You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Audio.

This talk features writer and filmmaker John Ronson, recorded live at TED 2012.

This story starts. I was at a friend's house, and she had on her shelf a copy of the DSM manual, which is the manual of mental

disorders. It lists every known mental disorder. And it used to be back in the 50s, a very slim

pamphlet and then it got bigger and bigger and bigger. And now it's 886 pages long and it lists

currently 374 mental disorders. So I was leafing through it,

wondering if I had any mental disorders, and it turns out I've got 12. I've got generalized anxiety

disorder, which is a given. I've got nightmare disorder, which is categorised if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a given. I've got nightmare disorder which is categorised

if you have recurrent dreams

of being pursued or declared a failure

and all my dreams involve people

chasing me down the street

going, you're a failure.

I've got parent-child

relational problems

which I blame my parents for.

I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. I'm kidding.

And I've got malingering. And I think it's actually quite rare to have both malingering

and generalised anxiety disorder because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious.

Anyway, I was looking through this book wondering if I was much crazier than I thought I was, or maybe it's not

a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder if you're not a trained professional,

or maybe the psychiatry profession has a kind of strange desire to label what's essentially

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