Haaretz newspaper says that an Israeli team has developed software to spot depressed bloggers “by analyzing their writing. The program scours blogs for words and phrases, descriptions and metaphors that can indicate the writer’s psychological state.”
The news coming out of Israel has been bad enough to make even the most positive-minded bloggers betray signs of depression. So now comes this wonderful announcement that we can be diagnosed and treated in time, and not suffer the fate of Binyamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist who, according to the recent satirical piece by Michael K. Smith, committed suicide recently.
According to the story: “Yatom grew increasingly depressed at his complete lack of progress in getting the Prime Minister to acknowledge reality, and he eventually suffered a series of strokes when attempting to grasp Netanyahu’s thinking, which he characterized in one diary entry as “a black hole of self-contradiction.”
A friend asked quite seriously whether that story is true. My response was that in the regions of Ali Baba, Jesus and Theodore Herzl, everything becomes true, as long as you can get a few people to believe you.
When lies become the reality for which people live and die, fiction may be the best approximation of truth and blogging a reasonable therapy.