Too Funny

Just a bit more Library humor to get you through the rest of this boring Thursday.

What are people thinking?

Now, this is interesting.

Honestly, at first I thought this was a joke.

For instance, check out this YouTube presentation on “Motivational Deficiency”. (I believe that I may have experienced a touch of this syndrome just last Monday morning)


But it turns out that these folks are quite serious;

“…the techniques of ‘disease-mongering’, in particular the expansion of the boundaries of disorders, the medicalisation of normal life events and the portrayal of risk factors as diseases is prevalent in the medical marketing world. Conference delegates expressed the hope that the public and media would become more skeptical of such claims and that health professionals would challenge the claims and recognise the marketing interests that attempt to shape their perceptions of disease.”

The Public Library of Science (An important, open-access science resource which really deserves a ‘blog entry of its own) has a collection of articles on “Disease Mongering” here.

Perhaps all these (ahem) patients really need is a bracing dose of bibliotherapy?

Searching “Librarian and syndrome” in Google returns:

“Systems Librarian Imposter Syndrome”

“Overprotective Librarian Syndrome”

“Tidy Librarian Syndrome”

“Silent Librarian Syndrome”

Finally, there must be a market out there among librarians for this sort of thing, Haworth Press has created a cottage industry out of it.

“Martyr-Librarian Syndrome”

“University-Library Syndrome”