The DSM, now approaching its fifth great edition, runs to hundreds of pages and includes such nebulous-sounding illnesses as intermittent explosive disorder (temper tantrums), relational disorder (pissed off with a relative) and sluggish cognitive tempo disorder (you may lack motivation).
"But if you have a rare disorder, you can feel very isolated.
"When you're making a diagnosis of a personality disorder, you don't let the New Jersey Legislature determine what you do".
When you have a mental disorder you get disbelieved in many shapes and forms, so why should they believe you with this?
"If two-thirds of your people have this disorder, you can't possibly pay for treatment for two-thirds of patients," says Dr Livingston.
If you suffer from this disorder, you will love "Cloisonné: Chinese Enamels From the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties," a ravishing exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center.
To be diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder, you need to exhibit five of around a dozen symptoms on a checklist, such as "Has a grandiose sense of self-importance" and "lacks empathy".
Perfectionism, attention to detail and a sense of superiority combine to make the pro-ana sites the most meticulous and clinically fluent self-representations of a mental disorder you could hope to find, almost checklists of diagnostic criteria expressed in poignantly human terms.
"Few facts have been firmly established about the molecular or cellular causes of schizophrenia, and that's because many traditional scientific approaches can't be used to study the disorder: you can't grow it in a dish, and there aren't very good animal models for it," McCarroll explained.
Dangerous is about Rumer's fear of returning to making music after four years away to deal with her bipolar disorder; You Just Don't Know People is "a direct response to losing faith in friends and battling the growth of cynicism"; Play Your Guitar is a "quietly subversive call to arms for struggling musicians"; and Butterfly, perhaps her most honest song yet, is about a miscarriage.
