Maybe you are a 296.22 (major depressive disorder, single episode, mild) or a 300.00 (anxiety disorder NOS--not otherwise specified). Hopefully, you are not a 301.83 (borderline personality disorder). Your kid might be a 313.81 (oppositional defiant disorder) or, more likely, a 314.01 (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type).

Since 1952, a tome called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, better known as the DSM, has been reducing to a few digits the psychological malady said to afflict a patient. This bible of mental health treatment, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), provides a list and description of every mental health condition known to—or invented by—psychiatry, from histrionic personality disorder (301.50) to transvestic fetishism (302.3).

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Stephen Joseph disagrees. In his new book, “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” the professor of psychology, health and social care at the University of Nottingham (in the U.K.) warns that our culture’s acceptance of PTSD has become excessive and has led to an over-medicalization of experiences that should be considered part of ordinary, normal, human experience. This has kept us from proactively working through our grief and anxiety: We’ve become too quick to go to the shrink expecting him to fix us, rather than allowing ourselves the opportunity to grow and find new meaning in our lives as a result of painful, but common, events. Joseph advocates for a push toward post-traumatic growth as therapy to treat the stress of trauma, which he distinguishes as being different from the hokey, blue skies and rainbows, pop psychology that he claims has exploded in our culture in the past decade.

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Michael Woodward comments, below the story:

Kevin Dawes was not a "medical aide worker" he is a self styled medic who taught himself the "skills" through youtube. He has no firearms training and is suffering severely from delusional and paranoid behavior. He is a danger to himself and others. In other stories about him, it is said even that battle hardened rebels are afraid of him and think he is crazy. This story is not researched and needs to be fact checked. I am sure that if you do search for some of his old screen names (try Caro)you will find some of his postings. Also, check out his blog and youtube channel- you will find he is not what this article portrays him to be.

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Then my sister-in-law asked the dreaded question. "Are you guys gonna have kids?"

I'm amazed at how many mothers and fathers ask this of childless couples. Of course you're going to have a baby, they're really saying. It's not a question of having one, but will you stop at one? What do you hope for? All boys? All girls? One of each? What if you have triplets? What a blessing that would be.

"We're not having kids," I said, with as much finality as I could muster.

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I'm writing because I respect you and the work you do. I have reached the end of my rope and don't know who else I can turn to for an honest answer. (My friends and family have been wonderful, but I sense that after years of advising and supporting me, they no longer know what to say.)

I am 35, unmarried and I live alone. I have had a rough past, which through years of therapy and dedicated hard work I have come to terms with. Unfortunately, I do bear one significant scar -- I suffer from mental illness. Diagnosis: bipolar with psychosis and PTSD. It runs in my family and is currently managed with a remarkable cocktail that has kept me relatively stable for many years.

The problem is this: I have big dreams for my life. Really big dreams, dreams bigger than healthy people should even have. And I am actively working toward those dreams. I take advantage of the myriad of opportunities I've been afforded, I seem to be naturally lucky, and I am a dogged, diligent worker. However, after any period of stress I become ill. Not necessarily mentally ill -- I've learned to manage my state of mind pretty well. But I become physically ill. Though it is typically reserved for the much younger, I got mono this year. I'm currently recovering from a sinus infection because I'm in an intensive language program. I do directly correlate the two, because I was also here last year and spent several weeks sick with the same thing.

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I was in the hospital because I was the worst type of cliché: a miserable college freshman who was borderline suicidal because his high school girlfriend had broken up with him. We went to different schools, which is the only reason why I didn't pull a "Say Anything" every night outside of her dorm to win her back.

After the breakup, things got so out of control that three months into school, instead of being out drinking and talking to women, I was holed up in my dorm room reading John Cale's autobiography. I was a wreck, and before long, I was overdosing on pills (well, Tylenol, a pretty lame choice in retrospect), cutting my wrists with the blades of a Gillette razor, and getting forced by a school counselor to admit myself to the local psychiatric center.

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"I'm a songwriter. I’ve written loads of music. Why would I try to put out a song and think I’m getting one over on everybody? That’s retarded."

Whoops. For someone whose message is all about how it's OK to be different, this was definitely a quotable misstep, especially after NME decided to put her r-word comment in the headline of their piece. Gaga has since issued an apology via CNN:

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Apparently this show has already had a one-hour online premiere in December, and if you've already seen it, I am sorry to be so completely baffled this late in the game. If, however, you somehow missed the Internet premiere -- maybe because you were too busy trying to sift your way through giant dumpsters in order to find old newspapers to clip -- here's a preview of what to expect from the show.

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During the interview, Madoff expressed considerable regret for his crimes. He also claimed that the scheme took a psychological toll long before his ultimate downfall; that he didn't launch the destructive charade with malicious intent; that it was an accident that spiraled out of control, torturing him for years. Madoff insists that he isn't a sociopath. Even after everything he did, he insists he's a good person.

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I can't believe I'm writing to you, but you seem to have such insightful answers to non-straightforward issues, that I think that maybe you could help me.

I'm 32, married, educated and employed. I work at a stable job in a wonderful city. On the surface, everything looks great. But I'm depressed. I have been for years. Neither I nor my various counselors/psychiatrists can make sense of it. There isn't any one thing that we can point to and say, "Aha! This is why you're depressed." And really, I'm OK with that. I'm OK feeling like there might be a thousand tiny reasons that all combine to make me depressed. My problem is the grindingness of it all. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Will I ever be not depressed? I'm beginning to lose hope, and while I'm not suicidal, I do feel drained and directionless. I go through the motions of each day without any real emotional variation, and I am getting to the point where I need to feel like I won't be depressed forever, even if I don't know when it will end. But, of course, I can't know that. So how do I keep going? Do you have any words of wisdom for me?

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The deadline for complying with the three-year-old law was last month. But nine states haven't supplied any names to the database. Seventeen others have sent in fewer than 25, meaning gun dealers around the U.S. could be running names of would-be buyers against a woefully incomplete list.

Officials blame privacy laws, antiquated record-keeping and a severe lack of funding for the gap the AP found through public records requests.

Eleven states have provided more than 1,000 records apiece to the federal database, yet gun-control groups have estimated more than 1 million files are missing nationwide.

"If the mental health records are not current from our sister states, the quality of our background check is going to be compromised," said Sean Byrne, acting commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services in New York, a state that has submitted more than 100,000 records.

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I'm on antidepressants. 

I've been on them for some time and they're more effective than the Net Nanny when it comes to limiting the time you spend seeking adult content online. Incidentally, I don't seek sex all that much either. I mean, I have it and it's good but if I stopped having it, I'd probably forget about it.

In a recent piece for Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory interviewed people about how antidepressants affected their sex lives. I worry about the 25-year-old photographer who stopped taking his happy pills because, he said, it wasn't worth the side effects. But I'm envious that he has the balls (pun intended) to forgo his sanity to satisfy the urge to frolic and fornicate.

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Diagnosis was less critical then, 30-odd years back, but the people I treated probably had paranoid schizophrenia, bipolarity and what is now called delusional disorder, formerly paranoia. My favorite was an annoyed and critical woman who said that CIA agents had damaged her car ignition and then followed her everywhere on the bus, so that she could not travel to see me -- and why should she, since I was probably part of the conspiracy? When the Blizzard of 1978 swept through New England, I was held over at the Connecticut Mental Health Center -- actually, I had managed briefly to get away and had used cross-country skis to return on the empty New Haven streets. At her appointment time, there, all alone, was my beleaguered patient, sitting on the molded Eames chair in the darkened hallway, waiting for her opportunity to give voice to her suspicions.

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Shocking, unexpected events motivate a search for explanations that would impose order on an otherwise harrowingly capricious world. The British psychologist Frederic Bartlett noted how people exert an "effort after meaning" to make sense of their experience, and this is especially true for seemingly unpredictable and uncontrollable horrors, which are far more traumatic than ones we can foresee and possibly prevent. The search to make sense of the seemingly senseless is entirely reasonable. Yet several cognitive biases of the human mind make the task of predicting mass violence appear easier than it actually is.

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My mother was a schizophrenic, in the bad old days of the '60s and '70s. This was the Family Secret. For a good 10 years, she went untreated and undiagnosed. My father couldn't understand what was going on with her. It started with her being "high strung" and somewhat neurotic in her early 20s. Easily slighted, quick to cry, she kept house and home obsessively and creatively. She cooked well, made clothing and slipcovers and seemed a tightly wrapped, perfect '50s wife. And then she unexpectedly became pregnant with my sister when I was 10.

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To try and untangle the influences that might lead one lone gunman to fire his Glock at a political rally, we turned to Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, respected psychiatrist and one of the foremost experts on paranoid schizophrenics. Torrey has written several books on the mental illness, including the bestselling classic "Surviving Schizophrenia." He is founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia, a national nonprofit for the mentally ill.

Quite early in the news cycle, the media more or less diagnosed Jared Loughner as paranoid schizophrenic. Do you think that's accurate?

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I've recently seen comments on websites regarding the Arizona shootings: People say the shooter should have gotten help, that his parents should have done something, that something should be done about crazies before a thing like this happens.

As if we hadn't considered that before.

Let me tell you what happened with us. I was already married to Stew when he started becoming mentally ill. It was a slow descent. We kept thinking that he was getting better, or would get better, and when necessary, when he was suicidal, which he was several times before the Great Psychotic Break that led to years of uncertainty and pain, he would even take himself to the hospital. He was good about that, about seeking help. At the time he had a job, and health insurance. He worked for a large health insurance company, so insurance was a given. But what could they do for him at the emergency room? Talk to him, make him promise not to hurt himself, and then send him home again, that's what.

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We'd had a pleasant conversation over drinks at one of the two date spots in our tiny college town and were now lolling on my couch, augmenting our discussion with the kinds of small touches you try out when letting someone new into your personal space -- shoulder pats, hand-holding, cheek-brushing. It was one of those warm moments in the beginning of a courtship where both parties know they're making all the right moves and that, for the immediate future, everything was golden.

Then she tried another little touch. She reached over and affectionately tugged on my ear.

"I love you," I blurted out.

Well, that sure was a deal breaker, wasn't it?

A shocked silence ensued. I didn't know what to do. So I dealt with my panic the way I always did: with talking.

"Hold on," I said. "That was a tic."

She knew what I meant. After our first date had gone well, I took the plunge and showed her my various medication bottles. "This one's for my allergies," I said. "This one's for my stomach. And this one ... " I hesitated, rattling the small pills around the plastic tube like a tiny maraca of anxiety. "For my Tourette's. I have Tourette's syndrome."

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I have a dear friend who has battled bipolar disorder since her early teens. We are part of a close-knit group of friends and as several of us have moved back to our home state in recent years, we have been seeing each other fairly regularly. My friend, who has been on medication since her diagnosis, has had a great few years -- she's enjoyed success in her job and has been with her husband for six years. Unfortunately, quite recently, she has started to exhibit the telltale signs that she is entering a manic phase, which for her includes wildly spending money, an increased libido, and substance abuse. While myself and our mutual friends have been through this before, her husband has not and I'm very concerned.

The mania can sometimes be hard to spot, but over the past few weeks it's been pretty clear as my friend has started spending money without regard, has openly flirted with a married co-worker while extremely intoxicated, and purchased a new car without informing her husband -- she just showed up at home with a brand-new car! The last serious manic phase she had was over eight years ago, when she stopped taking her meds, disappeared for three days (where she had sex with several different men), and ended up with over $25,000 of credit card debt. At that time she was living with her boyfriend, and their relationship was destroyed. I tried to explain to her boyfriend that these were traits of her illness, but he had never witnessed this behavior before and left her.

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