Dinsfield Syndrome

An obscure syndrome starts to gain more and more attention in society.

Dr. Graham was finished with his analysis of 15 year-old Samuel. He had been a psychiatrist for almost thirty years, so he didn’t have a problem telling his patients anything that might have upset them. He just sat straight up in his chair, and gave the news to Samuel.

“You have Dinsfield Syndrome,” he told him. Samuel had never heard of that before.

“What is that?”

“It’s something that causes several different problems for you in your daily life. You have a natural tendency to doubt your own standing in the world. You were born with the natural assumption that you were less than everyone around you. You don’t have the ability to interpret external information correctly, so any mild criticism, or anyone even laughing around you, is going to hold more weight on you than it should. This causes you to dwell on minor things, which greatly interferes with your ability to enjoy your life, to make friends, to focus on school and work, and to even perform basic daily functioning.”

Samuel didn’t quite know how to take this. It seemed like he should have thought this was a problem, but he didn’t feel that way. He already knew he had trouble with school, and with friends. This wasn’t new information. The only new information here was an explanation for why he was this way. He remembered being laughed at, and being insulted all the time by his classmates, teachers, and family members. Now he was looking at it all differently. Now he realized that these insults may have been far more minor than they appeared. He thought about being kept up late so many nights because a teacher told him he had to use a pencil when he wanted to use a pen, and how humiliating that was for him. He realized now that that might not have been that big of a deal, and maybe it was unnecessary for him to feel so badly about himself. He was relieved by this news. Soon, the appointment was over.

“Do I pay the secretary at the desk?” He asked.

“No, your parents’ insurance covers it,” the doctor responded, to which Samuel felt immediately upset by. He felt bad about his mistake, but now he knew about his syndrome. Somehow though, that didn’t make the feeling go away. He had no way of being able to tell the difference between things it made sense to feel bad about, and things it didn’t make sense to feel bad about. The next day at school, he couldn’t even concentrate on his test because he was worried about how bad he looked to the doctor because of what he said. He was still going to go around his whole life being completely susceptible to every minor criticism. He felt like a complete outcast at school. He knew he was considered to be strange, and wanted desperately to be seen as normal. It was still comforting though, to know that his troubles in life had an explanation.

About a year later, Dinsfield Syndrome gradually started to go from being something completely almost unknown, to something people started to take notice of. Public schools were starting to develop programs for children with the disorder, so that they would have an easier time concentrating on their school work, and so that they could try to learn how to engage in conversations, and interpret them better, in order to have an easier time trying to make friends. More time and money was spent on medical research, in order to find treatments for the disorder. Doctors started to prescribe medication for the anxiety, depression, and attention related problems that were associated with the disorder. There started to be more of an understanding of the disorder, so doctors started to notice it more in their patients, so that they could get the help they needed.

Things were starting to look up for people with this problem. Even the media started to take notice of it. Television sitcoms and dramas started to feature characters who had the disorder. For a brief while, there was a point where kids like Samuel who knew they had it, started to feel a lot less weird and unusual, because people were starting to understand what the problem was. People started to be a little more understanding to people had it, and so they were more forgiving when someone with the disorder would struggle in a conversation, or in their work. The media also did a good job of showing characters who could function well in society, despite their difficulties, which was very inspiring.

Suddenly though, it got to the point where the disorder was ubiquitously known in society. You’d be hard-pressed to find somebody who had never heard of it, and who didn’t have at least a vague idea of what it was. This posed a little bit of a problem for Samuel. One day in class, he heard two girls talking about it.

“My ten year-old cousin has Dinsfield Syndrome, and my aunt is worried about how to tell him,” one said. The other one laughed a little bit.

“Why? He just gets offended by things, like everyone else does.”

Samuel found this exchange to be very unsettling. He was annoyed that this girl thought that this syndrome, that had ruined his entire life, and still continues to ruin it, was being so casually brushed off. He started to be curious about how it was being portrayed on television, and so the first time, he decided to watch one of these shows that was portraying it. When he got home from school, he searched on the internet for an episode of one particular sitcom, which was notable for having a character with the syndrome. As Samuel started to watch the show, he started to get more and more offended. Here was this character, who had a strong circle of friends, seemed to fit in very well with them, and had a good job at which he excelled without any problems. The show used his disorder once in a while to make a joke about how the character interpreted something incorrectly, and was offended by it when he shouldn’t have been.

Samuel thought that there was no way anyone was going to get a decent understand of what Dinsfield Syndrome was, by watching a show like this. There’s no way they could understand the problems that it causes for the people who have it. There’s no way the general public would believe that people with the syndrome have a 70% unemployment rate, that many of them have to collect disability or otherwise depend on someone to help take care of them. There’s no way the public would believe the high rate of suicide among people with the disorder, or the fact that it is much harder for those with the disorder to grow up and form long term relationships. At first, it seemed like people with the disorder were being portrayed positively, because these shows were explaining that you can grow up and be fully functional in society, even if you have the disorder, but there was no point in explaining that if no one was questioning that in the first place. No one knew anything about the disorder, so they didn’t know how serious it was for the people who had it, and now all they knew about it was what they learned from these shows. Now, the girl’s reaction at school made perfect sense. Of course she thinks the disorder isn’t a problem. This is what she thinks it is.

Another thing Samuel had found out, by talking to people in a support group he went to, is that the disorder varies in severity. Some people are only slightly affected, while some people’s lives are taken over by the disorder. Some have to put in a little bit of work to overcome their struggles, while some have to put in a lot. There were a couple of people in the group who had an even harder time with it than Samuel did. He actually almost got into a fight with someone at the support group, who had only a mild version of the disorder. This was a girl about his age, who talked about how the disorder wasn’t serious at all, just because hers wasn’t that serious. Samuel was incredibly frustrated that this girl was invalidating everything he had gone through in his life because of the disorder. He had no friends, only a few acquaintances, and always struggled in school. He took comfort in knowing that he had a valid explanation for it, and now this girl was trying to take that away. Eventually, the moderator of the group solved the argument by pointing out that it was different for everyone. This tended to lead to an overdiagnosis of the syndrome.

Eventually, Samuel was a senior in high school, and he had a difficult and tedious book to read in just a matter of a month. For him, it was difficult to focus, even with the medication he was receiving. He would try for a few minutes, then start to get more and more anxious about some comment someone made to him a week prior. He couldn’t stay focused for more than a few minutes at a time.

About two weeks before his report on the book was due, he spoke with the teacher. He told her how hard he was trying to do his work, and how he couldn’t stay focused.

“I’m really working as hard as I can. It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to finish in time,” he told her.

“You had a month to read it. There are no excuses,” she said.

“I have Dinsfield Syndrome,” he said. “I know it’s not an excuse. An excuse would be if I weren’t trying at all because of it, but I’m actually trying as hard as I can. I can’t get through this book without being distracted. I’m putting as much attention as I can into this book, probably more than the other students, but I keep getting distracted, and what I can read, I can’t really understand.”

The teacher just responded, “That’s not what Dinsfield Syndrome is. My nephew has it. It doesn’t interfere with your work. You’re clearly just trying to use it as an excuse.”

He decided to leave the room, and just as he reached the door, he turned around and said, “More attention doesn’t equate to more understanding.” Then he left.

Samuel spent the remaining week trying to read and understand the book the best that he possibly could. He kept getting distracted, but he knew he couldn’t. Now, he was being distracted by the teacher’s lack of respect for him, which was causing him to feel even more helpless. He did the best he could possibly do under the circumstances. He handed in the report when it was due, and received a D. When Samuel looked at the grade, he saw what it looked like when people with Dinsfield Syndrome were viewed as normal.