There has been a blast of initialisms — like acronyms but worse — making news recently and even more recently than that. Take ADHD, PTSD, PGD, and BPD. Take them, they’re yours. I mean that literally, as people are self-diagnosing with these psychological conditions and saying with great relief, “Well, that explains a lot.”

But it might not explain much. Acronyms are easy to sound out. Initialisms are obscure, so much so that I sometimes forget what they stand for.

Same goes for many people suddenly believing without medical confirmation that they have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Prolonged Grief Disorder, or Borderline Personality Disorder.

After two and a half years of social isolation, work in dire straits, financial worries, a life conducted online, and an avalanche of catastrophic news (the invasion of Ukraine, supply chain shortages, climate change, elections, mass child slaughter, economic inequality stripped bare, and more) scarcely anyone is in a fit state to self-diagnose anything.

I particularly object to Prolonged Grief Disorder. Given the number of deaths related to COVID-19 and its strictures, it’s very much up to the individual how long she or he grieves and how deeply. Virginia Woolf’s mother would lie on the grave of her first husband, which sounds reasonable given what she was in for with her second, Woolf’s father.

I am unsure what to do with my share of my late mother’s ashes. She has since visited every room of the house. Eventually I hid them away lest my grief, which I call Prolonged Grief Order, be classified as disorderly.

And PTSD medicalizes what may be a rational and continuing response to terrorizing experiences. If you cannot work, was the work untenable to begin with?

ADHD is a lifelong condition from which people suffer grievously, not the jaggedly annoying persistent attention failure that is the hallmark of people living, working, shopping and playing online.

As the Guardian put it so aptly about the flaming rise in diagnoses, there are three ways to view ADHD: as a brain anomaly; a hugely profitable clinical disorder; and a #ADHD hashtag that “affirms” daily experience.

“People are able to take an ADHD diagnosis to a school or a workplace and have reduced responsibilities because of it, or accommodation for testing, et cetera. When there are benefits like that in place, you have different kinds of consumers.”

TikTok is said to be particularly good at diagnosis, another triumph for online corporate-owned malevolence.

I don’t have ADHD. But I recently forgot how to pay my taxes. The accountant sent the figures and I looked at them. Do I sign a form and pay online, hoping Revenue Canada will say, “Good, that matches up?” Do I pay the accountant? Does RevCan debit me? I cleanly forgot.

My calendar is confused. Am I attending an awards dinner or a mammogram? Is “Martha” a hair stylist or an investment adviser? MBNA sounds dental; no it’s a credit card.

The problem is concentration. It can be solved by reading slowly and carefully, just as obesity can be solved by eating less and alcoholism by fewer gulps. Bits of leftover COVID can help with the last two, since food tastes like damp cardboard and wine like scallions anyway. We shall be newly clever, slim and waterlogged.

Borderline Personality Disorder is a horror for sufferers, which includes not just the individual but those around them. I notice that people rarely diagnose themselves with it but quite readily diagnose others, a disorder in itself.

Depression was big; now it’s anxiety. Diagnosing the elusive and amorphous is a particularly American habit, partly because it affirms simplicity over complexity in the aim of huge profit.

I am very sad about those confessional online essays by young women elated to find a medical name for pain.

They need face-to-face medical attention, therapy and perhaps the right medication, things almost impossible to find in this shifting era of damage and yearning.

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