... I am a genuine neurotic. I diagnosed myself after a trip to the Strangers Rest Public Library, where I discovered my troubled self in a decrepit copy of the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” (Apparently I am not the only person in Strangers Rest who is engaging in do-it-yourself psychoanalysis.)
Features of Dream Anxiety Disorder (aka Nightmare Disorder) include:
• Frequent association with artistic ability.
• Personality patterns of distrustfulness, alienation, estrangement and over-sensitivity.
• Schizoid or borderline personality traits.
Does that not sound like me? By no means is Dream Anxiety Disorder my only mental condition, either. Turns out I have various features from eight to 10 other recognized psychiatric conditions. I don’t have enough features in any one disorder to meet the criteria for a full diagnosis. But if you put them all together they add up to a whole new condition, which I call Post-Modern Prophet Disorder (aka “Sheldon’s Syndrome”). I will be sending the American Psychiatric Association a letter requesting that this newly identified illness be added to the next edition of the DSM.
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DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR POST MODERN PROPHET DISORDER
A. Characteristic symptoms: Four (or more) of the following, each present for a significant portion of time during a 1-month period (or less if successfully treated or the world comes to an end):
• Detachment from subject’s own mental processes or body, as if an outside observer.
• Feeling like an automaton or as if in a dream.
• Restlessness, vigilance and scanning.
• Feeling keyed up, on edge.
• Exaggerated startle response.
• Difficulty concentrating or “mind going blank” because of anxiety.
• Irritability.
• Psychomotor agitation expressed in pacing or as an inability to sit still.
• Recurrent thoughts of death, often accompanied by the belief that subject or others would be better off dead.
• Themes of personal inadequacy, guilt, deserved punishment and death.
• Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt, which may be delusional.
• Diminished ability to think or indecisiveness.
B. Obsessional dysfunction: For a significant portion of the time since the onset of the disturbance, experiences obsessions which are recurrent and include persistent ideas, thoughts, impulses or images that are intrusive and senseless (ex: having recurring blasphemous thoughts) and subject attempts to ignore or suppress with another thought or action. These obsessions are a product of subject’s own mind and are not related to guilty thoughts in the presence of a major depression.
C. Depressive Episode: Accompanied by low energy and fatigue, low self-esteem, poor concentration and feelings of hopelessness.
D. Dream-based alien dysfunction: Dreams of being a robot or an extraterrestrial or dead. (Example, a dream by Mark Sheldon from the night of June 5/6, 2005: I am renting a house, which I share with a roommate. On my way to work, crossing the Hulen Street bridge. Heavy fog. I just make out cars sliding, colliding ahead. I put on the brakes, but I can’t see anything. I begin honking the horn so other cars will know I am here. Then all goes white, lost in total fog. Next I find myself inexplicably standing outside the garage of my rented house. I punch in the access code, and the automatic garage door rises. My roommate’s car is here, but not mine. Inside the house, a party is under way. Some of my relatives are here. So are some friends. Someone – maybe my roommate – explains what has occurred: I am actually a carbon copy of the original Mark Sheldon, who was killed on the bridge in the fog. I don’t feel like a copy; however, that is because I have all of the memories of the original. I am an exact copy. Then my roommate and I look outside. We realize somehow that all of the cars are gone now. A world without cars. Could this be a world of carbon copies, a world without original people? So we walk outside, look at the next door neighbor’s home. They have a swimming pool, but it’s in the front yard. And on the front walk next to the pool is a three-wheeled, robotic pool cleaner. This is a troubling sight, for I see the robot as part of a vast conspiracy to eliminate the original people of the world and replace them with carbon copies. I persuade my roommate to help me flip this robot onto its head. We run away, and I am laughing. Even when I see that the homeowners are watching me through the picture window, I am still laughing. But my roommate doesn’t find it so funny. He tells me this is bad. We’ll have to pay for the damages.)
E. Anxiety: Accompanied by irritability, brooding or obsessive rumination.
F. Persecutory delusions: Accompanied by sense of a moral transgression or some personal inadequacy.
G. Flight of ideas: Accompanied by subjective experience that thoughts are racing.
H. Distractibility: Attention is too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli.
I. Lability: Rapid shifts to anger or depression.
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