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The insensitivity issue is never considered by the press or the media. It's only invoked to save politicians' or corporatists' necks. The construction of a diagnostic category is not, in itself, defamatory. How the descriptions and categorizations are used cause the problems, although categorization is demanded primarily to keep proper financial and medical records.
And if I was insensitive at all in my previous post, I apologize. The mockery may be yours, but you're responding rationally to the picture that is presented by the media. I hope I didn't come off sounding too harsh, because my real complaint is with the media, and I've been complaining about this for years ... decades. Not even writing to the media -- executives, newsreaders, reporters -- have have done a thing except result in maybe two appearances in the Letters to the Editors section. In that context, the media and their mouthpieces have no place complaining about "dumbing down". America is a literate society, and if we have become dumb, the primary source of written information -- the press -- should take some of the blame for its own shoddy treatment of the topic (science) and audience alike.
Except for an occasional story about space exploration, the media never give the facts on scientific issues. When you hear people saying, "last week, they told us that drinking liquid uranium would give us cancer; this week, they're saying it's good for us!", that's what's going on. For example, nicotine was recently found to have therapeutic benefits for people with bowel disease, so the story was "Scientists change their mind -- smoking is GOOD for you!" although the story itself said the opposite.
The media world has a pathological need (but is there a diagnostic category for it yet?) to prove themselves to be right and the entire rest of the world wrong, while flattering the viewers for being intelligent enough to tune in. The real trouble will start when millions of us are conditioned by our TV sets to expect all Iraq combat veterans to have "IED". And it will be all the more painful to them since Improvised Explosive Devices -- roadside bombs -- go by the same name.
Psychiatric categorization of diagnosis is required by law and by insurance companies. The descriptions are very carefully considered, and the same people who make the final decisions about who-is-what are notoriously critical of labeling, even at that. At best, it's thought of as a "lesser evil". The first time the public really found out about the process was in the middle 1970s when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association was revised and eliminated Homosexuality as a disease. Only a few shrinks were against the change, but it was portrayed as a civil war within psychiatry.
I'm not sure of the exact reference the new disorder, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, but similar ad-hoc diagnoses have been around for years now. It's a part of PTSD, but like anxiety and depression, often is seen without PTSD. And a new source of funding will open up from the NIMH, and a hundred news stories will be written about it, several drugs will be approved for treating it and be marketed heavily, and within a year or two, the descriptions will be used to construct TV and movie characters (along with The Hero's Journey®, Dramatica®, and Dr. Phil's latest clichés).
The real fault, that will defame soldiers who clearly deserve better, is the practice of mining a few people's troubles for mass media entertainment. We've already had a few TV episodes featuring psycho-Iraqi-vets just this season, and it will only get worse; soon we'll have the wingnut stories about how Baghdad Jane herself spat on a returning veteran and how millions of hippies called them "baby killers" when it was the Iraqis who started it by bombing the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, sinking the Maine, and setting fire to the Reichstag. Historical revisionism starts the second the film footage starts rolling. And that's what's really sad.
--p!
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