Author’s note: Before reading the novel excerpt below, be sure to check out the fascinatingly insightful comments regarding Sheldon’s Syndrome at http://www.journalfen.net/community/otf_wank/611766.html#comments A blogger named “issendai” writes: “My personal favorite is the section of his web site where he [Mark Leach] presents a mental disorder based on himself for inclusion in the DSMV-III.” Another 17 bloggers added their own supporting messages agreeing with issendai’s post and generally reveling in the idea of yours truly as a certifiable nut job. Their comments might have been even more fascinating and insightful had any of them understood the difference between fiction and real life. Sheldon’s Syndrome is named after Mark Sheldon, the protagonist of a novel titled “Marienbad My Love” and written by Mark Leach. In other words, Mark Leach is a real person who invented Mark Sheldon, a fictional person who lives in a crazy fictional universe populated by terminally irrrational people who are a lot like some of the posters at journalfen.net. Enjoy the excerpt.
Update: A year later, and the insightful comments continue. This one was posted on Nov. 28, 2009: "I also like that his entry on Sheldon's Syndrome links back to otf-wank. Remember, we're the irrational ones." And so it goes. In the upside down world of the blogosphere, it is apparently rational to believe that the author and the protagonist of a novel are the same person. Who am I to fight it? In honor of this new merger of fiction and reality, I am renaming the protagonist "Mark Leach." Now I will live on a fictional island; he will work in a real office building in Fort Worth, Texas. I'll be posting an updated ebook sometime in the first quarter of 2010.
... 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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