Last Thursday, just when I was about to align myself with the Editorial Board’s defense against elder generations’ grumblings about the lay of the 21st century land, I stumbled upon a preview of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Now, I’m standing with our Golden Folks on their side of the issue, although their stance in this matter has less to do with our generation’s intelligence and more to do with society’s ever-flaccidifying grit.
Case in point: Sluggish Cognitive Tempo Disorder, symptoms of which include sluggishness, passiveness and dreaminess. Yes, we have officially diagnosed laziness, and it’s endemic. Based on those symptoms, I’m going out on a limb and guessing the lifetime prevalence for SCTD is around, say, 100 percent for any and every population.
My initial reaction wasn’t so much absurdity-spurred rage as it was perplexing disappointment: This disorder has already been identified; it’s called the “itis.” Anyone who has survived the gastronomic onslaught of Thanksgiving dinner has experienced the mind-numbing, motor function-inhibiting, couch-relegating symptoms of this disorder. In fact, I’m currently typing with one finger, half-conscious, in the midst of a dairy-induced near-coma after having powered through a pint of Karamel Sutra ice cream topped with Cheez-Its.
Among the other new revisions to the manual, some gems include Intermittent Explosive Disorder, which is not in fact the reason for Depends, but rather a clinical euphemism for “losing it;” hypersexuality, which is basically making the fulfillment of one’s sexual fantasies or urges the focal point of one’s life; absexuality, which can be described as being turned on by getting turned off (mull that one over for a while); and Cannabis Withdrawal, the symptoms of which are always chronic (because it’s weed).
It’s commonplace to hear the DSM referred to as the psychiatrist’s Bible, which I’ve thought to be too cutesy of a description for my tastes in the past. However, in light of some of these frivolous proposals, it might be appropriate, as it has adopted the same kind of blindly promising, duct-tape-solution type of reasoning usually reserved for Sundays (or Saturdays or Fridays).
The DSM is exposed to the same subjective formulation, interpretation and application as its colloquial namesake. The notion that the complexities of mental dysfunction (and even concepts of normality vs. abnormality) cannot only be compartmentalized, but done so with interwoven characteristics that can function as much to mislead as reveal, is substantiation of people’s desire to succinctly explain the insoluble being at odds with their inability to do so. No matter how much revision, tweaking or overhauling is done to the DSM, it can by no means produce an objective insight into the human condition, as the function the manual is limited to, descriptive assessment, fundamentally excludes the cause of the problem.
In this very way, the manual, like the books it’s associated with, can be considered as much a testament to our collective ignorance as anything else. Such an account is not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed it has been instrumental in providing effective treatment to many, but from such success emerges our label-happy, pill-reverent zeitgeist, which is as precarious as medication is efficacious.
With our solutions so concise as to be measured by the milligram and so narrow as to miss the mark and simply dull the iniquities, it’s not all that unlike good old fashioned repression, except now we’ve taken all the work out of it. So, the next time you hit snooze instead of going to class, don’t pass the buck to SCTD. As Grandpa might say, you’re just f-ing lazy.
