Well, wow. The psychic landscape around here resembles the setting of Waiting for Godot – raw.

Or it’s like Mad Max – a Hobbesian war of all against all, played out on America’s busiest media highways, with desperate gangs (TheraPeuts, PsychíaCrips, DataDevils) truncheoning each other for the biggest piece of the pathology pie.

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Our depressed nation has long taken its orders from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; but the DSM has – like much of its clientele – grown mulish, morbidly obese… Even as each edition trumpets new and improved deficits, the high-tech, data-gathering world is passing it by.

So the DSM is in denial. Facing obsolescence and repudiation, its editors brightly inform us that it remains America’s go-to book for the blues.

But, you know, the bottom line isn’t about this approach or that approach to psychic disturbance. The bottom line is that more and more observers are simply disgusted at the massive numbers of people in this country who have been persuaded – by television commercials, by the DSM, by doctors – to think there’s something clinically wrong with them for which they have to take pills for years. (‘[S]ome pharmaceutical companies that have enriched themselves by selling psychiatric drugs are now cutting back on further research on mental illness. The ‘withdrawal’ of drug companies from psychiatry, Steven Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Harvard and former NIMH director, wrote last month, “reflects a widely shared view that the underlying science remains immature and that therapeutic development in psychiatry is simply too difficult and too risky.” Funny how this view isn’t incorporated into ads for antidepressants and antipsychotics.’) The DSM has helped to make a lucrative fetish of pseudo-debility in the American population, and as long as there’s money in it and a total absence of biomarkers, it will, it seems, keep doing that.

Even when we get somewhere with biomarkers it won’t make any difference. Do you think an absence of any discernible ground for mental illness will stop a person who has been taught by this culture to think of herself in that way? To think of all of life’s difficult passages as illnesses rather than difficult passages? “The struggle of psychiatry since 1980 has not been to fashion more and more illnesses, but rather to convince us that when we are unhappy, anxious, compulsive, etc., we have a mental illness. In this they have been successful, at least to judge from the vast increase in numbers of people seeking treatment. It’s a predictable outcome of the DSM approach to mental suffering.” The science can tell us what it likes; until we stop liking the image of ourselves as debilitatingly neurotic it won’t make any difference.

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Remember what Nietzsche said about the DSM.

“The DSM is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration … The DSM is an illusion of which we have forgotten that it is illusion, a set of metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigor… Yet we still do not know where the drive to produce DSMs comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to have DSMs…”

It is better (as Bismarck said of laws) not to see them being made.

Certainly universities do all they can to conceal the details that go into the making of people like Richard Herman; but a zealous Chicago Tribune reporter has stridden (look it up) into the sausage factory. We, who would never dare, are in her debt. Hold it cheap / May who ne’er hung there!

Jodi Cohen has come back with a tale so exhaustively, precisely instructive as to the manufacture of moneyed academic malingerers that it is worth our while to attend.

Start with the fact that as then-chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Herman personally presided over arguably the largest scandal in the history of the University of Illinois – the now-notorious special admissions scandal.

Herman was “the ultimate decision-maker” for the applicants who were connected to trustees, lawmakers and other powerful people. Herman at times overruled admissions officials to enable the students to get into the school.

So this would seem to be a man who helped bring national disgrace to his institution. What to do with him?

Well, Herman is a math professor. He can teach math. A lot of students need help in math. So he goes back to the math department and teaches math, yes?

NO, because now that he’s dragged an entire university system into the mud he’s too eminent.

“I don’t think you should expect him to teach a freshman calculus section with a ton of students.” Quote unquote. From an emeritus professor there. And the university agrees. Not only should this man not have to teach freshmen, he should teach no math courses at all. Apparently the whole field is now beneath him.

But OTOH the university is paying him over two hundred thousand dollars, so he should do something, right?

Weeeeelllll… A man of his stature can’t be expected to live in Urbana-Champaign, which is where he … uh… something for $212,000… He can only be expected to commute in once a week from Chicago. This unfortunate mobility problem radically diminishes his ability to, you know, be there.

Now, after he resigned in disgrace, he did condescend to teach two courses a year at this inconvenient location. In the College of Education, because you wouldn’t want him sullying himself by teaching in his field of expertise. Unsettlingly, however, “His biography on the College of Education’s faculty website is blank.”

Not only is his website blank; so are his class lists. The man has an uncanny ability to get his classes cancelled. It keeps happening. They just effing don’t fill! Who knows why?

Oh wait.

I mean, wait, and wait. Before the second wait. The first: Because the eminent chancellor can’t, curiously enough, get anyone to sign up for his courses, he “has twice switched to teaching online classes to make up for on-campus courses that were canceled for low enrollment.”

OOH LA LA online! Well, online. Yes, online. Talk about a sausage factory… Goes without saying that this solves the mommy don’t make me go down there problem. Plus, well, let’s just say that UD would love to know who’s teaching Herman’s online courses…

So the second wait. Second wait is how does this genius manage to get one course cancelled after another?

“Richard acknowledges that he probably missed a deadline for getting his information submitted in time to get included in the (catalog).”

That’s from a university spokesman, explaining one of the cancellations. The other? It was a grad ed course. But… whoops!

[B]ecause the UIC graduate program doesn’t offer a higher education degree track, there was insufficient student interest and enrollment.

This is the moment to caution you: Don’t try this at home. For all of these elements to come together, for all of this sausage-making to make a sausage, you need high-level strategic skills plus extremely high-level connections.

Also, it probably doesn’t hurt to have inside information which, if released, could ruin the careers of the high-level connections.

… to you, maybe… But to the American Psychiatric Association, with its eminent leaders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is an absolute goldmine.

… my hubby!  (♥!!)  Fill out these forms and help us get him elected!”

Quilty’s borrowing scheme didn’t work out at all well in Lolita (Humbert killed him anyway). Nor, more recently, did University of Texas baseball player Cameron Cox’s. He borrowed a teammate’s pee for a urine test – knowing that his own, I guess, would be drug-laced – and of course the other player was also drugging himself, so they both got in trouble.

… the worst university in America. Go ahead and type UNIVERSITY GEORGIA in my search engine. You’ll get a few hits for other Georgia universities, but mainly you’ll get one unbelievable UGA scandal after another. The board of trustees tried to take over the student newspaper because they haven’t heard about press freedom. A professor shtupped one of his students in front of other students. Sports teams are endlessly full of gun-toting miscreants. After tailgating, the campus is literally a pile of shit. The school has outrageous rates of student alcoholism.

The school is of course on this year’s top-ten party school list; it always makes the list, and often tops it.

The latest is that Jim Donnan, UGA’s amazingly compensated football coach (he recently left), is under federal indictment as a Ponzi schemer. Most of his victims seem to have been his fellow sports morons.

UGA. As ever, a class act.

From the mouths of babes.

Architecture students at the University of Arizona rebuke the fancy eco-architects who built the 2007 extension to their old and – compared to the new glass architecture building – reasonably sustainable brick architecture school building.

It’s some kind of best-laid green plans fable for our times that, as Tom Beal writes in the Arizona Daily Star

The 2007 glass-and-steel addition to the UA College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture – promoted by the university as “a laboratory for sustainable practices” – is one of the biggest energy wasters on campus.

In its first year of operation, it used four times the energy of the comparably sized brick building to which it is attached. Its glass walls and unshaded, exterior cooling ducts, combined with design changes made to save money during its construction, make it difficult to heat and cool efficiently.

A “green wall,” designed to shade the building’s south side, has yet to grow.

The Tucson heat, seasonal glare, reflected light and noise from traffic on East Speedway blast through its north-facing glass walls. Students say the glare can be irritating and disorienting.

Well yes, glass buildings in Tucson… Of course, they can be made energy efficient, but a lot of things have to work. Like that green wall…

“It was a great idea and it’s worked in other places, and I’ll be damned if I can explain why those vines struggle,” said [the building’s architect].

The building’s architect claims that eco-considerations were not foremost in the building’s planning, but the article featuring his work on the extension (and based, one assumes, on an interview with him) touts eco stuff first thing.

There is a kind of pedagogical genius to the building.

In a sense, the building is living up to its description as “a working laboratory for sustainable practices.”

Master’s in architecture candidate David Tapia Takaki said it is providing plenty of problems for the students to fix.

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Add noise pollution to its other problems.

One of the big problems on the north edge is traffic noise, said [a student]. “It’s the cars on Speedway. If you are there one or two hours, you will not notice, but stay there all day and it can give you headaches.”

The Speedway! Named America’s ugliest street some decades ago, it remains a noisy thoroughfare.

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All in all, an embarrassment.

From Harvard the gift of the Niall
Approaches with crocodile smile.
To contemplate him
Is to think of the hymn:
“And only the human is vile.”

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Update: A British reader corrects my pronunciation of Niall (should sound like neel). All I can say in my own defense is that I had an Irish boyfriend once who pronounced it nile. (At least that’s how I recall it – it’s been a long time.) I’m also rebuked here:

Niall pronounce Nile is an Anglification of the name and it takes the heritage out of the name

Gevalt. Excuse me.

The killer was seventeen years old.

… of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, it’s been pretty clear that yiddishizing almost anything is liable to amuse. Even the translation of “Pumshtok” back into English is good (“On the wall of the kosher restaurant / Hangs dirty bedding / And bedbugs dance in circles. There is a stink / Of gefilte fish and wet socks. / Oy, Bashe, don’t ask questions, why bother?”).

The idea of doing this to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is so immediately obvious, so madly self-evident, that UD can only be ashamed it never occurred to her. You can buy the whole thing here (only 74 pages, as opposed to the much more expensive, 1,000-page, totally discredited — most recently by NIMH! — other one). Or you can sample the table of contents here.

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The non-parodic DSM-5 is a funny fat man about to fall over from a speedball overdose.

Along with the discrediting, there will be more parodies.

Fun interview with Gary Greenberg about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual controversy. Greenberg’s much more radical in his dismissal of the latest edition of America’s Icelandic psychosaga than UD‘s buddy Allen Frances (“We agree that the DSM does not capture real illnesses, that it’s a set of constructs. We disagree over what that means. He believes that that doesn’t matter to the overall enterprise of psychiatry and its authority to diagnose and treat our mental illnesses. I believe it constitutes a flaw at the foundation of psychiatry. If they don’t have real diseases, they don’t belong in real medicine. Al’s … really trying to keep scrutiny off of the whole DSM enterprise. That’s why he’s been so adamant that you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater — he believes that the DSM-IV, for all of its flaws, its still worthwhile. I disagree.”). He has a new book attacking the DSM from many angles. It’s called The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry and its cover is done up just like the posters for Psycho.

UD is mulling going to Politics and Prose bookstore to hear Greenberg talk. The guy has a sense of humor.

… alright then.

University of Texas System Regent Wallace Hall, who was criticized for not disclosing all of his lawsuits when he applied to join the board, has provided Gov. Rick Perry’s office with an updated list.

The original application contained information about two lawsuits and a bankruptcy.

In new disclosures provided to the governor’s office on April 12, Hall provided detailed information, including case numbers, on 11 lawsuits and detailed information about a complicated bankruptcy, with multiple appeals…

Can this be true?

UD has ridiculed Southern Illinois University on this blog for years. Put “Poshard” in my search engine for scads of posts about the place. But she had no idea it got as bad as this…

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Well, here’s the faculty page. All boys! ‘cept fer one girl that the dean done dumped. Laura Hatcher is suing.

I must say. It takes a special commitment to femicide to sustain absolute gender purity for over half a century. I trust the department has taken advantage of this distinction to forge relationships with its brother institutions in Saudi Arabia.

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UD thanks Wendy.

Justice is done.

A Tunisian court has convicted two veiled students of destroying public property at the office of a university dean they accused of slapping one of them.

The court dropped the case against the dean of the faculty of humanities at Manouba University, ruling on Thursday that there was no proof of an assault.

Score one for the forces opposing liars, bullies and fanatics in that country.

Not that this means things have improved all that much. But it’s encouraging.

To play for Wisconsin’s Coach Wardle
Is to bear a Shakespearean fardel.
For his temper’s quite short
When he’s out on the court.
So be sure that you’re well-stocked with Nardil.