Cass Avery: Each new label creates a new group of sufferers

I think the news item about people with pierced tongues who are suffering from what is being called the pierced tongue syndrome, a phrase used by the Dental Hygienists Association of Australia, is what finally woke me up to the growing overuse and abuse of the term "syndrome".

Pierced tongue syndrome? What? The piercing affects their dental work. Yeah really? Who would have thought? Wow. But the dental hygienists aren't quite as canny as they think they are because wherever I look, I find someone is calling something a syndrome and thereby creating a whole new group of sufferers. It's reached epidemic proportions.

Even John Howard, the political Pinocchio (does he look like a wooden boy to you, too?), so recently and pointlessly in Auckland, managed to discover a syndrome.

During the press conference at the Sheraton Hotel, a journo asked him about a newspaper headline that mocked him and Howard replied: "But, you've got to say something for a headline, I guess, and none of you are unfamiliar with that syndrome, are you?"

What? So now headline writing is a pathology? Newsflash John, negatively phrased bold type is neither a scientific nor a behavioural problem. It's a job. And when done well, it's a piece of art.

Syndromes are popping up everywhere in the world.

In the United States, a newspaper reports on the "gatekeeper syndrome", nothing more than the bureaucratic tendency to a chain of command where access to people and information is carefully controlled. This is almost a universal, considering it applies to everything from a teenager's bedroom being off limits to younger siblings to the love of large organisations for creating a sense of power by making everything difficult to do.

It's hardly a syndrome, most people gate-keep somewhere, sometime. It makes a lot of them feel good.

The US also brings us trash compactor syndrome, one of those witty metaphor syndromes that translates to nothing more than the frustrations people feel when they work in boring and tiny offices all day long. The cure? Get a life.

Or what about Clark Kent syndrome? This one is just silly. It's the trend of casual-dressing corporate guys to keep sharp suits in their offices so they can change for important meetings and then go back to their polo shirt for the rest of their work day.

If what people keep in their office cupboards or drawers is worthy of being a syndrome, there should also be last week's lunch syndrome, overuse of Post-it note syndrome ... it could go on and on.

Russia gives us a goodie - the toilet-brush syndrome. This is a local term for their tendency to pass pieces of legislation that can never work. Just as a toilet brush can never fly, so the legislation will never do what it claims to set out to do.

Their government process is clogged with passing such legislation but is it a syndrome? Nah, it's politics all over.

And women's magazines, where would we be without the plethora of social pathologies they give us to fret about? There's frantic family syndrome, formerly known as being really busy at home. And there's hurried women's syndrome, formerly known as being really busy at work. Everywhere you look there's a new syndrome.

Labelling a behaviour, or an act, a syndrome is a spurious way of trying to legitimise problems out of nothing more than ordinary human behaviour. It lends all the weight of medical gloom and severity to what are nothing more than modern ways of being.

If we label something a syndrome, we perceive we are affected by it or suffering from it. If we perceive we are suffering, we will go look for a cure. If we go looking for a cure, someone is going to charge us for it.

It's an economy of fret that makes money and creates an air of tension around how we live. It's time to say no to syndromes.

I am going to have a syndrome-free week. I intend to get things done; in Singapore this is labelled a no U-turn syndrome, and I intend to have a smile on my face, which perhaps should be called a U-turn syndrome.

And perhaps I'll get out one of the all-time best movies, called The China Syndrome and starring the underrated Jane Fonda (the leg-warmers were a minor setback).

This film is one of the great thrillers. Made back in the late 70s, it charts a fictional near-disaster when a nuclear reactor's core almost heats up so much it could have melted through the floor of the power plant, through the earth's crust and all the way to the other side of the planet, China.

This is the first syndrome I can remember hearing about, the China syndrome, when I was just a whippet. But it turns out the China syndrome couldn't happen, it's fictitious. And that looks to be a common syndrome of syndromes.