Dave Barry - Bad Habits

The other big cause of psychiatric disorders, besides demons, is your father. The man who discovered that fathers cause virtually all psychiatric problems was Sigmund Freud, who is known as the Father of Modern Psychiatry. Freud also discovered that if a trained analyst probed a patient’s past for several hours a week, week after week, year after year, the analyst could make an enormous amount of money. Of course, the analyst must be very skilled, because otherwise the patient might go off on all kinds of irrelevant tangents unrelated to the father:

PSYCHIATRisT: And what seems to be the trouble?

PATIENT: I’ve been having these horrible, splitting headaches.

PSYCHIATRIST: And when did these headaches begin? Around the time you realized your father was a horrible man?

PATIENT: No, my father was a wonderful man. My headaches began last week, when I was working under my car and the jack broke and the car fell on my head. I’ve also been bleeding from my ears.

PSYCHIATRIST: I see. And was your father’s name Jack?

And so it goes, for a decade or so, until the patient realizes that his head aches because forty-seven years earlier his father wouldn’t buy him an ice cream cone.

Freud’s approach is based on the fact that the human personality is actually made up of a number of parts: the Ego, the Libretto, the Sense of Humor, and the Tendency to Be Irritable in the Morning. The Libretto is trapped in the subconscious with nothing to read and consequently thinks about sex all the time. This embarrasses the other parts, so they clean up the thoughts before you actually get to think them. For example, let’s say the Libretto thinks about a sexual organ. By the time you get it, the other personality parts have turned it into an aquarium, so that’s what you think you’re thinking about, you nave fool. What this means is that everybody is actually thinking about sex all the time, although this becomes obvious only under intensive psychoanalysis or at office parties.

Freud’s brilliant pioneering paved the way for new discoveries by future generations of psychiatrists, all of whom disagree with him and each other. We can only regret that Freud did not live to see his theories come to fruition, and maybe watch Taxi Driver a few times.

NOTE: Before you read this article about medical care, let me warn you that I am not a doctor. I did, however, study First Aid when I was in the Boy Scouts. We scouts used to meet in the Methodist Church basement and apply tourniquets to each other, and we got really good at it. We once applied a tourniquet to Randy Lape that was so elaborate he couldn’t move any part of his body, and he probably would have lain there until he starved to death if the choir hadn’t shown up for rehearsal.

I have forgotten my First Aid training, except for one rule: When you encounter an injured person, you’re not supposed to move him. At least I think that’s the rule. Maybe the rule is that you’re not even supposed to touch him. Maybe you’re supposed to run away. Frankly, it’s all a blur in my mind, along with the Morse Code, which is the other thing I learned in Boy Scouts, God only knows why.

Anyway, I just thought you should be aware of this before you read this article, assuming you still want to.

You should get a thorough physical examination at least twice a year, unless you have to pay for it personally, in which case you should get one every eight years or whenever you think something is really wrong with you, whichever comes first.

You can usually tell when something is really wrong with you, because you feel really lousy even when you haven’t been drinking. Sometimes you can cure yourself merely by calling your employer and saying, in a sincere, sick voice, that you won’t be coming into work. If you have faked illnesses in the past, you should subtly let your employer know that you really are sick this time. Retch frequently, and say something like “I’m really sick this time. Really. (Pause here for a retch.) Honestly.”

If you still feel lousy, you should identify your symptoms and try to figure out exactly what’s causing them. Here are the most popular symptoms:

Sharp, stabbing pains in the chest or stomach—These are usually caused by being stabbed in the chest or stomach with a sharp object, but it could be something worse. Dull, aching pains in the head—These are usually caused by a headache. Often, you can cure yourself merely by being irritable; if that doesn’t work, you may need aspirin or brain surgery. Vomiting—This is usually caused by eating clams.

If your symptoms don’t go away, you should call your doctor’s office. Notice I say “doctor’s office,” not “doctor.” Under American Medical Association rules, doctors are not allowed to talk to patients over the telephone, because this would be unethical.

So when you call the doctor’s office, you will talk to a medical personnel wearing a white outfit, whose job is to make an appointment for you to come in roughly six weeks later. If you are really sick, and you are a regular patient, the medical personnel may agree to talk to the doctor on your behalf, and your doctor may agree to phone the drugstore and order you a little bottle of pills that costs $34.38. But if you are really really sick, too sick to go to the drugstore, too sick to walk, too sick to even move, the doctor may want you to come to his office right away and sit in the waiting room.

Assuming you can get to the doctor’s office without dying, your first job is to find a good seat, ideally one that is close to the tropical-fish tank and as far as possible from patients with visible fungus. Then you should read an old copy of National Geographic. Doctors like to have National Geographic in their waiting rooms, because it reminds patients that in many primitive countries people are not fortunate enough to have the kind of medical care we have here in the U.S.A. Many patients feel so much better after reading it for a couple of hours that they don’t even need to see the doctor. They just pay their bills and leave.

But if you still feel sick, the medical personnel will order you to undress and put on a garment that gives your secret bodily parts a high degree of visibility. Then they’ll take some blood out of your arm and make you go into a bathroom and urinate into a glass container. While you’re in there, the medical personnel will hide, giggling, in a closet, so that when you emerge you have to parade around, bodily parts flashing in every direction, looking for somebody to give the container to. None of this has anything to do with curing you. Why on earth would they want your blood and urine? They’ll just throw it away. The point of all this is to determine whether you are really, sincerely sick, sick enough to actually see the doctor.

If you pass this test, you get to go into a little room and sit on a table covered with cold waxed paper for about forty-five minutes—this is the final test—while the doctor watches you through a secret peephole. If he is satisfied that you qualify, he’ll bustle into the room and prod you with various implements, muttering all the while. The doctor is not allowed to tell you directly what is wrong—again, this would be a breach of ethics—you have to listen closely to his muttering, and interpret it. Here are the standard doctor mutters, translated to laymen’s terms:

“Uh huh”: This means “Oh my God.” “Ummm”: This means “Good Lord.” “Ah hah”: This means “I vaguely remember seeing a case like this in medical school, but it hadn’t advanced nearly this far.”

After the doctor has finished prodding you, either he will send you to the hospital, which will give you a battery of extremely humiliating tests designed to weed out people who are not serious about being hospitalized, or he will call the drugstore and order you a small bottle of pills that costs $34.38. If he spent much time in the Boy Scouts, he may also decide to apply a tourniquet.