B15
Collective Memory
Excerpt from poetry collection:Call it Awash: Stories and aphorisms.

The Personal Conditions Manual: Why it is and when it wasn’t.

Constance Rhubarb published the first edition of The Personal Conditions Manual in ERA 17. Prior to the Personal Conditions Manual, the existing information available for psychological ailments were in the form of “diagnostics manuals,” created and revised by doctors and scholars. As their name suggests, these were used to diagnose people with mental conditions, based on the criteria the patients described. Rhubarb felt there was an issue present in the current system, being that the descriptors for these ailments were written by observers describing what was “non-normative” about their patient or subject. The Personal Conditions Manual, on the other hand, was the first comprehensive classification system in which psychological conditions were defined by people who had the conditions, rather than from the perspective of an observer. […]

In her preface, Rhubarb states, “The definition of a disorder is the entry-point for an outsider to understand what a condition entails. […] If their definition is inaccurate or incomplete, how is a professional expected to help somebody who has the condition?” Group names and descriptive definitions are offered up by communities of persons who experience the condition. These definitions are then voted on by that community and updated with each revision. These were the guidelines Rhubarb suggested when she published the first edition on the Public Record, and they remain for each monthly revision. Communities discuss how they want to be identified, then vote on the best description for their condition, and the highest voted definition becomes their group’s Definition for the next month. After countless revisions, the PCM is now the standard classification system for assessing and assisting with cognitive conditions.

A notable success of The Personal Conditions Manual was the separation of ailments with overlapping symptoms. For example, the term “depression” once applied to a variety of ailments with a long, vague list of descriptors. These terms were intentionally vague, being that they needed to apply to a host of sufferers. Communal-diagnoses allowed for granular definitions of conditions, as long as of communities of peoples who suffered from similar ailments. If any self-described group could create a test in which more than 80% of participants within their group could pass, and more than 80% of those not in the group would fail, they were allowed to create their community. This was meant to ensure that only those who actually experienced the condition were allowed to comment on it, as these are the only points of view the community was interested in. Users in the communities frequently discuss symptoms, relate to each other’s pains, and offer up suggestions for amendments to their groups’ monthly Definition.

Deesy Vorator