As we all know, the DSM is getting a do-over. As the NYT pointed out today, narcissistic personality disorder is on the chopping block.
Well, newFNP can help pad those empty pages. She is here to offer a new criterion for "psychotic disorder NOS" that should make it into the new psychiatry bible.
NewFNP is a fan of technology helping her out throughout the course of her workday. Where would she be without her iPhone and its BMI calculator, its OB wheel, its ICD-9 coder and its access to her gmail account so as to enable newFNP to track her online package shipments while at work? (Damn you, Madewell, and your cute new sweaters for 25% off!!) NewFNP's clinic is en route to electronic health records and newFNP is very much looking forward to forgoing the search for a decent black pen every day.
But these technologies are not those of interest to newFNP in regards to her hypothesis of how technological advances are shaping the scientific and clinical milieu.
NewFNP has noted time and again that people who are somehow psychotic attribute profound significance to the shitty photos snapped on their cell phone cameras.
NewFNP has seen many, many a flip-phone and Blackberry image and has been told that the image in the blurry photo of a sex partner was the aura of a snake, that there was a hand coming out of someone's head, that there were angels reflected in the mirror. In each and every photo, newFNP saw essentially the same thing -- a crappy, blurry cell phone picture utterly lacking in reptiles, odd appendages or the supernatural. And she can say definitively that the more expensive phone did not take a better crappy ass picture.
In one patient, newFNP gently asked if anyone had ever told him in the past that he may have a mental illness? No, he told newFNP, he was a Christian and he had burned the curtains in the living room after having sex with the snake-aura partner in order to purify himself. His response did not diminish newFNP's concern.
Perhaps the criterion can be "On at least three of the past seven days, the patient has engaged in excessive cell-phone photography (excluding those on iPhone 4 with flash and photography apps) and has inappropriately placed religious or spiritual significance on the incomprehensible images attained."
You're welcome, APA. You get that one for free.
1 comment:
Some countries are now starting to allow cell phone use on planes, so the FAA is thinking about it here too.
So in the future not only will you get that annoying person sitting beside you talking to somebody during the 3 hour flight, when they are not on the phone they can show you pictures.
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