Sunday, July 19, 2009

This American Life

It's a syndicated program on National Public Radio.

The topic is Pro Se. (People who defend themselves in court.) If the podcast link below works, prepare for a treat. The topic of the first segment is how easy it is to fake madness to avoid prison time. (I took notes.)

Then how impossible it is to prove you're normal.

I laughed until I cried. It's an indictment of Psychiatry.

DSM-IV-TR. It's the Psychiatrists manual. It lists every known mental disorder. The journalist in this hilarious piece reads it and diagnoses himself with 12 disorders including:

1. Disorder of Written of Expression (Poor Handwriting)
2. Arithmetic Learning Disorder (Cured if you get a calculator.)
3. Nightmare Disorder (When you dream people are chasing you.)

He didn't realize how unbelievably nuts he was. Listen to the link below, won't you? It's funny. Get through the first few minutes. It's worth it.

http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/385.mp3

4 comments:

Happy Hour...Somewhere said...

That was actually kind of a creepy story...nightmarish. Does that make me nuts if it haunts me? But even at 18 you recognized crazy people, it just makes you wonder how to help them. Too bad it is the Scientologist leading the charge on this story. They harassed the hell out of me when I was 18 or so; they were scary and seemed a little nuts.

It would be a nightmare trying to prove you are not nuts, that you are normal to people when you know they are looking at the world through the paradigm of diagnosing people, not at reality. But Tony may have been a psychopath. Great link.

SweetPeaSurry said...

I'm coming back to this one. I do like a good creepshow!

Charmaine said...

Happy Hour - It WAS creepy. You're right. But I'm not so sure about Tony. I was a psychiatric aid at 18. My uncles are Psychiatrists.

I saw what they did in working with them, basically drug folks. The whole time, not a SINGLE person ever got out. Not one.

I used to "make a case" for some patient being "normal". The following day in group therapy (wherein I was observing) my Uncle would push the kid's buttons and he'd get mad. The next day, the sucker was a zombie.

bigtumtums said...

Through search and surf I found your blog and it tickled my curiosity... I like how it came about... hehehe.

Re: this post... sorry I couldn't listen to the mp3... but I get somehow it talked about being normal... well, I was never normal... it's the crazy and the odd that makes news right?... though if things get creepy, it does need guidance.

I like what Happy Hour said about proving to people... it took me years to realize it ain't worth it.