The conditions that we, as a society, choose to medicalize, and the ones that we do not, reflect our collective values. Case in point: Shift Work Sleep Disorder. Also known as “being tired because your job hours are not consistent with your Circadian rhythm.”

This is significant because Provigil is approved by the FDA for treatment of SWSD, validating SWSD as a real, treatable, medical condition. What about, “Rave-Dancing Sleep Disorder,” which is the condition where you are too tired to dance to trance music until four in the morning? That condition doesn’t exist, of course.

This raises two questions: first, why is it that we need to medicalize something as simple as, “being tired because you work until five in the morning,” and second, why is it that we choose to medicalize THAT, but not other activities that also keep people up until early hours? Which adds more value to the world as a whole: working a factory job or dancing ecstatically at a rave?

I blame the Puritans.

And of course, more fundamentally, why is it that the state gets to decide which activities are worth taking medication to stay up for, instead of the individual?