personality Disorder?"

Well, is it? Big M.D., Big Psych, and Big Pharma hope so. People with BPD must be treated, declares the article. With mood-stabilizers, anti-psychotics,  and anti-depressants.

And who might these sick people be? "People with borderline personality disorder can quickly swing from having intense love for someone to suddenly becoming very angry and hating that loved one".

This sounds like marriage to me, so let us include all the wedded. It sounds like the mother of a defiant 14 year old girl, and the football fan who throws his shoe at the dog when it blocks his view of the last play of  the Tennessee- Florida game.

A round of anti-psychotics for each and every one.

Big Psych says there are other symptoms. "Spending money carelessly". Here go the Men in White Coats- out to fill their vans with Black Friday shoppers fighting each other to get into Target.

"Eating Binges". Now we have diagnosed anyone who sits down to Thanksgiving dinner, or orders a second burrito .

"Over drinking" There go all the Winter Carnival revelers stumbling back to Fraternity Row across the Hanover Green.

"Being afraid of being alone". Now we have to figure out the anti-depressant dose for infants and toddlers-

"Feeling empty inside."  Existential pain that has plagued man and woman since Eden. That means the whole doubting, suffering, wondering human race. We are all going to the Bad Mood Gulag together.

And who else will be joining us there?. Jesus felt forsaken on the cross. Job confronted silence and emptiness until God spoke to him out of the whirlwind.

Job must have been hallucinating. Big Psych says so.