Symptoms and signs: prefers popular books, songs, and movies to the classics of Western literature, music, and theater. Imitates heavy metal rockers ("metalheads") or atavistic sixties folk rockers ("deadheads") in dress, hairstyle, and speech.
Etiology: basic rebelliousness tempered and to some extent coopted, but also unproductively molded, by the passivizing effects of mass culture. Student seeks sense of belonging through retrograde group identification.
Treatment: mild symptoms indicate sterile gluteculturide suspension (Whitebread 2000); more acute cases will respond to phenobloomdehyde u.s.p. (Occludex). Students with difficulties responding properly to poetry will show marked improvement with appreciazone (PoemGroove). Chronic symptoms may require aversion therapy (isolation and ridicule).
Prognosis: fair. Group identification is powerful and resists most pharmaceutical therapies. Once the student's primary goal has been revealed as simple belonging, a sense of community, it is relatively easy to modulate that desire along more acceptable academic lines.
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Copyright 1992 the Good Dead Usses