UNTREATABLE.COM
Patient forgot to text their friend back for six days. Remembered while loading the dishwasher. Has now decided they are, structurally, a bad friend. Has reviewed every friendship they have ever had for evidence. Has found some. Has ignored the friend who texted back three weeks late without comment last month. The friendship is, in fact, fine. Patient will not be able to message back for another two days because now the silence has become, itself, a reason for shame.
Chronic. Delayed response times are taken as character verdicts.
None. The friend, statistically, has not noticed. A physician with actual credentials would be more useful than our paperwork, if the worry persists.
Patients with Severe Am-I-A-Bad-Friend Rumination typically present with some or all of the following:
Severe Am-I-A-Bad-Friend Rumination belongs to the Institute's growing taxonomy of behaviors that real medicine has declined to name. It exists, roughly, at the intersection of internet culture, interpersonal friction, and whatever is happening in the lives of our patients. It is fictional and it is everywhere.
Under its Latin label Dubium amicitiae retrospectiva, the condition appears only in the Institute's own catalog. Real clinicians do not recognize the term. They recognize the behavior.
Think you have it? Find out what else you might be suffering from at the diagnosis generator. Or browse the full index of afflictions.