brainandspirit: Brain And Spirit

The purpose of this list is to facilitate a discussion of story research issues. I am planning to write a science fiction / fantasy story regarding the issues surrounding psychiatry and spirituality, past and present.

The first topic for this list will be "generalized social deviance disorder", a fake psychiatric diagnosis that would the theme of the science fiction portion of my story.

There is a lot of diagnosis inflation going on in psychiatry right now, so the GSDD made up diagnosis is meant to extrapolate on that. GSSD would be diagnosed for people who are socially deviant in a fair number of small, but dramatically different ways. I am interested in doing research into types of social deviance, current treatments for those (psychiatric or psychological), how GSDD would be clinically tested or researched, how patients that suffer from GSDD would be distinguished from those with other problems, who would be diagnosed with GSDD, and if it would be used as an Orwellian social control mechanism.

I have at least one expert (a psychology professor) who has given me tips on how to proceed already. By setting up a mailing list, perhaps a number of experts and myself could stay in contact and up to date with each other. That would be the goal.