Advanced disclaimer: this post is not intended to make fun of mental illness; rather it seeks to highlight in a humorous fashion the somewhat arbitrary and, to some, capricious way in which a panel might choose to define and categorize various disorders, with important repercussions.

"Hey George, what's up?" I asked as I prepared to ease into an adjacent chair. Before I'd gotten my rear end anywhere near the seat, he whipped the screen around to face me.

"Read this," he demanded. 

"Let me get some coffee first." I started to rise, but George snapped: "I'll get it. You read."

"Decaf with skim," I called out to his back as he moved to the counter.He waved his hand in my direction.

Here's what you need to understand about George: He can be funny, charming, really good company, the life of the party, as long as you keep to one subject--George. Move too far from that topic and he can be sulky and unresponsive, even self-righteous. But I rarely see him infuriated. As his friends joke, he's much too full of himself to get angry.

The news story concerned the draft of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, aka DSM--the bible for mental health professionals of every stripe. The draft committee had eliminated a number of recognized disorders and consolidated others, a move that was stirring up passion and controversy among members of the mental health community. I scanned past the paragraphs concerning proposed revisions to diagnoses for autism, substance abuse, and eating disorders to note that five (five!) of the ten personality disorders listed in the current version have been eliminated, including narcissistic personality disorder.  

"You see?" George was suddenly behind me with a cup of...

"What is that?"

" A mocha cappacino. It's good. Drink it."

I sighed and turned back to the article as he stabbed his finger at the screen. "They're eliminating my disorder. I hate this."

"I thought you didn't have a disorder, George," I remarked with the faintest trace of a smile. "I thought you were perfect."

"Not so much perfect," he replied, deadly serious, "as, you know, better than everyone else. And it's not so much a disorder as it is a condition."

"The whole point of wanting to retain this diagnosis," he continued before I could reply, "is to allow my shrink to continue her search into my brain."

"I didn't know you had a shrink, George," I interjected, but with another telltale wave, he kept going.

"My shrink understands that my focus on myself, my ability to understand my superiority deserves, in fact requires further study. My shrink and I have a special relationship. She knows and I know that the other professionals would eventually come to  recognize the innate advantages of my condition. If, in order to get grant money, it had to be temporarily classified as a disorder, I was willing to go along with the classification. Besides, the disorder label made my divorce settlements a lot simpler; it's not like my wives could tell the judge I was an a-hole, you know?"

"But now, they're blowing off the whole idea of narcissism, like it wasn't any big deal, like anyone with any esteem at all could be a narcissist which is absolutely not true. It takes a special person to recognize and be proud of his standing in the pecking order. I mean, come one, someone has to be on top, it's the natural order of things and  I, for one..."

But I wasn't listening anymore. I'd just come upon a paragraph that noted that the DSM-5 was not going to recognize melancholia as distinct from depression and I was  feeling, well, bummed out.

see: 
USA Today
American Psychiatric Association
New York Times
Psych Central