Oh, dear. Let’s not go into the pop-psy favourite pastime of diagnosing oneself with a variety of psychiatric disorders. Or, even better, diagnosing various people on the ’net.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
Oh, dear. Let’s not go into the pop-psy favourite pastime of diagnosing oneself with a variety of psychiatric disorders. Or, even better, diagnosing various people on the ’net.
While I share the sentiment, recognizing that their are multiple psychological issues that lead to lower social skills is an improvement over simply thinking of everything as autism.
Fair point, but actually I think these are disorders only in the extreme case, and simply personality types in more moderate cases. I think e.g. most poets had to be a bit schizoid.
Oh, dear. Let’s not go into the pop-psy favourite pastime of diagnosing oneself with a variety of psychiatric disorders. Or, even better, diagnosing various people on the ’net.
(Three men in a boat)
While I share the sentiment, recognizing that their are multiple psychological issues that lead to lower social skills is an improvement over simply thinking of everything as autism.
a.k.a. Medical student syndrome
Fair point, but actually I think these are disorders only in the extreme case, and simply personality types in more moderate cases. I think e.g. most poets had to be a bit schizoid.