DMS-IV???

DMS-IV???

I finished reading Battlefield Earth today. It's a pretty good sci-fi adventure novel, and no, I am not a Scientologist. In fact, Hubbard hated Psychologists and Psychiatrists, and it's very thinly veiled in his book. The evil arrogant aliens are called "Psychlos", and towards the end of the book, you find out that their planet is really controlled by a cult called the "catrists", now work real hard here, Psychlo + catrist = you get the picture. I read the book about 10 years ago, and just decided to read it again, in case I wanted to see the movie. Well, after looking over the initial votes at the IMDB, I'm not so sure I want to see the movie...

In the movie's defense, even though I haven't seen it, some of the initial reviews really slammed Travolta's acting, claiming it was over-the-top. Obviously, these reviewers never read the novel, for that's exactly how it was written...

I was watching ER last night, it was delayed locally a few days because of the recent storm. One of the doctors on the show said she was concerned about one of the other doctors possibly suffering from manic depression. She said that she'd "looked up the diagnostic criteria in the DMS-IV". Okay, now I may only have an undergraduate degree in Psychology, but I caught that mistake in about a tenth of a second, were their consultants not paying attention? In case you don't know, what she meant to say was the DSM-IV, or Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition, which is the standard reference used in Psychology and Psychiatry to treat and diagnose mental illnesses. Although, the title of Diagnostic and Manual Statistic does have an interesting ring to it...