The attempt to catalog all the ways that Americans can go crazy dates at least to 1840, when the Census included a question on “idiocy/insanity.” From those two simple categories, we now have more than 300 separate disorders; they are listed in a 943-page book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM for short.
Tag Archives: diagnostic
Diagnostics: How We Get Labeled
Pardon the personal question, but have you ever had a sexual fantasy involving the use of a nonliving object–Anna Kournikova’s tennis outfit, say, or Tom Cruise’s Risky Business skivvies?
Bad to the Bone
To their victims they seemed pretty normal at first, even admirable.
Orthorexia: Can Healthy Eating Be Labeled a Disorder?
Kristie Rutzel was in high school when she began adhering precisely to the government food pyramids.
Why Abdominal Pain Is Such a Headache for ER Doctors
There it was, glowing on the computer screen next to each patient’s name, and repeated again, up on the emergency-department tracking board: “Abd Pn,” the abbreviation for abdominal pain.
Internet addiction linked to ADHD, depression in teens
Some children and teens are more likely than their peers to become addicted to the Internet, and a new study suggests it’s more likely to happen if kids are depressed, hostile, or have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or social phobia.