ABC Radio National

All In The Mind





Date/Time 18 Mar 2014 7:47:40am
Excellent radio which stimulated my imagination:
Made me try to imagine how it might feel to be told by a health professional whom you have met and would probably trust that you have a disease or a condition or a syndrome etc which has a particular name and symptoms listed in that health professional's "Bible".
And of course imagining thet is easy: I've had comparable experinces, though luckily for me the conditions have included the relatively trivial, like bronchitis and broken bones. The diagnosis helps you to make sense of your symptoms in important ways and always comes from a source that is endorsed as trustworthy and accurate and so on.
And even though it's bad news to be sick, Thomas the Aspy is at least obviously benefitting psychologically from being able to identity with a named, "legitimate" group of fellow sufferers, however problematic their chances of a "cure"...and I'm really starting to have to engage imaginitive muscle now, but I will press on:

Then, how would I feel if that prized diagnosis ceased to exist, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, because the relevant Bible had been revised and a new edition of it had "come in"? Based on decisions made by a group of health professionals I will certainly never meet who are far away in a different country.

The only way I can imagine that is to analogise, and since the term "Bible" is already in play, here goes:
Say I am an average Joan Bloggs Christian who sources a big chunk of how I see myself from, say, the New Testament. And then in the course of a revision the verses that I see as key to understnding myself aren't just excised from the new edition but also are now officially false according to the same people, who I do not personally know at all, who previously promulgated them as true.
There are of course problems with the analogy.
But it does serve its only purpose: to help me imagine how Thomas and his fellow "Aspys" may be feeling as DSM-V becomes accepted and other people begin to forget that the diagnosis informing so much of their self-understanding ever even existed.

But it really defies my imagination, this additional little load of anguish they are all going to have to endure.
