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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2399 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The Eternal Dissident.

The Oxford Handbook of Psychiatry, 4th edition:

The authors have made the bold artistic choice to employ what I call "narrative whiplash" as their primary technique. Patient vignettes follow a strict three-act structure: Act One (character introduction), Act Two (literally any psychiatric condition), Act Three (death/insanity/miraculous recovery). This eliminates any tedious middle section where character development might occur. It's rather like if War and Peace were rewritten as a series of Twitter threads, except instead of 280 characters you get exactly three sentences before Pierre either achieves enlightenment or develops catatonia.

Then again, the pacing might well be a stroke of genius when you consider the target audience: exhausted junior doctors who need to absorb maximum psychiatric knowledge while standing in a hospital corridor at 3 AM. Who has time for denouement? The patients certainly don't seem to.

The real mystery is why Oxford's handbook writers haven't applied this technique to other fields. Imagine: "A 67-year-old man presents with chest pain. He has a heart. He does not have a heart. The end."

(I don't actually think there any patient vignettes in it, it's too no-nonsense for that stuff)

I have previously complained that Fish's Clinical Psychopathology has very little to do with fish, nor was it written by one. A missed opportunity, I'd like to know what the SSRIs and cocaine in the water do for salmon facing the awareness of their inevitable mortality.

Verdict: False advertising, so I won't even read it.

Then there's Making Sense of the ICD-11. It always sets certain bells ringing when a book requires another to make sense of it. I hope the authors of 11 know that it should have just been a trilogy. The DSM guys are at least more restrained about milking the franchise (galactorrhea due to hyperprolactinemia).

The main takeaway, at least for me, is that the real mental illness was the classification systems we made along the way.

Ya'll don't have review books over there?

Dang.

Also medical classification systems are great. Fight me bro.

Something like:

V9135XA: Hit or struck by a falling object due to an accident in a canoe or kayak

I'm sure is a lot of fun to marvel at, but working with this system practically might be challenging... "So you say you were struck in the head by a falling object, my first medical question would be - were you per chance in a kayak at the time? How about a canoe?"

Comedy value on point though.

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