A group of academics is training to be lead marshals in tomorrow’s graduation ceremony. John the marketing specialist explains what the procedure is (did you know this is what marketing specialists did in universities? I didn’t either.)
The procedure is long and complicated.

“Will I have to talk to anybody during the ceremony?” an academic from the School of Engineering asks in a haunted voice.

“What do you mean?” the marketing specialist asks.

“As long as I don’t have to talk to anybody, I can do it,” the academic explains.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“Oh well, then I’m fine,” the academic beams.

You have to be one of us to realize how often we ask ourselves this very question.

My sister suggested I published this riddle based on a completely real story. N. guessed the answer before I finished telling it.

“Oh, I’ve had the most horrible day,” my sister says. “One of my employees quit her job today. And the problem is not that she quit as much as why she quit and what she is planning to do after quitting. I would have preferred she left the company for any other reason than this. ANY other reason.”

When she told me the reason, I agreed with her assessment completely.

Question: why did my sister’s employee quit?

DSM-5 continues to cater to lazy consumerists in thrall to pharmaceutical companies and now pathologizes every emotional state and every aspect of being human:

It is a peculiar and reductive logic about the nature of being human, this idea that grief – or stress, or bingeing on pie – merits medical intervention. And it is a logic that pervades the DSM revisions, which is why the manual is proving wildly controversial on the eve of its unveiling.

Feel anything? There is a pill for that!

I can’t stop laughing at the naive folks who keep blabbing earnestly about the “stigma” against psychotropic medication. What stigma? It is now hugely fashionable to carry a bunch of completely invented “disorders” that need constant medication:

This is the overriding concern of mental health professionals who oppose the DSM-5. As the manual grows (the original had 95 mental disorders; the last edition, 283), they argue that it lowers so many thresholds for being diagnosed with minor mental illnesses that life, itself, becomes treatable as disease.

Which is, of course, what the pharmaceutical companies have been praying for. As the Chair of McGill University’s Department of Psychiatry says,

“The problem lies not with this particular edition [of the DSM] but with the ideology behind it, which is that mental illness is neurobiological, and that psychosocial factors are not that important. This is the position that has taken over academic and clinical psychiatry over recent decades, and it has led to a serious overprescription of medications.”

The really hilarious thing about this is how deftly the pharmaceutical companies have managed to weave this consumerist obsession with psychotropic drugs into the Liberal discourse. Crowds of people seriously believe that they are being progressive when they defend the pharma companies’ right to stuff their junk down everybody’s throats.

At its margins, which is where many of us – the bereaved, the heartbroken, the flat-broke – reside, this is about what story we want to tell ourselves about who we are. Our narratives, as we live and ascribe meaning to them, are richer and more nuanced than what is laid out in a set of behavioural criteria, or a shrinking number of physical symptoms.

Ultimately, irrespective of what any whored-out psychiatrist or any stupid DSM will tell you, the choice is always yours. Will the narrative of your life be defined by you or by a marketing representative of a pill-pushing conglomerate? Remember, though, contrary to all the lies you have been told, the pills are not helping you. Just the opposite:

“To cite just one of many possible examples, between 2000 and 2009, the consumption of antidepressants in the OECD countries increased by an average of 60 per cent. No study has shown a decline in the prevalence of depression. Quite the contrary: The suicide rate in Iceland, a country that consumes the highest amount of antidepressants per capita, has been constant for the past 10 years.”

Anti-depressants and other psychotropic drugs are making you sicker and your drug lords richer.