5 Feet of Fury

When Doctors Decide Your Disease Doesn’t Actually Exist

When you become a human Pluto…

Theodore Dalrymple writes:

Asperger’s syndrome is eliminated from the new Manual as a separate category and this will not please everyone either. People come to like their diagnoses, or at least to feel that they have explanatory power for the dissatisfactions in their lives.

In some cases a diagnosis even give meaning to those lives: they devote themselves to associations that care for or (more usually) campaign politically for other people with the diagnosis.

If much of your life you have been told that you have a condition which has become the focus of your existence, only to be told years later that no such condition exists, you are bound to feel a sense of loss or even of bereavement.