Press Release: Professors Hopkins and Goetsch open world’s first Podcast Asylum

by Lee Hopkins on September 21, 2005 · 24 comments

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Professors Hopkins and Goetsch celebrate another successful case resultFor Immediate Release

With funding from the World Health Organisation, leading mental health researchers Professors Lee Hopkins and Sallie Goetsch have opened the world’s first mental health facility for sufferers of various mental health issues relating to podcasting.

The asylum, located in the glorious and tranquil Adelaide Hills, Australia, offers peaceful, 24-hour attention from skilled and caring nursing staff and immensely qualified doctors. Set in 200 glorious acres of sculptured gardens and enchanting forests, The Podcast Institute offers caring, counselling and rehabilitative treatment for the following mental health issues:

Nurse Janet is there to care for you‘Podcast Solipsism’ (also known as ‘Earbud Isolation’)
Sufferers of this ravaging disease can often be found with earbuds in place during shopping trips, errand running and even Parent Teacher exchanges. This condition affects the higher cognitive processes, so that, for example, listeners to podcasts may actually believe that the people they listen to on podcasts, such as Dawn and Drew, Adam Curry and Hobson and Holtz, are real people, not the superb actors reading the carefully crafted scripts that they really are.

Sufferers of this disease may alternatively believe that only the podcast is real and that everything outside of their earbuds is fantasy.

‘Podcast Unavailability’
Encountered when podcast junkies find their regular podcasts have downloaded incorrectly into their podcatcher. An example would be when episode #69 of the popular soap opera for business communicators, the Hobson & Holtz Report, failed to download correctly. MedNews reported that sales of valium and other psychotherapeutic drugs tripled as a result.

‘Podcastus Ignoramus’
A horribly debilitating disease that ravages the body and mind of the victim. Sufferers lose cognitive coherency and start to believe that podcasts are either not relevant to their lives, or else pretend they don’t even know what they are.

Felicity is gaily massaging her clients to better health‘Post Traumatic Podcast Disorder’
Victims suffer intense and prolonged shock when they realise that podcasters are allowed to swear in front of and to their audience and can get away with it; this is a condition most often associated with parents realising that their children subscribe to the Dawn & Drew Show.

‘Podcast Withdrawal Syndrome’
Sufferers are paralysed by the psychological terror associated with the loss of function of one’s mp3 player. Clinical staff can rapidly treat the mild version by being armed with rechargeable AAA batteries.

‘Compulsive Podcast Bookmark Disorder’
As identified by our consulting Professor of Technical Podcasting, Professor Derek Leverington, CPBD results when a podcast listener compulsively creates far-too-frequent bookmarks on their mp3 player whilst listening to a podcast. This condition results from a podcast listener experiencing a profound sense of anxiety, even abject terror, over the possibility that they may lose their place in their podcast due to an inadvertent pressing of a button on their mp3 player. A positive diagnosis CPBD is arrived upon by observing a patient bookmark a podcast more frequently than once every 5 minutes.

‘Hyper Attention Podcast Disorder’
Sufferers of this mental health challenge can be identified by their lack of focus to tasks, caused by listening to podcasts instead of concentrating on, for example, driving, writing a report, or washing up. Predominantly associated with men rather than women, it appears that sufferers find difficulty in completing more than one task at once when listening to podcasts.

‘Podcast Humouritis’
A form of early senility, victims of this disease laugh out loud at inappropriate moments or locations, for example when on a crowded bus or in the reading room at the library.

Podcaster’s Insomnia
As personally discovered by our Canadian research fellow Dr. Papacosta, the victim suffers from the inability to fall asleep because they are re-recording their own podcast (or a client’s podcast) in their mind. Very often they also awaken at 3:00 a.m. with ideas for new podcasts. Currently there is no treatment for this debilitating disease.

Sven can massage your podcasting cares awayAnd finally, ‘Podcast Anxiety’.
As already researched by my highly esteemed colleague Professor Leverington, and replicated by my erstwhile colleague Dr Hobson, this condition is caused by having too many podcasts backed up in one’s media player and a lack of time to listen to them. Treatment can include enforced break at the asylum, and depending on one’s gender and preferences, repeated sessions of massage therapy by either our dusky handmaidens Agnes, Denish, Delores and Monique, or our toned and burly Swedish masseuse named Sven.
One of our handmaidens, Agnes One of our handmaidens, Denish
One of our handmaidens, Dolores One of our most popular handmaidens, Monique

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