Chronic Kvetching Syndrome (CKS)

Chronic Kvetching Syndrome is less of a disease in the usual sense of the word than it is a condition marked by unremitting complaining to anyone who will listen about anything and everything that comes into the kvetcher's mind.

Only the subject of serious scientific investigation in recent years, the focus has remained on Jewish people because the word itself is a Yiddish term meaning to complain.

Perhaps owing to the preponderance of Jewish Psychiatrists involved in the development of the upcoming revision of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (the upcoming DSM-V), the terms Chronic Kvetching Syndrome was chosen over a less Semitically suggestive designation such as Chronic Complaining Syndrome. Even Psychiatrists, odd though they may sometimes be, do make an attempt at humor now and again.

Used in common parlance for many years, The American Psychiatric Association has finally developed criteria by which it can be dignified as a specific diagnosis.

Establishing the Diagnosis

The criteria for establishing the diagnosis of CKS are pretty straight forward.

Any four of the following six items (called "rule-in criteria") must be met for the diagnosis to be appropriate:

1. The behavior must occur on most days, indiscriminately, to anyone who will stop and listen to it.

2. The supply of things to kvetch about is inexhaustible.

3.Those subjected to it on a regular basis find it irritating and seek ways to escape from the immediate proximity of the kvetcher.

4. The behavior cannot be explained by any diagnosable physical or other psychiatric condition.

5.The incidence of kvetching increases in direct proportion to the amount of time people are willing to listen to it and

6. The subjects addressed are not of the type that complaining about helps, in any way, to alleviate.

Available Treatment

While Pfizer, Smith-Kline-French and a number of other major pharmaceutical manufacturers both in the U.S. and abroad have been hard at work for over a decade now in the quest to develop an effective psychotropic intervention to combat CKS and the isolation it frequently causes those who suffer from it, success has not yet been reported.

Psychotherapists have not found known techniques that are successful with many other conditions to be effective. The hypothesis is that because client motivation to change is generally regarded as the core key determinant in the success of any psychotherapy, it does not work in this case because people afflicted with CKS tend not to see it as an affliction at all. In fact, most of them, when asked, will insist that the problem is not that they complain all the time, but that not enough people (most especially their adult children) do not take their complaints seriously and make everything OK.

The quest for appropriate and effective interventions, spearheaded by hoards of those adult children, continues unabated.