With your idle time at the reference desk, use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to analyze the mental health of your library coworkers. They're all in there somewhere. (And so are you.)
Ask the readers: Is there a prevalence of one particular mental disorder at your library? (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? Asperger's? Borderline Personality Disorder?) Let us know in the comments section below.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
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38 comments:
I thought OCD was a job requirement. Don't you have to have a high OCD score to get into library school?
All pages should have OCD.
I don't (f#ck!) know what you (sh!t!) mean. My coworkers and I (you ugly c*cksuck3r!) don't have any disorders.
(Is Tourettes in there?)
a$$hole!
Is the inability to understand irony a mental disorder? Or is it just something in the water?
Using the DSM-IV to diagnose your coworkers is also a hobby for those working in technical services. That book is like a Baedecker's for libraries.
Passive-aggressive personality disorder rules the day in my library.
Asperger's! I'm cornered everyday by certain someones wanting to discuss their luddite tendancies and justification for keeping paper records of library transactions for decades.
Aspergers & OCD.
Also histrionic personality disorder.
Passive aggressive covered with sickly sweet syrup.
We have Asperger's twins that are daily patrons. They have wheely backpacks and allergies, so you can hear them coming a mile away with the wheezing and the skating bags.
We also have constant problems with half-violent women who have rage issues. They will talk circularly for days and then.....EXPLODE.
Oh, you meant coworkers? Just anxiety issues. The other branches have all the nightmare OCD and P-A ones.
Collectively, our staff suffers from: borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, schizotypal disorder, histrionic personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, paranoid personality disorder, Asperger's disorder, antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, anorexia nervosa, learned helplessness, generalized anxiety disorder, fetishism, and, of course, so much depression.
There should be bingo cards for this.
We have a sort of Management Tourettes Syndrome whereby random shafts of irrelevant drivel are suddenly injected into our lives at odd intervals and required to be acted upon.
We do have a page that is truly diagnosed with Aspergers. He is also the one who catches the books from other systems that get mixed in with ours, the NYT shelved with the local paper, some cataloging errors.
When do we start noting which disorders turn up in management during budget, pages after the weekend, and especially in Children's during summer reading.
I work in the State Library of ____, and most of what I see here are your garden variety of paranoia.
Mixed with a lot of avoidance issues.
It seems like some type of personality disorder is the reason some librarians ascend to director jobs! The one that jumps out to me is Narcissism. see
http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php/type/doc/id/419
HAHAHAHAHA! This cracks me up!
Let's see, we have one Asperger, one diagnosed bi-polar (who is actually medicated and the sanest-acting person in there), one passive-aggressive pathological liar with narcissistic borderline personality disorder (bet my life on it), one OCD page with fits of rage from time-to-time, one hyperchondriac, and one serious control freak with delusions of grandeur. The rest just suffer from extreme apathy coupled with an inability to move into this century re their jobs.
I, seriously, suffer from anxiety issues, but at least I'm in therapy.
Now, the question really is. . .
Did people become this way because they are librarians?
OR
Did they become librarians because they are this way?
"passive-aggressive pathological liar with narcissistic borderline personality disorder (bet my life on it)"
we've got one of these too (unfortunately)!
narcissistic hoarder. nuff said. (I bet there are lots of hoarders in libraries. Think of those librarians you know who refuse to weed!)
passive aggressive
narcissistic
paranoia
bipolar
My husband refers to the staff at my library as the "Scratch and Dent Staff of the County." We have diagnosed depression with paranoia and OCD. One diagnosis I'm not sure of, but would lean toward BPD. And then lots of garden variety passive-aggression. Which leaves me with and ulcer.
A couple of passive aggressives, at least one mild case of histrionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and one I just can't figure out. I'm amazed at the managers that won't try and MANAGE these people but just complain about it.
The cataloging group - Asperger's and OCD - seriously.
Let's see we've got a lot of OCD, a little passive-aggressive, a smidge of histrionic and just a touch of borderline personality disorder.
Glad to see other librarians do this as well. It is a little game we play when things get slow at the reference desk.....
Hoarding: the inability to throw anything away no matter how insignificant so that your co-workers are forced to work in increasingly smaller and smaller work spaces
uncontrollable rage: co-workers that are ticking time bombs and could blow up on you at any moment, and have.
The book to read is "Toxic coworkers: how to deal with dysfunctional people on the job".
Is sudden blindness a mental problem?? I mean when coworkers don't want to see or deal with particular problems in the library and just walk away like nothing happened? In other words when coworkers refuse to see the elephant in the room. That should be a mental illness too!!
"The book to read is "Toxic coworkers: how to deal with dysfunctional people on the job"."
Oh yeah, I'm really going to check this out on the job. That'll get the passive-aggressive narcissistic drama queen convinced "IT'S ALL ABOUT HER!!!" Well, actually...it is.
I'm bipolar and I like to think of myself as a good librarian. The BPD also comes in handy when policing children. . .one minute nice, the next MEAN!!
Air travel
After reading all the posts, I feel absolutely normal and functional. I have various quirks that don't hurt anyone, but are irritating to coworkers.
I like the idea of "Mental Syndrome Bingo Cards," wherein you can 'scratch off' your co-workers when they display a trait. . with a prize for the most observant. Of course, no one would ever collect it. The parties in question would be busy hotly disputing the diagnoses. :) Mel
The boss has OCPD and is bipolar. Perhaps even schizophrenic or has multi-personality disorder (One former employee said she'd counted 19 personalities!).
The rest of us are completely normal, at the moment anyway.
But the turnover is sky high. I've outlasted lots of others, maybe because I can let what's said to me roll off, turn the other cheek, whatever, most of the time anyway.
I love my job, as have most of my coworkers, past and present. Just hate seeing people come and go so often. And dread it for the new people when reality sets in.
diagnosing the mental health is very important.people should be aware of mental health.i think it s very useful to all.
=====================================
julie
Dual Diagnosis
Dual Diagnosis
My library director is obsessive compulsive, bipolar, and perhaps even schizophrenic, has multiple personalities, whatever! I love my job but we go through a lot of turnover, and just surviving gives me high blood pressure, chest pains, trembling, headaches, probably an early death. I wish my library director could just be nice.
Anxiety is a part of life for everyone. It is quite normal to feel anxious over certain circumstances however it becomes a problem when a person is anxious over seemingly small, trivial or non existent factors. This is known as an Anxiety Disorder and is a recognized mental illness. http://www.xanax-effects.com/
I think having a personality disorder is a prerequisite for employment in a library. Narcissistic, histrionic, passive aggressive, schizoid - you name it, you'll find it @ your library. In fact the information I read about schizoid personality disorder, besides seeming strangely autobiographical, says suffers seek ofter seek out library jobs.
In the library 'profession' you are never more that six feet away from a nutter (fact)
I thought catalogers suffered from CDO. It's like OCD, but it's in alphabetical order, like it should be. :) -From a future cataloger
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