Category: military

In most branches of medicine, illnesses are things that doctors have encountered over the millenia, tried to understand, and sometimes learned to treat. In psychiatry, illnesses are decided by committees. No matter how bad you feel, you can't have one unless you meet the requirements the committees have established.

I'm talking, of course, about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You might think you're depressed, but if you don't meet the criteria in the manual, nobody else will think so--including, notably, your physician and your insurance company.

I could go on--I've written about this cookbook-recipe approach to medicine before, and I always enjoy it. But I learned something today that I didn...