DSM-BS

Maybe Tom and L. Ron are right about this psychiatry racket.

My favorite proposed diagnosis:

God Complex

Antecedents: Creating the known universe.

Symptoms: Thinking you own the place. Snooping on people's private conversations even when not addressed through prayer. Fickle support for Steinbrenner's Evil Empire during playoffs. Sufferers will sometimes exist just to spite Christopher Hitchens.

Notes: Those with long beards, devout followers, and immortality are often misdiagnosed. Inquire about bandmates. See: ZZ Top Complex.

From the cheap jokes file

From Dr. Deb's post about Dissociative Identity Disorder (commonly called Multiple Personality Disorder):

There are no precise numbers on how many people experience [Dissociative Identity Disorder]. Many who have the disorder don't seek treatment for fear that they will not be believed. But Stanford University psychiatrist Dr. David Spiegel - who has been studying this disorder for over three decades - estimates that DID affects about 1 percent of the population.

It all depends on how many times you count each case.

sorry

The seven faces of me

The revelation of Herschel Walker's multiple personality disorder is bound to be discussed by scads of Monday-morning psychiatrists (I could have used 'arm-chair psychiatrists' but that's not a great differentiation is it?)

The phonologist in me says - His personalities are in complementary distribution.

The historical linguist in me says - I wonder if I can figure out what his parents' personalities were.

The semanticist in me says - Are are his personalities ±Herschel? Is 'Herschel' the prototype of his identity?

The syntactician in me says - This looks like a substitution test for constituency.

The experimental linguist in me says - His judgments of his personalities aren't reliable. I need to use various methods to elicit responses from a large enough group before I decide which personalities are possible.

And the prescriptivist in me will take this opportunity to say - Everybody is saying that he has schizophrenia but that's an incorrect use of the term. Schizophrenia is a different type of disorder distinct from dissociative identity disorder, which is included in the category of general dissociative disorders. So stop misusing the term unless you want to show that you have no education or training in mental disorders.

And "I" say - I actually agree with my prescriptivist-self on this one.