{bazima.com}

Thanks to my first post-college New York job in the late nineties as an intake person for a passive-aggressive, Jewish hippie social worker who would stand over my desk combing her long scraggly hair, which clearly had not been cut since Woodstock, I was introduced to the endless wonders of the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I worked for a two-person office at a large social services agency that could not have cared less about our "department." We were the only people in the building who were not given computers. It was a throwaway employment situation, one that served only to allow me to live life after college in the real world and make it a living hell every day. Congratulations, Graduate!

I sat at my desk in front of a word processor in a silent, windowless hallway outside of the hippie social worker's office. When a new call came in, which was rare, I had to label the caller with a Mental Problem, based on a few scripted questions, my zero expertise, and by using the overwhelming gloom in the DSM. (To make matters worse, it was also suggested that I try to determine the ethnicity of the caller, but without actually asking them about their ethnic background. My boss, the M.S.W., assured me, "Usually, you can just tell." )

I don't think I need to tell you that it wasn't long before I had diagnosed myself with 70% of the mental illnesses listed in the DSM. You read the description of a disorder and you shrug it off. Then you read the symptoms associated with the disorder, and you're like, "Oh, shit." You have everything.

Sometimes I think that headcleaners want to turn everything into an official diagnosis, and in some cases I often wonder which came first - the declaration of the disorder as a major problem in need of treatment or thousands of people certain that they have it. Which is not to say the problem isn't real, just that if I constantly feel fidgety every time I sit down, for example, am I just overly un-still because of anxiety due to unresolved stuff I need to figure out how to figure out, or do I take TV commercial-prescribed meds and find a national network of fidgety people, start a movement, and apply for disability. In any event, if I didn't think I had everything a decade ago—before email everywhere, and texting, and YouTube, and Wikipedia, and Facebook, and Flickr, and blogging (when I blogged more), and (do not even get me started on) Scrabulous and Surf The Channel —I certainly do now. A shrink in PDX wants to add internet addiction to the (un)healthy mix.

I miss the days when everyone was worried about herpes of the mouth and too much time spent playing Space Invaders at the arcade. Question: What about the people whose livelihood depends on the internets? Question: Will they have online support groups for this?