Comments on: Diagnosing Darth

Diagnosing Darth

Chocolate Pickle — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:54:41 -0800

The Dark Side is like using drugs. "It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn't do it." A psychiatrist diagnoses Anakin Skywalker.

By: boo_radley

boo_radley — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:55:39 -0800

Science has never been softer!

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:58:42 -0800

Let's not discount the possibility of a midichlorian defect. This is a scientific journal, after all.

By: furiousxgeorge

furiousxgeorge — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:58:44 -0800

We should really have the psychiatrists working on healing the PTSD all the Star Wars fans got from watching those crappy movies.

By: adipocere

adipocere — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:02:00 -0800

C'mon. This was just a character summary about Willow in the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with some terms from the DSM thrown in to dress it up a little. We will keep getting squishy-squishy "science" articles and none of us have the midichlorians to stop them. Bored now!

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:19:47 -0800

What if the Sith were right?

"What the Jedi call the Dark Side, and what came to be known as the Dark Side, these people believed that life should be about emotion. They believed you should be unrestrained, that the galaxy wants us to love and lust and kill and make art and cry and dream..."

By: Nice Guy Mike

Nice Guy Mike — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:22:24 -0800

"They believed you should be unrestrained, that the galaxy wants us to love and lust and kill and make art and cry and dream..." ...and dominance and butchering anyone who disagreed with you....

By: ooga_booga

ooga_booga — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:29:15 -0800

Well, if Anakin were around today he'd probably end up like this.

By: treepour

treepour — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:30:10 -0800

It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn't do it. Bit of a derail, but I can't help noticing how, in the sort of diluted psychobabble that makes it to the tabloid level of science journalism, you can pretty much replace any reference to drugs with a victorian-era reference to masturbation.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:38:07 -0800

"It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn't do it." Is this really about the Dark Side, or about George Lucas finally coming to terms with abusing CGI?

By: Skygazer

Skygazer — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:42:53 -0800

Second Star Wars FPP within two hours of one another. Shouldn't this trip some Metafilter Defcon 1 code alert or something? -Luke SkyGazer

By: Skygazer

Skygazer — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:44:22 -0800

"It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn't do it." Blazecock Pileon: Is this really about the Dark Side, or about George Lucas finally coming to terms with abusing CGI? Yes, and LSD and THC?

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:51:00 -0800

I've been trying to come up with anagrams for ANAKIN SKYWALKER and so far the best I've found is A SNARKY WEAK LINK.

By: homunculus

homunculus — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:07:08 -0800

It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness

By: fleetmouse

fleetmouse — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:07:22 -0800

"It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn't do it." He says that now but I bet we catch him down the line hiring a smooth young Jedi to lift his luggage.

By: clockzero

clockzero — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:15:17 -0800

Now, their letter to the editor titled "Is Anakin Skywalker suffering from borderline personality disorder?" is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychiatry Research. This would imply that he's a human being, which I think even a casual viewing would decisively rule out.

By: psycho-alchemy

psycho-alchemy — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 01:10:33 -0800

Any deep inspection of Annakin would have found that he is just a card board cut and any resemblance to a thinking person is strictly coincidental. Maybe someday someone will redo the series and really show how the darkside can seduce you.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 02:24:37 -0800

"I had watched the two prequel movies ["Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith"], and it was during my residency in psychiatry while trying to explain borderline personality disorder to medical students that I thought of Anakin," said Eric Bui, a psychiatrist at Toulouse University Hospital in France. JOKES: 1) Why would someone in psychiatry torture himself? 2) Apparently he's blocked out memory of the Phantom Menace entirely.

By: absalom

absalom — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 07:32:38 -0800

Nice Guy Mike: What choice do the Sith have? You think the Jedi are just going to let them sit there and enjoy their epicurean alternate paradigm? No way!

By: w0mbat

w0mbat — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:53:30 -0800

Therapy you should get. Help you it will. Yes.

By: grobstein

grobstein — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 13:04:35 -0800

He says that now but I bet we catch him down the line hiring a smooth young Jedi to lift his luggage. that's the training sequence from Empire

By: Kit W

Kit W — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 13:53:37 -0800

Having worked as an editor, I have a long-established theory: when writing falls below a certain standard, the writer always looks half-crazed no matter how sane they actually are. This is because writing creates a facsimile of reality, bad writing creates an incorrect facsimile of reality, and mental disorders likewise frequently involve interpreting reality incorrectly. Being stuck in the mind of a bad writer is like being stuck in the mind of someone ill, in that reality doesn't resemble itself in either place. Whether or not one can apply this theory to characters, I shall go away and reflect. :-)

By: butterstick

butterstick — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:08:11 -0800

That Ars Technica link is great... it's a shame how much good and interesting content is out there under the "Expanded Universe" which will probably never get made into "canon" film. Pity Lucas did such a horrible job with the prequels.