• inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
  
• decreased need for sleep (e.g., feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep)
  
• more talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking
  
• flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing
  
• distractibility (i.e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli)
  
• increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation
  
• excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e.g., engaging in unrestrained buying sprees, sexual indiscretions, or foolish business investments)
  

Diagnosing the Diagnostician: "Bipolar Disorder" in the Psychological Community

Presence of at least one Self-Importance Episode and evidence of past Self-Doubt episodes. Condition in which academics or professionals unconsciously mask excessive self-doubt beneath an exterior of excessive certainty and self-importance. (It has been theorized that the entire profession and science of Psychology is a sublimation of the collective insecurities of its members).

Criteria for Self-Doubt Episode

Five (or more) of the following symptoms have been present during the same 2-week period and represent a change from previous functioning; at least one of the symptoms is either (1) depressed humanity or (2) loss of interest or pleasure in human nature.

Note: Do not include symptoms that are clearly due to disinterest.

• Dehumanization most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., appears inhuman) or observed effects on others (e.g., treats students as inhuman).
  

• Irritability
  

  Note: While in older male professors, we may observe efforts to be loved by undergraduate students (especially females); in younger female professors, this is manifested as an expression of power over male graduate students or an enabling of coddling, cajoling, or sycophantic behaviors in male teaching and research assistants
  

• Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, issues related to human nature and experience most of the day, nearly every day (as indicated by either intellectual timidity or laziness)
  
• Significant intellectual impairment (e.g., a change of more than 5% of verbal IQ points in a month), or decrease or increase in occupational appetite nearly every day.
  
• Increased knack for inducing hypersomnia in persons with no professional affiliations with Psychology
  
• Methodological agitation or theoretical retardation nearly every day
  
• Repressed feelings of worthlessness or guilt nearly every day related to the insecurity that their approach may not reflect the one true path (not merely self-reproach or guilt about being stupid)
  
• Diminished ability to think or ruminate, or excessive decisiveness (as when thought is replaced by mindless adherence to professional or departmental policy), nearly every day
  
• Recurrent thoughts of being rejected by tenure committee (often symbolized by fear of mortality), recurrent ideation related to abdication of one’s soul without a specific plan, or a conformity attempt or a specific plan for compliance that results in loss of individual ethics, vocation, or discretionary intellect.
  

Self-Importance Episode

A distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood, lasting at least 1 week (or any duration if hospitalization is necessary). During the period of mood disturbance, three (or more) of the following symptoms have persisted (four if the mood is only irritable) and have been present to a significant degree:

• Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
  
• Perception of decreased need for sleep in students and assistants (e.g., feels students only need 3 hours of sleep and no hours for personal thought)
  
• More celebratory or evangelistic than usual or given to pressure students to produce flattering statements consistent with professor’s philosophy
  
• Flight from ideas or objective experience that the science or profession of Psychology is celebrated by politicians and public
  
• Distractibility (i.e., attention too easily drawn from human issues in psychology to unimportant or irrelevant details of methodology or ethical code)
  
• Increase in goal-directed activity (either to influence public, political or professional policy or to increase uniformity within department)
  
• Excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e.g., prone to sleep with students or therapy clients; and another form of intercourse in which professors seek to make an example of students or assistants who do not tow the departmental line)
  
• The mood disturbance is sufficiently severe to cause marked impairment in vocational but not occupational functioning or in usual social activities or relationships with others but not in conformity or consensus-building. Hospitalization may be required to prevent harm to students or assistants. Psychotic features may be present.
  
• The symptoms are not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., alcohol) or a general medical condition (e.g., low brain weight or blood pressure).
  

Shared Psychotic Disorder

A delusion in which a preferred mode of behavior is mistaken for a norm or imbued with normative properties. The delusion is passed from one professor to another in a groupthink encounter. Primary means of transmission for false norms is usually a departmental meeting, but may also be a memorandum in the context of a close relationship with another professor, who has an already-established false norm. Students or peers whose attitudes or behaviors are even slightly inconsistent with the norms are perceived as ‘unprofessional’ and some form of probation or scrutiny is applied accordingly. In faculty meetings, shared psychotic disorder can take the form of a groupthink encounter in which attempts to ascertain adequate and accurate information becomes secondary to -- or subjugated by -- the goal of maintaining group harmony.

Bulimia Nervosa

Recurrent episodes of binge learning of useless and trivial facts. An episode of binge learning is characterized by the following:

Specify type:

Purging Type: during the current episode of Bulimia Nervosa, the person has regularly engaged in self-induced vomiting or the misuse of laxatives, diuretics, or enemas
Nonpurging Type: during the current episode of Bulimia Nervosa, the person has used other inappropriate and compensatory rest and relaxation behaviors, such as excessive drinking, hyper-technical reliance to a diet regimen, or exercise , but has not regularly engaged in self-induced vomiting or the misuse of laxatives, diuretics, or enemas

Agoraphobia

The presence of Agoraphobia related to fear of developing panic-like symptoms (e.g., dizziness or diarrhea).

Criteria for Agoraphobia:

Anxiety about being in places or situations in which one’s professional training might not be adequate or appropriate. (As agoraphobic professors adhere rigidly to a narrow and nurturing routine, situations or places in which they may find their training inappropriate is fictional or theoretical, i.e. based on imagination and fantasy rather than on prior experience). Agoraphobic fears typically involve characteristic clusters of situations that include being outside the university alone; being in a lay crowd or standing in a line in wait for one’s credentials; being on a bridge between two or more ideas; and traveling to places where one’s certification may not be revered.
Note: Consider the diagnosis of Specific Phobia if the avoidance is limited to one or only a few specific situations, or Social Phobia if the avoidance is limited to situations involving inconsistent ideas.

The situations are avoided (e.g., travel is restricted) or else are endured with marked distress or with anxiety about having a Panic Attack or panic-like symptoms, or require the presence of a colleague or co-author.

Autism

Qualitative impairment in ability to (or loss of interest in) relating to or understanding persons beneath surface behaviors they can take at face value.

A total of six (or more) items from (1), (2), and (3), with at least two from (1), and one each from (2) and (3):

2. Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following:
(a) Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity (i.e., -isms like logical positivism and professionalism) or focus (i.e., attention limited to applied issues [e.g. gerontology], procedures [e.g., program evaluation], or systems [e.g., ergonomics]). Intolerance for concepts with no obvious concrete and immediate referents.
(b) Apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional policies or procedures
(c) Stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., student evaluation meetings, or complex whole-body movements, i.e. “witch-hunts”)
(d) Persistent preoccupation with parts of psychology (i.e., the neuron) or reification of fluid and fuzzy processes into static terms with circumscribed meanings (i.e., id, ego, and superego). Inability to think abstractly or relationally and thus to comprehend or extend meaning.

Histrionic Personality Disorder

A pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

(1) Is uncomfortable in situations in which he or she is not the center of attention. Because the individual professor has sacrificed a personal for a professional identity, “he” or “she” also includes the department, profession, or research team.
(2) Interaction with others is often characterized by inappropriate seductive or provocative behavior. There is an extreme extraversion characterized by a demand for a mutual dissolution of individual selves in a collective unit. Behavior may mask a more deeply seated vampire fetish.
(3) Displays rapidly shifting and shallow expression of emotions confined to precise or professional words used as a method of intimidation to underscore values, e.g. “inappropriate.” This style of speech may be excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail so that students do not know what is exactly is meant by “inappropriate” (e.g., irrational?; unethical?; ineffective?; evil?).
(4) Consistently uses physical appearance (i.e., ID badges, diplomas and certificates, attaché cases, cell phones and pagers) to draw attention to self
(5) Shows self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated expression of emotion sublimated through professional outlets, e.g. vitas, web sites, policy statements, course syllabi.
(6) Is suggestible, i.e., easily influenced by professional or technical authorities
(7) Considers relationships to be more intimate than they actually are, as is evidenced in the sense of personal betrayal they express when a student’s behavior or viewpoint is inconsistent with departmental or professional norms.

Psychogenic Amnesia

Psychogenic Amnesia is a sudden inability by a professor of Psychology to recall the importance of psychological phenomena (or to find psychological causes for psychological phenomena) that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary skepticism and is not associated with an organic lack of intelligence. The completeness of the amnesia and the time period involved may vary widely. Amnesia is indicated by five (or more) of the following:

(1) Draws conclusions about psychological phenomena (e.g., dreams) based on Statistics or on the Application of Mechanical Devices to the brain (e.g., EEG measures of REM latency).
(2) Quick to temper when phenomena does not readily lend itself to mathematical or mechanical research methodologies
(3) Is easily distracted by administrative tasks
reduces normally unified functions of identity, memory, or consciousness to singular biological structures or statistical laws, or else treat each function as if independent of a whole person

(NOTE: Consider the diagnosis “Psychogenic Fugue” in cases where a new identity is assumed which may involve, but is not limited to, that of Biologist, Sociologist, or Actuarial Scientist. Psychogenic Fugue is also ruled in by sudden, unexpected travel away from lab or lectern ).
(NOTE: Consider the diagnosis “Dissociative Identity Disorder” in cases where faculty revises mission statements and joins student recruiting drives but not for normal administrative duties. Consider diagnosis if faculty refers to self as Head but not as Chair).

Depersonalization Disorder

Depersonalization feelings may occur as a symptom in a wide range of psychiatric and neurological conditions. Depersonalization is only considered to be a diagnosable disorder when it occurs in the absence of one of these other conditions, and is severe enough to cause social or occupational impairment or marked distress.

Depersonalization involves an alteration in the student’s, client’s, or subject’s sense of self, resulting directly from behavior of faculty instructor, therapist, or researcher respectively. The person feels unreal, as if in a dream, like a machine, dead, self-estranged, or otherwise significantly changed from normal. Sensory disturbances such as anesthesias, paresthesias, a change in the sense of body size or body parts, macroscopia or microscopia, or the experience of being outside of one's body and watching one's self from a distance or looking down from above are often present and accompanied by a generalized sense of inhumanity. The individual may also have passive-influence experiences, feeling controlled or as if functions such as speech are not under the individual's control but have a "mind of their own."

Psychatization Disorder (opposite of Somatization Disorder)

A. A history of many theories beginning before tenure that occur over a period of several years and result in punishment for the belief that most phenomena have a psychological cause or result in significant impairment in compliance, conformity, or other important areas of professional functioning.

B. Each of the following criteria must have been met, with individual symptoms occurring at any time during the course of the disturbance:

(1) Four hypotheses: a history of psychodynamic or humanistic theory related to at least four different sites or functions (e.g., attitudes, dreams, unconscious processes, conscious processes, extremities)
(2) Two breaches of scientific precepts: repeat offenses of at least two scientific precepts (e.g., falsifiability, parsimony, replicability) or at least one violation of the null hypothesis testing system
(3) One reproductive or meiotic symptom: a history of at least one proliferation symptom (e.g., indifference to the opinion of others, failure to consult departmental policy or faculty expectations, indifference to publishing results and fewer than three voluntary, extracurricular consultations of research literature, vomiting throughout Psychobiology)
(4) One pseudopsychological symptom: a history of at least one attempt to explain a phenomenon with a known organic cause in terms of dynamic or motivational factors.

Conversion Disorder

A. Inability of professor to compel compliance or conformity from his students; inability to win students over to departmental or professional point of view.

B. Failure is deemed the result of a professional skills deficit or incomplete professional conditioning. May warrant suspension of associate status or reduction to assistant status.

C. The symptom or deficit is not intentionally produced or feigned (factitious) to lull a student into a false sense of latitude (malingering) punishable by probation or expulsion

D. Inability to cause clinically significant distress or impairment in student with deviant or malformed views.

E. The deficit does not occur exclusively during the course of a distraction (house closing, birth of child, new publication, or administrative duties) and is not better accounted for by another mental disorder.

Undifferentiated Somatoform Disorder

A phenomenon is classified with this disorder if it cannot readily be explained in terms of organic or hyper-rational (i.e., Cognitive Science) causes.

A. Either (1) or (2):

(1) After appropriate investigation, the symptoms cannot be fully explained by a known general biological condition or the direct effects of non-conscious cognitive processing

(2) When there is a related general biological condition, the phenomenon is in excess of what would be expected from the physical examination or laboratory findings

B. The phenomenon causes clinically significant distress or impairment in occupational functioning.

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and inability to understand the ideas or qualities of others that deviate from their own:

(1) Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
(2) Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love (believes a member of psychology can make the cover of Time magazine)
(3) Requires excessive admiration (usually from undergraduate students or graduate assistants)
(4) Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of automatic compliance with his or her expectations
(5) Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends (e.g., [a] relies on colleagues to conspire against a student, [b] relies on colleagues to put the force of a new norm or policy behind his or her opinion or preference or [c] claims support from non-specific or non-existent norms/policies)
(6) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others. (May be indifferent to alternative views or view the alternatives as expressions of defiance)
(7) Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
(8) Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

Oppositional Defiant Disorder

An inscrutable pattern of irritable, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least 6 months, during which four (or more) of the following are present:

(1) Often complains about things of which the student should not be expected to care (i.e., things of a personal or petty nature about which the student is not given ample information)
(2) Often starts petty arguments with proteges or assistants
(3) Often actively defies or refuses to comply with norms of courtesy and respect
(4) Often deliberately annoys students or other professors with disparaging remarks aimed to release the anger; often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
(5) Is often touchy or easily annoyed by others
(6) Is often angry and resentful
(7) Is often spiteful or vindictive

Body Dysmorphic Disorder

A. Preoccupation with an imagined defect in the professionalism of a student’s work. If a slight format or style anomaly is present (e.g., indenting first rather than second line of citation in References consistent with obsolete edition of APA Style handbook), the professor’s concern is markedly excessive.

B. The preoccupation causes clinically significant distress to the professor or harm to the student’s career.