"Woke Up This Mornin', Got A Blue Moon in Your Eyes"
A recent issue of Superman (#176, “A Little Help”) published in the aftermath of DC's recent cross-over All-Out War mini-series, put the Man of Steel in a setting few of us expected to see him - a psychiatrist's office.

Structured as a single session with a long-necked therapist named Dr. Strong, the tale (writer, Jeph Loeb; artists, Ian Churchill and Norm Rapmund) describes the Kryptonian's first visit to this ultra-specialist shrink. It opens with a recounted fantasy then shows our patient recalling his first meeting with the currently deceased Aquaman, a visit with his adoptive father Jonathan Kent (who may be displaying early onset Alzheimer's) and finally a moment with his grieving wife, Lois. All of these sequences are designed to delineate those anxieties that are seriously stressing Kal-El.

While I'm sure there are fans who'll themselves be distressed at the thought of this icon of American values seeing a shrink, the story indicates that Superman's not the first to visit Dr. Strong: clearly the responsibilities of hero-dom can be emotionally debilitating. Me, I found myself wondering what diagnosis the good doctor would be giving the Kryptonian for billing purposes. Most insurance companies and HMOs, after all, require a demonstrable DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) diagnosis before they'll pay for services. I don't know what kind of coverage Clark has, but I bet his therapist tacked a diagnosis in his file.

Back in an earlier incarnation, I used to do provisional intake diagnoses for new admissions to a private child-care facility. My first inclination would be to assign Kal-El a tentative diagnosis of PTSD.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is an anxiety disorder diagnosis frequently used for those who've been traumatized by events like All-Out Galactic Invasion. According to the DSM-IV, it's generally characterized by the following:

1. Exposure to a traumatic event involving actual/threatened death or serious injury; a threat to the physical integrity of self or others - and a response of intense fear, helplessness or horror;
   
2. Persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event;
   
3. Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event;
   
4. At least two of the following persistent symptoms: sleeplessness, irritability, difficulty concentrating, hypervigilance and exaggerated startle response.

Most superheroes, of course, experience events involving actual/threatened death on a regular basis - and quite a few of 'em suffer from persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event, if only because their authors feel the need to regularly re-examine their origins. Of greater concern is the second pair of criteria. If you're Peter Parker, say, and you're regularly experiencing dreams and flashbacks of your girlfriend falling off a bridge, and you're driven by these remembrances to avoid going anywhere near that bridge or find yourself growing paralyzed once a masked villain has led you to its neighborhood - than your level of personal distress may be severe enough to warrant therapy. Does the Man of Steel fit under this umbrella?

The key lies in that final cluster of criteria: you could probably argue that “hypervigilance” that is part of the superhero job package - and in Superman's case, he clearly has it in spades: at one point during his first session, he dashes out of the room to quickly rescue a cat from a tree. As for the other symptoms, they're a bit more difficult to nail down. We know, for example, from earlier tales that Superman doesn't require much sleep, so what constitutes “sleeplessness” for him? I don't recall too many recent displays of irritability (in Man of Steel #120, he gets peeved at Lexcorp's cavalier attitude toward the environment, but this strikes me as justifiable righteous indignation) or difficulty concentrating (though on several occasions during the war itself, our hero seemed dangerously distracted), while that startle symptom seems just silly. If the Kryptonian persistently displayed an exaggerated startle response, then he and Lois wouldn't have any intact furniture in their apartment. Perhaps PTSD doesn't work, after all.

If Doctor Strong doesn't want to utilize a bogus catch-all (Generalized Anxiety Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, say) we may have to consider creating a whole new diagnostic label peculiar to superheroes/ines. Call it Kal-El's Disorder: a profound sense of helplessness/guilt triggered by an inevitable inability to protect everyone in the world all at once. It'd fit under the DSM-IV's general Anxiety Disorders category, but to meet it you'd need to possess powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.

I suspect Jeph Loeb's story is one of those single-issue tales designed to broaden our sense of Superman's humanity without going much further. (You have to wonder about the commercial viability of a story about the psychological fall-out from an All-Out War being released in the midst of our nation's current “All-Out War on Terrorism,” but I like the fact that it's been published.) The idea of placing the Man of Steel on the couch alongside Tony Soprano frankly tickles me - though I'm not sure that's the response that Loeb and company were going for. Still, it's clear that much of the superhero community would benefit from an issue's worth of directed introspection.

Perhaps some public-spirited comics company could put together a title devoted to therapeutic interventions for the meta-human community at large. If Dr. Strong is too busy, perhaps they could find someone else to take up the slack. Back in the fifties, EC experimented with a short-lived comic, Psychoanalysis, devoted to a single psychiatrist's therapy sessions. Wonder if that guy's still available?