The latest bullshit mental disorder
14 MAR 2024
∙ PAID
It’s called orthorexia. Or orthorexia nervosa.
Well, it’s a proposed disorder. Advocates have so far failed to get it listed in the official bible of the American Psychiatric Association.
Orthorexia is defined as an obsession for eating healthy pure food.
It can lead to social isolation, because those afflicted can’t find anything to munch at parties. They also tend to show disgust when in the vicinity of impure food.
When the obsession reaches great height, profound weight loss and even death can result.
Proponents of the “disorder” tend to talk like this: “Orthorexia is caused by a combination of underlying genetic predisposition and environmental factors…”
As if they knew anything about supposed genetic reasons for anything. When in doubt, when bloviating, cite genetics.
Well, we’ve all known “orthorexia” people. They have super-strict standards for food. They’re cranky. They tend to go on unexpected sudden rants against food they consider “unclean.”
Analogy: On a moonlit night, a guy and his gal are sitting in a rowboat in the middle of a lake. He’s about to pull out a ring and propose marriage to his sweetheart—but he just can’t go through with it. Instead, he launches into an exposition about how we never went to the moon, it was all staged in a movie studio, and the there was no reason for the flag to be flapping next to the crater. He talks for an hour, until his girl stops him by diving into the lake and swimming to shore.
But people being obsessed with food doesn’t mean their behavior is a mental disorder. The behavior isn’t an “it.” It isn’t a THING.
It’s just behavior.
In the same way, 15,000 people who sit in a stadium and listen to a TV preacher determined to fleece them of their hard-earned money is behavior, but not a disorder.
Not a disorder with a label and “underlying causes.”
I’ve walked into clubs where metal bands were performing and speakers were pumping out the “music” at a volume that caused an immediate blinding headache and forced me back out the door. Meanwhile, hundreds of customers were sitting there loving it all. I can and do say those people are batshit crazy, but I don’t appeal to the American Psychiatric Association to find a label and list it in their diagnostic manual of mental disorders.
Orthorexia is how ALL so-called mental disorders work:
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