While the rest of us were sitting around on our couches gesturing lewdly with cigars, speaking with funny German accents and generally making fun of Sigmund Freud, psychiatrists have been busy debating a new class of mental illness: relational disorders.

This is true, I read it in a newspaper yesterday. They are considering, for example, defining a marriage where the spouses bicker all the time as suffering from a disorder, which will be given a good name; this relational disorder – a sick relationship – will then be treated with your usual psychiatric tools of therapy and drugs. This is good, because such disorders, besides making/keeping people miserable, do seem to cause other problems like various forms of abuse etc.

When I first heard this I thought, heh, the jokes are writing themselves again. And, now everyone’s going to bicker because then the insurance pays for their drugs.

But we don’t get depressed because then the insurance pays for our prozac, do we?

I’m thinking they might be onto something here.