_ In the final week of January, 2011, I read an article in the New York Times titled, “Grief Could Join List of Disorders.”  It said:

In a bitter skirmish over the definition of depression, a new report contends that a proposed change to the diagnosis would characterize grieving as a disorder and greatly increase the number of people treated for it.

That made me think: what other normal shit is now, like, fuckin’ crazy, bro!?  So I came up with a list of other revised definitions for common disorders.  The results:  Eh.


First problem:  that Times quote is long, yet it’s still not thorough enough to set up my game.  The right quote should also say that this proposed change would appear in the new (fifth) edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the book-to-beat in professional psychiatric diagnosis.  Rather than try to squeeze in that long-ass title, I’d rather just toss “the D.S.M.” in brackets somewhere and assume that you—a savvy reader of broad interests now doing post-doctoral work at one of Switzerland’s finer particle accelerators—are familiar with the acronym.