The list of things I lie awake at night getting annoyed about is growing. Currently, it stands at the following: everyone else in our baby group has bought an Audi and I’m still bussing my family around in a diesel Skoda — everyone else can therefore change their CDs without opening their boot; our very expensive flatscreen television is not HD — it’s not even HD-ready; and my 8Mb broadband is only providing 1.3Mb of broadband.

I am tormented by stuff that either doesn’t work or I haven’t got. I am also infuriated by automated helplines, cold calls, warm calls, any calls, special invitations to take out loans, tricksy small print, tricksy big print and people doing well on Britain’s Got Talent only because they’re ugly.

I assumed my increasingly bitter attitude to life was an inevitable symptom of getting older. One thing I didn’t lie awake at night worrying about was how many things I was worrying about. Society is annoying. People are annoying. With their flashy cars and their televisions with hard drives and their iEverythings and their functioning broadband. It is completely understandable that I get annoyed by them.

But no, apparently I have a mental illness. Or at least that’s what the American Psychiatric Association says. It met in San Francisco recently to discuss reclassifying good old bitterness as post-traumatic embitterment disorder (PTED). It’s just like post-traumatic stress disorder but instead of feeling anxious, PTED sufferers want revenge.

“They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It’s one step more complex than anger. They’re angry plus helpless,” Dr Michael Linden, the German psychiatrist who named the disorder, told the Los Angeles Times.

Are you mentally ill if you want to wheel-clamp a wheel clamper? Or loosen the screw holding the Flatron 3000 television to your show-off neighbours’ wall? Or stage a dirty protest in the main lobby of the BT broadband headquarters? Or are you simply normal?

Linden explains that the kind of embittered people he wishes to reclassify as mentally ill are hard-working types suddenly beset by something awful — a failed relationship, being passed over for promotion, the usual stuff. From that moment on, they are consumed by a great sense of injustice. “Embitterment is a violation of basic beliefs. It causes a very severe emotional reaction. We are always coping with negative life events. It’s the reaction that varies.”

So now I’m worried. In American psychiatric terms, I cope with negative life events badly. I complain, I moan, I grumble. I lie awake at night plotting cartoon deaths for the owner of the faulty car alarm across the street, for the corner-shop guy who refused my Scottish tenner, for all those people who still haven’t understood that shouting down your mobile phone on a train is antisocial. Is this just me? Is it just me who thought Michael Douglas was well within his rights to shoot up a fast-food joint in Falling Down because they refused to serve him breakfast at 11.02am? Or is it all blokes?

Linden says people suffering from post-traumatic embitterment disorder are almost treatment-resistant. They think the world has to change, not them. “Revenge,” he concludes, “is not a treatment.”

No, but it is therapeutic. I wonder how my neighbour’s car — the one with the faulty alarm — will look with “Shut up” written down the side in red spray paint?