Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.
But there are a few things we can learn from this:
- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.
- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.
- most mental disorders are an issue of degree and not something qualitatively different from a typical experience. People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.
> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.
This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok.
There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Many young people lean into this and label everything as a defensive tactic.
A while ago, one of the trends was “time blindness”. People who were chronically late, missed meetings, or failed to manage their time would see TikToks about “time blindness” as if it was a medical condition, and self-diagnose as having that.
It was bizarre to suddenly have people missing scheduled events and then casually informing me that they had time blindness, as if that made it okay. Once they had a label for a condition, they felt like they had a license to escape accountability.
The most frustrating part was that the people who self-diagnosed as having “time blindness” universally got worse at being on time. Once they had transformed the personal problem into a labeled condition, they didn’t feel as obligated to do anything about it.
This parallels the debate about free will and determinism. If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?
Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can:
"Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition.
Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this
significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1]
i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too.
If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual.
The problem is conflating one's identity with the label allows a person to project all of their problems onto the rest of the world.
By "being" the label, one has little to no agency over it. Without agency, there is no responsibility, nor incentive to change. Without responsibility or incentive to change, there is no problem for the individual; rather the problem is everyone else.
This isn't just something that a person can do to themselves- it's something society can do to people. The phrase "bigotry of low expectations" describes a behavior of assuming that a label identifies a person, and that they have no personal agency to overcome it. The behavioral shift of everyone around that person molds the image the person has of themselves to a limited, restricted version of what they're actually capable of.
You can force agency, ironically, by applying subjective labels that require irrational amounts of hard work to shake off (not just a change of perspective, tho a permanent one also requires undue amounts of schlep)
Like "unwell"*, "uncool" or "has bad taste"
In the barbaric old days, like you mean, there was racism (no longer objective)... Nowadays you can deny my suggested labels are cruel, plausibly, even in court!
> could you still hold people responsible for their actions?
Surely this is trivially "yes". If their actions are deterministic, then your responses to their actions must also be deterministic, including holding them responsible (punishment, firing, etc).
Even stronger if you believe things are deterministic there is no reason not to hold them accountable. You don't try to argue with a broken clock for it to become more punctual, you just trash it.
If you have a mechanistic view of humans, you know that punishment can cause changes in behavior, so you would use punishment to cause the changes that you would like to see. Punishment is fully compatible with determinism.
> If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?
I've been thinking about an escape hatch here:
Imagine that all philosophical notions of free will were incoherent. In that case non-philosophers' use of "free will" would either be a) inherited from this philosophical incoherence, or b) pretentious/ambiguous nomenclature that reduces to a more practical, well-defined term-- e.g., self-determination, freedom from tyranny, etc.
In reality, it seems like in the vast majority of non-philosophers mean "free will" as a short-hand for one of the more practical, workaday terms. The only edge case I can think of is the use of "free will" in the history of Christian theology, but I very rarely see that come up in non-academic situations.
If my supposition is right, then we can practically swap out nearly all instances of "free will" for the relevant non-philosophical, well-specified lay terms. And the continue to hold people responsible for their actions based on the centuries of case-law, common law, social history and medical knowledge that led up to our modern era. Perhaps more importantly, we can incrementally level up our understanding of responsibility/justice based on modern research into human behavior, while completely avoid digressions into philosophical determinism.
In fact, I'd speculate that college philosophy "free will 101" classes are a kind of unwitting bait and switch. I bet if you did a survey, most prospective students would be expecting a class that sharpens their teeth on one of the workaday synonyms, most often something like "self-actualization." But that has about as much to do with "free will" that as "coffee bean calligraphy" has to do with Javascript. (Alternatively: it would be a fun prank to do a "free will 101" class that teaches students to stand up for what they believe in, resist tyranny, etc. :)
In a deterministic universe, the future is still affected by (and can be improved by) shaming people for behaving poorly, even when they have a predisposition towards such behaviour. Think of it like integral windup in a PID controller. The feedback provides an error signal that accumulates to (in most cases) move the person's outputs in a direction that will reduce the poor behaviour. Eventually their brain will start predicting the negative feedback and alter its outputs to produce more acceptable behaviours.
Whether this is best described as "learning", or as "internalised <whatever>", or as "trauma", is left to the reader.
> If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?
This is a good example of where over-thinking a topic in abstract terms causes some people to lose sight of the big picture.
Take a step back and think about what you’re saying: If nobody could be held accountable for their own actions, does the concept of accountability disappear? It’s a farcical claim.
But you’re right, this is essentially what is being argued: By invoking therapy speak and formal sounding labels, the person wants you to kindly box up any accountability or consequences under the label and direct them at the abstract notion of the labeled condition, instead of the person responsible.
This is why I experienced so many people getting worse at punctuality after learned the phrase “time blindness”: They used the therapy speak to transform themselves into the victim, at which point the pressure to improve their situation diminished because they believe victims couldn’t be blamed. The temptation becomes strong to label everything negative this way as it’s a nice escape hatch to externalize accountability.
Wouldn't it then absolve me of my personal responsibility to reprimand the person?It's not me choosing to hold people responsible, it's just something that happens (or doesn't, depending on what was determined)
I am interested in this topic, but I do sometimes find the compatiblism argument difficult to distill down to its essence without still leaving a sense of unfulfillment.
From my understanding, compatibilism boils down to accepting that everything may be pre-determined, but people are still free to make choices as long as they are uncoerced.
The argument from that quote above is a little bit subtler and aligns with my thinking. I don't believe we have free will in any sense, either everything is pre-determined, or it is random, and I can't even think of a definition of free will that would make sense (just like the compatiblism one does not to me). But clearly there is a feedback loop going on, and so it is inherently in the species best interest to hold people accountable for their actions, because the act of holding them accountable forms part of the inputs that lead people to make choices. Not doing this is not a great survivability trait overall. Doing so, we survive a bit more.
But I'm not sure that is strictly necessary to call oneself a compatibilist.
TL;DR: It argues that what comes after "God is dead" (Nietzsche) is "the soul is dead" (or less poetically, "the self is dead"), i.e. we become convinced we have no agency, but mere biological and environmental automatons with the concomitant lack of moral accountability.
The dilemma of determinism has the other side - if free will is indeed truly free, i.e. it may introduce causes that themselves do not have causes, the accountability is lost as well, for there is no continuity.
Reposted to address: labels on clusters of belief such as "free will" and "determinism"
tlb or pg has a pithy saying that I can't find now goes smth like
"we should avoid labels [on people] not because they are useless (they aren't) but they are hard to get right. Adding the cost of being wrong to that makes them not worth it"
There's some connection to the "build skill or taste?" dilemma threaded earlier
This is simultaneously funny and sad. I wonder when alcoholism will get a front row seat during zoom meetings (or even IRL meetings). "Can't help it hick I'm an alcoholic".
I think a lot of societal change these days can be summarized by the idea that self-labeling is seen as transforming something into "everyone else's problem".
Modern treatments do actually treat alcoholism like a disease. The one that cant be cured, but can be managed.
It is trying to remove the shame from the equation, because it is not a productive emotion. It makes people postpone and avoid steps necessary for treatment.
Yes but the issue here is that treatments exist for alcohol use disorder and that one cannot use the simple presence of alcohol use disorder as an excuse to dodge accountability.
And yet people are using things like "time blindness" as excuses.
I think socially it's because addiction is stigmatized heavily. Despite having real psychological disorders that fuel it, addiction is still largely viewed as self-inflicted. Of course this stigma doesn't come out of nowhere - people who are addicts almost always devolve into dangerous and asocial behavior. If someone is an asshole who stole 50 bucks from you to shoot up, it's easy to think they're a heroin addict because they're an asshole. But really it's the other way around.
Western society has basically built a hyper capitalist system that creates individualistic consumers, but has failed to hold individuals accountable to minimum standards.
The bar has never been lower and we just sort of amble on as a lonely, isolated society so long as the stock market grows quarter to quarter.
> Stop blaming capitalism for every problem in the world, it just makes you look childish.
Economics is intertwined with every other study. We can't pretend socio-economics isn't real, social interactions fuel the economy and the economy influences our social interactions.
Also, making connections to way capitalism might fuel addictive disorders, such as, say, talking about advertising of alcohol and tobacco, does NOT mean that we are saying communism is perfect. Communism fuels disorders in other ways. It's actually quiet childish to take any analysis of capitalism as a praise of communism. It's the sort of "team sport" mentality you see in politics among the most uneducated and reductive among us.
If you want to criticize capitalism on a website run by literal capitalists then the onus is on you to propose a better alternative. So far none of the other economic systems that humans have applied at scale have worked out better. I mean Islamic fundamentalist theocracies have lower rates of alcoholism but that advantage comes with some pretty severe downsides.
But nobody is trying to prove or show a better alternative, that's my point. A critique of capitalism doesn't mean we should dismantle capitalism.
I don't get it, because we do this with other stuff all the time. I program in C#, guess what? I have plenty of critiques of C#. That doesn't mean I want C# to go die, I love C#. It seems to me everyone understands this... until it's capitalism. And then, suddenly, it's our first day on Earth.
Also capitalism, like everything, is not just one thing. It's a complex beast and there's infinite possible implementations of a capitalist economy. Nobody actually wants raw, unregulated capitalism because that sucks major ass. Yes, that's a technical phrase.
Meaning, we can, and should, be looking to progressively improve our economic system. I mean, it's what we've been doing since forever.
It was created because those hyperindividual consumers will not enact any political change as it requires numbers and solidarity, something that our society of snowflakes finds disgusting. Everything else is a byproduct.
I think after a few expressions of time blindness, they'll discover that their contracts have continuity deficiency and their career vertical expression challenges.
The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.
>The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.
"A child who isn't disciplined at home, will be disciplined outside of the home" - old African proverb.
The issue is kids growing up without being taught accountability, but instead that they're perpetual victims of "the system" created by evil old white men, and therefore nothing they do is ever their fault. This is the fault of the parents, school system and society as a whole who coddles kids giving them the false sense of security that they can always have their way, right until they hit the brick wall of adulthood featuring employment, bills, debt, responsibilities and self sufficiency.
"Disciplined at home" is being a maybe not perpetual but victim of the system for something like 18 years though.
I don't get where this idea that kids are coddled with comes from. They usually are not even allowed to wear the cloths they want or choose the food they want and get pushed around to silly extents.
In order to hold someone accountable for their actions you need to allow them a choice in the first place. Disallowing children from making choices is one way of protecting them from the consequences of a bad decision: by not allowing them to make it in the first place. That is what coddling is, protecting from the environment. Protecting them from the choice is just a more extreme version of shielding them from the consequences.
Ye. But the hard problem as I see it is the "the consequences of a bad decision" part, for which many "bad decisions" have no consequence but the arbitrary punishment from adults itself.
I.e. not cleaning up toys from the floor. Staying up late. Wearing different colored socks. Playing or speaking too laud. What ever. The consequences of those are really complex or fuzzy and the threshold level for breaking the rules arbitrary.
Also the subset of "bad decisions" that maybe have some distant future bad consequence, i.e. eating too much ice cream, are even harder. Or all the 'none will like you if you do that' things you need to teach kids.
Speak for yourself. I've seen 2 year olds being able to choose their clothes and if they don't get their way, they throw a temper tantrum so bad they vomit.
And I fear, the child will turn into another Cartman. I.e. spoiled beyond any belief.
There’s enormous variation, from giving the kid whatever they want, to giving them no choice and then punishing them for doing what they’re told.
If you imagine it from the perspective of aliens with very different biology, it’s kind of crazy that this important and difficult task is given to people with zero training or qualifications.
I've seen this kind of thing and it annoys me to no end. However that seems to be a small minority among many.
But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.
Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ? Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power? Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with? Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Again, I agree with you that some are hiding behind these things in order to deflect blame, but let's not pretend that the young don't have every right to be mad at us.
>Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ?
Who said they should? Nobody should ideally, but that's the way the world works: shit rolls downhill. And being a cheeky little shit at work, will not result in a revolutionary change at the top of corporations leadership the way you imagine, but will just result in your direct manager's career being at risk due to your behavior, so you're giving him no choice but to cut you because they're not gonna die on your hill for you. Cultural changes take a long time and need to involve 90%+ of the workforce, not just a few.
>Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
You know why. Because the rules are made by those in power, and people choose to rise to power in order to make the rules by which others are held accountable.
That's why young people are engaging in the "lying flat" or quiet quitting movements, and voting outsiders of the establishment like Trump, Mamdani, etc. They want to flip the monopoly board over because they know they were dealt a shit hand. And while I'm not that young anymore, I totally support their movement.
Who is "us"? Youths are welcome to get as mad as they like but seething with impotent rage and posting hot takes on social media isn't going to get them anywhere. If they want to improve the world then first they'll have to work hard and pay their dues just like every other generation before them.
Or they could try to start a revolution, but frankly most of them are too weak and fragile to attempt anything that involves real sacrifice and risk.
> But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.
As young adults always had, since the dawn of time.
And as they've received and comprehended the answers, most quickly stopped asking.
That is part of what becoming an adult, without the "young" bit, means. It's not like these things are unknowable, or that the "system of things" is secretive. It's all rather obvious - it just takes a little time and experience to figure out the questions and notice the answers.
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> Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement?
Because that's how it works. It's not that different from asking, why should they suffer the consequences of a tree falling on them and crushing them? Because they happened to stand under it at the time, duh!
Society and civilization aren't fixtures created by nature/God - they're built out of human interactions. People pursuing all kinds of interests, alone or in groups, navigating around each other, cooperating, convincing or coercing each other. It's all abstract systems created and maintained by strangers. And the unfortunate reality is, someone screws up somewhere badly enough, everyone downstream of it suffers.
The sad irony is, the consequences they ask about come from mismanagement of systems that were created in the past to shield people from consequences of failure of earlier versions of the same or similar systems! That's what civilization is, in a way - stacking systemic solutions to problems of previous systems!
The silver lining is in hoping that every iteration makes less people suffer consequences and to a lesser degree.
> Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
It is invoked much more often than they think, but they're not able to recognize it - it looks different than with people not in power. And it needs to be different, because the situation is different too.
> Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with?
Why is it OK for them to yell at old disgruntled people for things they have nothing to do with? Yelling is easy. Understanding that almost no one individually has much influence on how things are, that can unfortunately take a lifetime.
> Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Because that's how life works. It was the same for us when we were young, and for our parents when they were young, etc. Young people don't know shit about life, and don't even realize that yet. Over time, they acquire knowledge, experience and relationships, and various kinds of power - and along the way, they are treated more and more seriously, until they themselves become the people "running things" and start hearing the same questions they used to ask from the next generation of kids.
----
To be clear: I'm not saying that things are all ideal, or even perfectly fine. I'm just saying that the answers to those questions aren't mysterious, and figuring them out is exactly what growing up to be an adult in a society looks like. It always has, which is why you can see the exact same complaints about "kids these days" and "old farts" showing up in every period in history, all the way back to ancient Greece and earlier.
This has been the worst thing about my experiences on Threads. A lot of people make what they - and the US mainstream, apparently - defines as a heterodox personality their entire sense of self. So almost everyone is some combination of queer, "neurospicy", a witch, "creative", and so on.
This often seems to come with some assumption of moral superiority.
But under the label many of them are absolutely mainstream people. Their posts aren't genuine spontaneous comments - they're calibrated and calculated as a marketing exercise for "engagement" and to promote a product, course, Insta lifestyle, and so on.
I realise it's tough out there and everyone has to hustle. But there really aren't many who acknowledge the gulf between the vocabulary of rebellion from the reality of "Please buy my course on how to be anticapitalist." (Actual example - not made up.)
If I looked I imagine I'd find a mirror image of hustle conformity and superiority culture on far right boards, only more so.
It's all quite weirdly Social Media™.
Edit: to add, I'm not criticising specific subgroups. I'm very aware the US is a dangerous place and being certain kinds of person significantly decreases your life expectancy.
It's more how social media has somehow distorted the online experience of those subgroups away from straightforward human exchange into commercial opportunity without people being aware of it.
Some young people in that phase of their lives where they grow into being responsible for themselves start missing the times when they were not responsible and try to extend those times with any pretext they can come up with. It's quite human but should of course not be encouraged.
I don't watch TikTok videos, I don't use Instagram, but I have been plagued by these symptoms my entire life, and don't really care about others opinions on it. You probably don't have it if those symptoms don't resonate with you, but there are plenty of people who genuinely struggle, and there's likely some overlap with those who have undiagnosed ADHD.
The problem isn't that time blindness is a fake issue.
The problem is that many people incorrectly self-diagnose as suffering from conditions like time blindness. Which they do for a variety of reasons: To externalize accountability for why they're late, to feel special, and so on.
A comparison is the large number of people who claim "gluten sensitivity" and maintain special diets. Now there are serious medical conditions like celiac disease that require one to avoid gluten. But the vast majority of self-diagnosed "gluten sensitives" do not have such conditions. Researchers conclude that for many of them there is no physical basis for their self-diagnosis.
Among other things this phenomenon makes it harder for people with actual conditions to be taken seriously, because there are so many impostors.
I assume that your solution is having a professional diagnosis.
Sadly this doesn't really work due to the current state of psychiatry where many people with legitimate issues are being denied a diagnosis and treatment (see for example: trans healthcare and gatekeeping, adhd healthcare, etc). It is even more weird because often when you go to two different doctors you will get different results.
Not to mention that usually to even explore the idea of getting an official diagnosis you start with a self diagnosis.
> But the vast majority of self-diagnosed "gluten sensitives" do not have such conditions.
If you believe that you have celiac but for whatever reason you haven't been able to test it yet, then there is no harm to try going glutten free. The real issue is how many people deny the very existence of glutten sensitivity and put these people in danger. If you look at communities of people with the disease you will see what I am talking about.
No that's not how it usually works. People with a serious mental health condition don't usually start with self diagnosis. Instead they are referred to a mental health practitioner by another healthcare provider, a school administrator, or the criminal justice system because they are unable to function effectively in society. Many mental health conditions impair the type of objective metacognition needed to reliably self diagnose in the first place.
> If you believe that you have celiac but for whatever reason you haven't been able to test it yet, then there is no harm to try going glutten free. The real issue is how many people deny the very existence of glutten sensitivity and put these people in danger. If you look at communities of people with the disease you will see what I am talking about.
You just made one hell of a strawman argument about what GP said.
He merely stated that “the vast majority of self-diagnosed ‘gluten sensitives’ do not have such conditions”, as you quoted. This comment jibes with my experience.
The two folks I know who have full-blown celiac end up projectile vomiting for hours if they consume even small amounts of gluten (e.g., gross contamination in a fryer or on a cutting board).
The two folks I know who have milder versions were able to figure out that they needed to be tested in fairly short order due to “digestion issues” when they ate gluten.
On the other hand, the dozens of other folks I know who claim to be “sensitive to gluten” have no real basis when saying so. When I mentioned to them that I have friends with celiac, and I empathize with them, and I suggest they get tested if they haven’t yet (undiagnosed celiac is real), the answer I get are nothing short of glib - “oh, I’m just on a keto diet, and this is an easy way to do it”, “oh, I just found that I feel bad after eating things like cake” (sugar crash? diabetic?), or “oh, I’m fine, I just want them to make a fresh one (of whatever) for me”.
Your defense of folks who claim a problem that they can (often) fairly easily determine that they don’t have is enabling those folks’ dysfunction — that is, lying to themselves and (per this thread) using labeling as a defensive tactic.
People who actually have celiac need very specific accommodations. But the multiples of people who claim “gluten sensitivity” when they don’t actually have it causes large swathes of the general population to disbelieve the folks who really do have it.
It’s ok to call out the poseurs for what they are while still looking out for folks who have celiac or might have celiac and don’t know it yet.
That's half my point, which is why I lead with agreement on that very problem, i.e. people self-diagnosing when they shouldn't. The top-level comment seems to attribute all such people who identify with those symptoms as doing so because of a trend.
Most wacky things start with a kernel of truth, so yes, the real tragedy here is people with a genuine psychological issue getting drowned out by a wave of trenders. The trenders denounce medical gatekeeping as exclusionary, but it’s also what protects resources for the genuinely needy, and what protects them from unnecessary medicalization.
> The top-level comment seems to attribute all such people who identify with those symptoms as doing so because of a trend.
I think the only source of disagreement is in the way you chose to frame it in absolutes, i.e., "all such people" instead of "people".
Framing anything in absolutes counts as a strawman argument, because all you need to do to refute it is find a single case, no matter how isolated it is, where it doesn't apply.
So you didn't think they were dismissive or trivialised the issue? I mean, I can sympathise with the frustration of people somewhat 'giving up' after labelling their own issues, but it's not a logical conclusion to assign it all to a trend. That's what they appeared to be blaming and I didn't see them say otherwise, in any of their comments.
> So you didn't think they were dismissive or trivialised the issue?
What issue would that be? People falsely claiming they suffer from conditions they do not have? Or is it when they claim they struggle with a condition they self-diagnosed but somehow don't even bother to seek medical help not even to verify a diagnosis? Because if there is something that harms those who actually have to endure these conditions is people making fraudulent claims and trying to capitalize on everyone's goodwill.
> I mean, I can sympathise with the frustration of people somewhat 'giving up' after labelling their own issues, but it's not a logical conclusion to assign it all to a trend.
Is it "giving up", or is it just abusing a label they clearly know doesn't apply to them? You're somehow avoiding the elephant in the room and the whole point of this thread, which is the problem created by fraudulent claims by attention seekers.
This isn’t such a great example. You don’t need to have celiac disease to benefit from avoiding gluten. I suspect some people avoid it because they feel better in some way. For myself eliminating gluten (or wheat, I’m not sure how to differentiate that) has been life changing, it immediately made breathing through my nose effortless, made concentrating easier, etc. I can tell you eliminating gluten is not easy, you have to cut out a lot of common foods, eating out is almost impossible. If someone is sticking to that diet they probably have a very good reason. I think a lot of people should give it a try at least and not worry about this being part of some fad. I’m a bit ashamed to admit but I only tried it because of a South Park episode...
You can differentiate that by buying some pure food grade gluten and eating that. There's a lot of stuff in wheat beyond just gluten. Of course this won't be a truly scientific controlled experiment but maybe good enough for your purposes.
Most restaurants have menu items with zero gluten, so eating out is hardly difficult. Not much gluten in a plain steak, potato, and vegetables.
i would encourage everyone to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. you interact with these people in passing, they deal with themselves all the time. you might find them grating or difficult to work with, and that's fair, but i would hope people wouldn't extend "i dont like this person" to "I dont believe this person has a disability and they're making it up and i assume this because i dont like them"
neurodivergence can and frequently is a real debilitating disability. it is really fucking hard to cope with in a society that actively punishes it, and is full of perspectives like yours that invalidate these very real conditions.
i understand it's a difficult thing to wrap your head around. it isn't super visible like someone missing their legs. it's a really complicated, nuance spectrum of problems that are also really difficult to understand by people who don't have it, and frequently the people who do have it also don't know they have or understand how it impacts them
You think that society now, more than ever, punishes this after what we've been discussing—numerous instances of people glorifying it and (attempting to) excuse poor behavior through it?
i didn't say more than ever, but in fact in a way it is: having a job and being able to support yourself is increasingly knowledge and skills based work, whereas in the past things were much more labor focused, which is a better fit for people with ADHD.
yes ADHD is better recognized and better treated these days. but as this entire comment section shows, there is still tons of stigma, misunderstanding, and a lack of compassion for a real disability
That article is not claiming that “time blindness” is a real standalone condition. As the other commenter already explained, it’s not among the conditions with actual diagnostic criteria and agreed-upon symptoms.
The first sentence claims that it’s something people with ADHD might experience, not a specific condition. In other words, it’s just the therapy-speak way of saying “chronically late”.
Note that the date on the article is also very recent: Only a few months old. This date is after the trend was popular on TikTok. It was likely written in response to the trend, as a way of capturing search engine traffic from people searching for it.
This is representative of the issue I was describing: There’s a sense among some people that using the therapy-speak terminology for something transforms it into a different type of personality attribute, for which they can’t be held responsible. Saying “I have a problem with being on time” and “I have time blindness” are functionally equivalent, but some people want to believe they the therapy speak labeled version warrants different treatment.
So because those people are ignorant of the nomenclature, they must not really experience those issues? I never asserted that it was a standalone condition, in fact I attributed it as related to undiagnosed conditions that do have names.
Applying formal-sounding nomenclature does not transform accountability like you’re suggesting.
Also, being able to Google a TikTok-famous phrase and get hits from SEO-targeted blog posts like this doesn’t really make it official nomenclature. They’re just trying to capture traffic with trending keywords. This is a very obvious SEO article.
Saying “I have a problem with being on time” and “I have time blindness” are functionally equivalent. Applying therapy speak doesn’t change the situation.
This is all very much missing the point, though. Someone who believes they have “time blindness” should recognize that they have a higher need for additional measures to address their issue, including more use of time keeping aids, alarms, and even accountability from external parties. Trying to use a labeled condition to escape accountability for one’s actions is not only unhelpful, it goes against the entire purpose of therapy.
The problem becomes more clear when you imagine the same idea applied to other issues: If someone is constantly lashing out and yelling at people, they don’t get a free pass for saying they have “an anger issue”. They’re still accountable for the consequences of their actions, regardless of what name you put on it.
The intersection of this with employment, specifically, seems hairy to me.
Is time blindness a disability that requires accommodation? To what extent, and who decides? If not, what makes it different from other disabilities that do get accommodation or some kind of protected status?
(These are meant to be rhetorical questions, but I’m sure someone has a direct answer, so I’d be interested in that too, because I really don’t know)
Employers only have to provide accommodations for actual diagnosed disabilities. And even then legally required accommodations only have to be reasonable. If the job fundamentally requires showing up for meetings and completing assignments on schedule then employers don't need to allow disabled employees to be late.
AHDH is an actual diagnosed disability. If I have to take meds that would leave you tweaking for 3 days then employers better allow me being late sometimes.
That would depend on the jobs requirements, wouldn't it? In some roles that might be a complete deal breaker. For example, anything customer/client facing. If you can't perform the jobs duties with reasonable accommodation, maybe you should find another job?
Similarly, if you are 3 feet tall you'll likely never be the worlds slam dunk champion. Not even if they provide you with a step-stool. It's not your fault, or the employers. Sorry, I guess.
It's not fun or easy for anyone to find a new job. However, it's usually less painful than staying if you're poorly suited to your current role.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. The secret to living a good life is learning to take an honest inventory of your personal capabilities and then figuring out how to work with what you have.
Nope. A disability diagnosis isn't a blank check where employers have to accommodate everything you want. If the job requires being on time then at least under the Americans with Disabilities Act an employer is totally allowed to fire an employee who shows up late. There are some nuances here that won't fit in a comment so consult an employment attorney if you have questions about your legal rights.
You've really missed the point there, what I said was that these people who are using the term "time blindness" are not using official terms, and that ignorance does not detract from their life experience. Psychologists refer to this as executive dysfunction, which that article specifically mentioned.
I'm not sure why you're attempting to discredit it, was the Masters in Science of the author, and the review by a doctor not sufficient for you?
I never missed your point, I made no comment on people failing to hold themselves accountable for their behaviour. You certainly seem unable to comprehend that not everyone experiences time as you do.
That's not what they said. Whether your condition is diagnosed or not, it's your responsibility to take care of it. If you're chronically late, you should set timers or write notes or whatever helps—whether you've got class-A ADHD and take meds or just assume there's something wrong with your sense of time.
Just saying "I'm time blind, sorry not sorry, deal with it" is not an appropriate reaction to causing trouble to your surroundings.
You're missing my point. I'm not trying to deal with the 'conditions' that individuals or groups say they have. My point is that if a group says a person has a condition it's considered real, but if an individual says so, it's not. It's a point about deferring to authority over what is existent or not.
Who defines conditions, says that ADHD is real, for example? It wasn't in earlier generations. The are terms of social (group) art - special names that are generally accepted as meaningful.
Yeah this is sadly common. People with autism, adhd, or who are trans are infantilized and have their agency removed from them when dealing with the medical establishment. In a "I will tell you how you feel" way.
> Did you even search for anything before making that idiotic comment?
You acknowledged the fact that "there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition".
I, in turn, added to the fact that you pointed out that not only are there "those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition" but there is also a complex mental disorder where individuals play the role of a sick patient to receive some form of psychological validation.
This somehow triggered in you an emotional reaction. Why was that?
You can't see how, in response to a comment that was primarily about whether "time blindness" is real, which you quoted directly, your comment comes across as dismissing any self-diagnosis as Munchausen syndrome? Did you read about that either?
>Patients with FDIS intentionally falsify or induce signs and symptoms of illness, trauma, or abuse to assume this role. These actions are performed consciously, though the patient may be unaware of the motivations driving their behaviors.
I'm not convinced 'I have that!' statements quite meet the criteria for that. You may be thinking of malingering.
Yeah, but if you have it you need to compensate for it. It’s what calendars, reminders, todo’s etc etc are for.
Speaking as one with a huge challenge in this space. No one is going to go “oh, you have ADHD, well, I guess you don’t need to fulfil that expectation…”
Which is why I use those tools extensively. I never said these people shouldn't try to compensate for any deficit, my point is that what people describe as "time blindness" is a real problem, and should not be so easily dismissed.
Yeah, but the parent is moaning about people shirking their responsibilities because of a self diagnosis.
That might be a projection; just a punctual person peeved off with the chronically late; but I was just adding the point that being challenged in this area isn’t an excuse.
I’m on-time for work stuff; I’ve figured out how to compensate. Personal life, ok, different story, but the responsibility has always rested with me.
Sorry, but you clearly have no idea what it's like to actually deal with this, at all. If I try to be on time to things, I will be stupidly early, or still think I have time to do tasks A & B before doing C, because they invariably take more or less time than I estimate. Or I start doing tasks X & Y, because I'm easily distracted, you know because it's a deficit in attention. Don't trivialise what you don't understand.
Your advice is as ignorant as saying 'just do more fun things' to someone with depression.
I don't want to trivialize, as I am currently procrastinating due to axiety on something, I know it's not easy.
But yeah, let's be stupidly early. I think part of accepting that you have a mental condition means that your life will simply not be optimal. Which is harsh to accept in a society which values efficiency above all else.
I think part of why time blindness / chronic lateness gets such visceral responses is that the behavior is a broken promise generator. The impact feels very personal.
Continuing with the walking stick metaphor...it'd be like if the person with the walking stick was frequently committing to go jogging, hiking, etc with others. They know the activity might be beyond their capabilities, but they keep saying they'll go on the difficult hiking trail or whatever. This impacts the plan for everyone else.
Saying you'll be somewhere at a particular time is a commitment to someone else. If you're making commitments and frequently breaking them, people will react badly to that.
Having had a number of chronically late people pass through my life, I've often heard "be there in a second", "I'm on my way", "5 minutes, max" and similar phrases once the person is late. What I rarely hear is proactive acknowledgement and ownership of the issue.
The commitments you make as a chronically late person need to include your chronic lateness as a factor, just as the mobility limited person should take their limitations into account before signing up for the group hike.
That's a good assessment, but it misses the fact that the person with the effective dysfunction genuinely believes they will 'be there in a second', because they cannot accurately assess time. The lack of forthcoming contrition is not difficult to explain, shame discourages people from drawing attention to their faults. If it's happening frequently, one would always be feeling 'faulty'. Aversion to that is expected.
So you agree with nomdep? If you know you have time blindness it's a good opportunity to do something about it. I tend to choose the be really early option because that works for me. But it can be stressful for sure. And I probably don't get as much done as someone that can organise their time better. That's just the way it goes.
False dichotomy. You can both take measures to address an issue you have, and still know that won't always solve the problem. Being really early sometimes is the only option, but if you're always doing it, regardless of how critical it is, you're wasting a huge amount of waking life.
Everyone wastes a huge amount of waking life on something, whether it's sitting around waiting for an event to start or watching TV or scrolling social media. So what.
So, knowing how much time and effort is required to maintain such responsibilities, you think someone with a similar situation, but who also has trouble being organised in general, has extra time to twiddle their thumbs for half an hour or something, before every single obligation with a time attached, just to be sure they don't get distracted? Do you have any comprehension of how ridiculous that sounds? If you're less capable of completing tasks you need more time than a typical person to do so, not less. They don't give students with ADHD less time in exams to ensure they can break task and put their pens down on time.
Still pushing those preconceptions, eh? Is this how you approach everything you could learn from? Assume you know all the answers before actually studying? Your teacup is full.
Do or do not, there is no "try". If you know you have to leave home at 7:00 AM to avoid being late then just set an alarm at that time. When it goes off then walk out the door, even if you're in the middle of some other task. Like if you're brewing coffee then just unplug the machine and leave: no coffee for you today. Don't allow yourself the opportunity to get distracted. Simple.
I’m not arguing against your basic point as I completely agree arriving on time is my own responsibility, but when I do what you suggest, i forget my house keys lol
You're really missing the point. No one here is claiming that ADHD isn't real. It's listed in the DSM. But there are practical techniques that people can use to improve their lives regardless of whether they have a mental health condition or not.
I think you're oversimplifying ADHD and its impact. It's not just a matter of using tools or strategies. ADHD exists on a spectrum, and it's often comorbid with other conditions like anxiety, autism, or depression. What works for one person might completely fail for another, especially if their challenges are layered or more severe.
Also, saying “regardless of diagnosis” is invalidating the real need for accommodations. People with ADHD often require not just personal effort, but systemic support, whether that’s in school, work, or healthcare.
He did not deny that it is in DSM or that there are people who fit the definition provided there.
Usually such techniques tend to not work when they are suggested by people who haven't experienced the consdition and haven't put serious thought into them.
I get that he didn’t say that here, but I’ve seen other replies leaning toward the idea that “it’s easy if you just try hard enough” and that’s what I was addressing, too.
this response is like hearing someone has crippling depression and telling them "have you tried just thinking happy thoughts? have you tried thinking about things in a happier way?"
here's the real thought process (edit: the writing is all over the place but im not gonna spend more time editing)
it's the night before, you know you need to leave at 7am, you pick up your phone to set alarm, and you see a text from jimmy, you spend 3 minutes texting jimmy, put your phone down, and move on to something else completely oblivious to the fact that you didnt actually set an alarm. i never CHOSE to text jimmy, there was zero percent of my brain that said "i see a text from jimmy, but i should set my alarm first because i might forget otherwise, so im going to set an alarm and then text jimmy just to be safe". this is what it means to have lack executive functioning. I will find myself making actions i did not make a decision to do, and the smaller the action it is the more likely i will do it without having ever decided to do it. for example, i will be focused writing software at my desk. 30 seconds later im standing in the kitchen, looking in the fridge, pulling out a sandwich, and it occurs to me: i never decided to stand up and go to the kitchen. the decision making process literally never occurred. I have to literally TIE MYSELF TO MY DESK to stop myself from doing stuff like this.
luckily, you wake up accidentally at 6am. crisis averted! you still have 20 minutes before you need to get out of bed. no problem, scroll hacker news. it's now 6:35am and oh shit i should have been out of bed 15 minutes ago, i didn't set an alarm for that because i didn't think i would lose track of time when im literally staring at the time in the corner of my screen, i rush out of bed and jump in the shower thinking this will take a couple minutes, no big deal. however adhd makes you chronically underestimate how long something takes, because im generally really unaware of how much time elapses when i shower because i have time blindness. it's not 6:45am and i need to be leaving out the door, but my shower actually took 10 minutes, and im now soaking wet and still have to get on my clothes.
but wait, i need to take my meds, i really really cannot forget that. so i go grab my meds, but then wait i need water. so i go fill up my water bottle for the day like i always do, but its dirty, so i need to wash it first, and at this point im hyperfixating on doing what feels like a necessary step because part of adhd is losing bigger picture context and longer term rewards, my brain told me "i hve to take meds which means i need water which means filling water bottle which means washing it" and my brain literally doesn't ever take a step backwards until it's now 6:55am and i finally took my meds and FUCK i'm not 20 minutes late.
repeat at every single step of every single day for the rest of your life. this is also why people with adhd have the stigma of being lazy. the reality is that we can and often get less done when it's not something that intrinsically motivates us (most things) because everything is THREE TIMES HARDER. we're constantly stumbling, constantly having to set a million timers, having fatigue of so many timers, so sometimes we're over confident in not needing them because it's not reasonable to set 40 freaking timers every day, but then one in five times we slip up, and now im 5 minutes late for a meeting, and i show up and my boss is being pissy because he thinks im some self diagnosing tiktok idiot because has no idea what this looks like and how it impacts me despite trying really really fucking hard and absolutely hating it
Another one that just doesn't get it. In that scenario, if you texted Jimmy, it would be a choice, if someone with ADHD did, it wouldn't. Again as stupid a response as telling someone in a wheelchair they chose not to walk upstairs.
Not everyone's experience is the same as yours. Denying that only makes you look like an idiot.
You're really missing the point. I'm trying to help by giving you practical, actionable advice which has worked well for other people. When it's time to leave, take the kid out the door even if that means carrying them out in the middle of a meltdown. This teaches children discipline and makes them understand that they can't get their own way by acting like spoiled brats.
the problem is that ADHD impacts every single action of every single day for the rest of your life with no cure. yes you've fixed the coffee situation, but there are literally 50 other things i have to do every morning, sometimes they're things unique to that morning, and while i work really hard to be mindful of creating structure in my life to help cope with severe ADHD, it's not reasonable to have 50 separate techniques for the 50 things i have to do every morning and follow all of them perfectly or even have all of them perfectly setup.
there is massive, massive emotional fatigue to the amount of effort that getting through a day with ADHD entails, and this is on top of other things like having a ton of sensory sensitivity where literally just being around bright lights, is being bright outside, the sound of traffic, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, car horns, a door shutting loudly, someone clinking dishes while serving coffee, all cause emotional reactions in me that are intense enough for me to physically cringe. i literally cried while driving home a week ago at night because the oncoming car headlights are so bright the entire drive and i have to drive with one arm stretched out to block them from my view and etc etc
my brain is not an easy place to live. i am cognitively capable of understanding what technique can help with what issues. the problem is both recognizing every possible way my adhd can fuck things up and the amount of mental and emotional drain it is to have to consider everything all the time lest something fall between the cracks.
No one is saying that structure or boundaries aren’t important. Of course they are. But what is being challenged here is the assumption that a meltdown = misbehavior. Sometimes it is. But often what looks like “acting out” is actually communication. Discomfort, overstimulation, unmet needs, not manipulation.
Teaching kids discipline without empathy doesn't create resilience. It creates shame, masking, and fear of expressing emotions. And yeah, being on time matters. But so does understanding why the kid is melting down in the first place, especially if it’s a recurring thing. Otherwise, you’re just dragging a panicked, overwhelmed human out the door like a bag of potatoes and calling it a parenting win.
I’m sorry people are so dismissive of your reality. I really don’t understand why they feel a need to insist you are just lazy when you are clearly intelligent and hard working, but struggling due to wiring you can’t directly control.
People aren't being dismissive. The point is that whether someone is intelligent and hard working is utterly irrelevant to everyone else, especially in a work environment. What matters are results, not inner qualities.
That rather depends on the job. Punctuality = productivity for many jobs, especially those in manufacturing, food service, agriculture, education, hospitality, transportation, security, etc. In the real world certain things have to be done on set schedules and anyone who can't reliably show up on time is worse than useless to those employers.
“It takes me 15 minutes to get to my destination. I should leave 5 minutes earlier than I need to in case there’s traffic or whatever.”
Set an alarm for 20 minutes before you need to get there, and leave when it goes off. Done.
I will absolutely trivialize it because everyone I’ve ever known that’s like that simply leaves at the time they’re supposed to already be somewhere. Or yes, they get distracted and start working on stuff that they know will take 30 minutes when they need to leave in 10. Thankfully we all have mini computers in our pockets that tell us exactly how long it takes to get somewhere that can also easily set alarms.
You clearly don't have these issues, and I doubt you care about anyone who does, because your "Oh, come on." response positively reeks of 'that's not my experience, so other people's can't be that different.'
It's never just one thing like travel time, it's scores of steps in a routine, which aren't always the same, and can easily be derailed by anything unexpected. You can estimate how long something you do frequently will take, based on how much time it took previously, and still get an inapplicable answer because distraction is a constant problem, and the executive function deficit means you literally do not think 'don't do that, get back on task' in the moment. You know how long everything should take, and still struggle to apply that when you're doing the routine.
Everyone has issues. For instance, I have idiopathic hypersomnia - I'm tired literally all the time. I don't get to say "Sorry wife, I'm just not going to be able to work."
There are things we're good at and things we need strategies to mitigate. I may not have ADHD but I have friends and family that do, so I'm familiar enough with it. What steps in a routine are needed to leave the house? Find your keys and wallet? Always put them in the same place. Go to the bathroom and maybe check how you look? Set that timer I talked about 3 minutes earlier. Other people with your condition can handle it; so can you.
Why is it that you think you're offering life-changing advice? What makes you think I don't use repetition? What makes you think I've never tried timers? What makes you think I'm the exact same as person as your friends and family? What makes you think I don't also 'just get on with it'? Do you even think about what you're writing?
Everyone else manages to do it, you're not special. Be on time, or be a NEET I guess. You've decided you'll never be able to function properly so yeah you probably won't.
What a fuckwit. No, not everyone else manages it. I decided no such thing, you're just fabricating bullshit to feel better about being an arsehole to people who weren't born neurotypical. I have a career with pretty good pay and benefits, and you obviously didn't read anything else I wrote about managing my issues. I'd rather be late than a sociopath.
“Time blindness” is not named anywhere in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5, 2013) nor in the DSM-5-TR (text-revision, 2022). It is not recognized as a stand-alone disorder or an official diagnostic criterion.
Imagine that your car breaks down and you bring it to a mechanic and he tells you, “Oh, your car has a case of broken-downness.” You’d know right away: this guy has no idea what he’s talking about. “Broken-downness” is an abstraction; it doesn’t refer to anything, and it’s not going to help you fix a car.
FYI: SlimeMoldTimeMold has been heavily debunked across multiple topics. It was popular for a while in rationalist communities for the multi-part series claiming lithium in the water supply caused obesity, until everyone realized the author has a serious habit of misrepresenting sources, claiming citations say things they don’t, and omitting contradictory evidence.
I am not an expert on neurology or anything but for ADHD at least there is definitely a biological difference, it's not just a diagnosis of a bundle of psychological symptoms
It is treated with stimulants, but if you give those same stimulants to a non-ADHD person you will see very different results
What a terrible analogy. Diagnosing a car with “broken-downness” would be like a mental health professional diagnosing you with “bad.” Diagnosed aren’t always great, but they’re not that ridiculous.
Still down a bit and you’ll find plenty of vagueness with mechanics. “You have a bad tie-rod end.” Ok, cool. What caused that, why did mine fail when my buddy’s didn’t, how can I avoid this? Shrug. Once you’ve got it down to a part, you just replace it with a new one. Can’t do that with mental health. “Your time management unit is bad, we can replace it with a manufacturer part for $2,000, or an aftermarket equivalent for $1,500.”
Because that's a colloquial name given to a range of specific symptoms people experience, and it is in the DSM, covered by 1.e.:
> Often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities (e.g., difficulty managing
sequential tasks; difficulty keeping materials and belongings in order; messy,
disorganized work; has poor time management; fails to meet deadlines).
The DSM doesn't list all minutiae of every general problem.
Having a single symptom does not mean someone has the condition. The diagnostic criteria for the condition for which you took that quote (out of context) is more comprehensive. It’s not a simple matter of doing Ctrl+F on the DSM and seeing that something can be a symptom or something else.
This is more obvious when you start thinking of other conditions: Feelings of sadness are a symptom of depression, but not everyone who has feelings of sadness has depression.
The misuse and misinterpretation of the DSM has become commonplace in parallel with the use of therapy speak.
They did not bring the DSM into the conversation, someone else did. And the person you are responding to made no such conflation! They also made no such claim that "[having] a single symptom [means] someone has the condition." That might be how you decided to interpret what they said, but it is quite literally not what they said!
They simply stated that time blindness is a real issue and linked to an article which acknowledges exactly what you are describing: "Many people with ADHD struggle with a lesser-known but deeply frustrating sign called time blindness." (emphasis mine)
I'm really not, you've made an argument based on a semantic misunderstanding of my first response. I did not say "time blindness" was a condition, I said that people generally self-diagnose conditions, not just for those symptoms. I also described it as a set of symptoms in later comments.
Omfg. A timer, for everything! Why didn't I think of that? And I'd set this timer for getting dressed, and showering, and making coffee, and conversing with my children. "Sorry, son, I can't help you any further with practising shoelace-tying this morning, I only allotted 90 seconds for that." I should probably set a timer for setting timers, too. Don't want to take too long doing that. Undoubtedly, this will also solve the distraction issue because the proximity of a time measuring device to my neurons will rewire them all to be "normal".
There is a pervasive feeling in our complex postindustrial society that one thing we are lacking is a little fucking slack, the sort of thing that might be unavoidably extended on a very regular basis in the primeval human tribe/clan. We get it where we can.
Turning employment and education into an up-or-out pressure cooker that thinks nothing of, for example, firing the bottom performing 10% of people every year, or failing a student who's fifteen minutes late to a final exam, is not what we are built, cognitively/socially/culturally, to tolerate. These people are taking a norm that we DO make a formal attempt to force tolerance on, disability, and trying to extend it to get the system to treat them more like a human being and less like a competitor.
Let's take a more consensus trend: ADHD.
ADHD barely existed as a recognized social phenomenon until the 1990's.
> I didn’t realize how much of a psychiatrist’s time was spent gatekeeping Adderall.
> The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
> (it’s because his colleagues are all on Adderall already – but telling him that will just make things worse)
> He goes on to give me his story about how he’s at risk of getting fired from his Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers position, and at this rate he’s never going to get the promotion to Vice President Of Staring At Giant Spreadsheets, so do I think I can give him some Adderall to help him through?
> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.
Time blindness is a real thing. However, I know it triggers peope snd it allows them to complain about people being late. "Time blindness" is about temporal processing, and I have it. I only mention the condition when people ask me questions about when something happened, because people think everyone is the same, I have to explain that I can't perceive time. It's real, etc. So exhausting, but they keep complaining about something they don't have.
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.191...
> But there are a few things we can learn from this:
> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.
This is almost the opposite of what we can learn about this, and the article does a great job at pointing that out. It's a very recent social phenomenon. Yes, that contradicts your abnornal psych class, but think about it. 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)? In elementary, middle and high schools, at the workplace, in other majors? IME absolutely not, very much the opposite. The only ones who did so were the diagnosed, and then only mentioned it when very relevant. Let alone 100 years ago. Let alone the massive differences between different regions/cultures in desire for uniqueness, both historical and uniqueness.
This is a massive sociocultural phenomenon, absolutely not something inherent to the human psyche. Almost no one is born this way (strong desire to make themselves feel unique).
> 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)?
The “Aspie programmer” meme has been around since the turn of the century (at least)
I’m pretty sure people made reference to it when I was at Cal in the 90s but I can’t prove it. (The prevalence of social awkwardness, eye contact avoidance, hyper-interests, etc.). I don’t think it was as much about people wanting to feel special as trying to find explanations for the overall environment.
Exactly. If anything I think the vast majority of us engineers under-diagnose ourselves for where we fall on that spectrum (which is probably the safe career and social move in the millennial generation).
Almost every day of my whole career I've worked with people who were missing social cues and being disliked because they were misunderstood. I think an engineer is MUCH more likable if they genuinely say "Sorry if I'm loud, and I don't mean to interrupt, sometimes when I get excited I accidentally do this, I don't do it because I think my ideas are better than everyone else's."
Now obviously if somebody exaggerates a trait they don't have, says it in a self-important way, and isn't remorseful at all about the effect it has on people around them, and isn't trying to change it that's a shame.
But frankly imo the balance of that in software is I've met 1/2 in my whole career who came across as self-important about their conditions, versus against maybe 20% (dozens and dozens) weren't able/willing to communicate their oddities.
20 years ago you didn't open your phone to see videos by anyone that called themselves a therapist or psychologist say you might have ADHD if you have these xyz common signs. Or if you struggle to have difficult conversations with your partner you might have grown up in a chaotic household.
All very loose, quick and ambiguous explanations that do not provide any balance.
If someone sees it and goes "Oh gosh that loosely explains why I do xyz" they will take it, because is confirming something or its providing an answer to something they deem they struggle with that they didn't have any answer for before.
It's part of the human psyche to try and understand and answer things and we have a confirmation bias that limits our ability to think of both sides of the coin, not just the one that's constantly popping up on our mobile phones from so called therapists.
> 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic
The labels people use follow trends. Labelling (self or others) as autistic or on the spectrum is relatively new, but there have been trends for other disorders in the past. Neurotic, depressed, anal retentive, even phrenology - people worrying that the shape of their cheekbones mean they must be genetically stupid, or applying that to others. We have evidence of such trends going back 100 years at least, and probably more.
For sure, social media has amplified and homogenized things, as it does. But it's not a new phenomenon.
> Let alone 100 years ago. Let alone the massive differences between different regions/cultures in desire for uniqueness, both historical and uniqueness.
100 years ago we used to often arbitrarily decide what mental conditions people have and then proceed to extract out parts of their brain to try and fix it to disastrous effects.
20 years ago, in our math and tech focused university, people were literally pretending to have lower social skills then they had. People would do weird things on purpose and brag about social mishaps. Because lower social skills were associated with being genius and everyone wanted to be seen as a genius.
Obviously, if your deficit appears only when it is socially advantageous and disappears when disadvantageous, it is something else. But it was a thing.
They're doing it now because it gives them power and social status now.
The same story has been repeated dozens of times; An individual is bullied/ostracized for some hobby or characteristic, years later they find the same bullies now going all in said hobbies and characteristics.
The author's concerns would mostly all be ameliorated by logging out of TikTok and never logging back in. They seem to think that "TikTok" and "Society" are synonyms. They are not.
you seem unaware that over 60% (150M) of the US uses tiktok and around 70% of that (100M) are 18-30. it's unclear on the < 18 numbers but likely a significant number.
i don't think it's unreasonable, particularly when she qualifies gen-z, to conflate tiktok and society.
it's really out of hand. the brain rot, beyond just the psych labeling she touches on, is crazy.
Generally it means “deterioration of creative or critical thought capabilities into facile but engaging substitutes for thought” - usually it means something like “taking the algorithm home with you; letting yourself become one with the endless torrent of memes that infinite scroll platforms hand pick and deliver into your brain”
It has definitely slipped into real life, amongst us, persons who don't use TikTok. And I've recently heard therapy talk related to relationships/love coming from a close person who I know for certain that doesn't use TikTok, and she's also in her mid to late-30s (so no zoomer).
When I first discovered that I suffered from a "new" condition called Prosopagnosia - by means of an online "Are you face blind?" test - everything about my life suddenly fell into place. It was a liberating self-diagnosis which gave me permission to admit that it was some small malformations in my brain that were the cause of my troubles, not some selfish malformations in my personality and social skills.
Of course a self-diagnosis is not enough. I discovered my condition while it was still in the early stages of research. I signed up to be a guinea pig for researchers, and got paid a handsome £20/hour to undertake various tests (including brain scans - I still have a 3d image of my brain stored in a box somewhere) to help people better understand the underlying causes of the condition. It was fun for a while, until some of the tests got more disturbing. I also got to learn about the coping strategies I had already developed, and how to use them in better ways to help lessen the impact of the condition on my social interactions.
Glad it somehow worked out for you. I find it very sad though that you felt somehow "guilty" (based on "selfish malformations in my personality and social skills"), which I would see as a toxic society pressure.
Not sure how, since as long as I can remember I thought all people are different, so it's just about finding some that you like and that can also accept you. I don't want to force my quirks and preferences on others, but they don't get to do that either. Of course that can mean some periods and/or situations when you are not part of "the group", but looking back, although it did not feel cool all the time, that was mostly beneficial, got to know more people and do more stuff while looking for people I like.
Developmental prosopagnosia wasn't recognised as a "thing" before the late 2000s. Before that, everybody assumed that being able to recognise someone was just something everyone, well, did. Failure to recognise a friend or relative in the street was seen as an affront, or a deliberate snub. Failure to recognise famous people in films or on the TV was something to be ridiculed. Prosopagnosiacs quickly learn coping strategies growing up in such a world, but those recognition mechanisms are significantly slower: they don't solve the problem.
It is amazing how upset even the most decent and understanding of people can get when they feel you've slighted them in some way. Having someone (you like/respect/love/etc) screaming abuse at you in the middle of the street because you failed to respond to their greeting, because you didn't recognise them and realise they were saying hello specifically to you ... is humiliating. Not knowing why this situation was happening on a regular basis - can you blame me for thinking that it was my fault? That I wasn't a reasonable, decent person? That the things being screamed in my face were accurate?
Hence my relief when discovering there was a label for my condition. Though, sadly, no cure.
> It is amazing how upset even the most decent and understanding of people can get when they feel you've slighted them in some way.
I personally think that shows hidden issues in said people - at least that they take things too personally and do not have some emotion control. It can be horrible for the people they get upset on, but there are many reasons why this can happen even without considering prosopagnosia. Me personally I think 90% of the times I am the one noticing people I know on the street. I never got upset and just think that most people are absentminded or tired to check people (I lived mostly in medium/big cities so it gets tiring).
I definitely don't blame you or the condition, but the social construct that makes you wonder if you are not a reasonable person if you do something "different". I would hope in a civilized society, the instinct should be to wonder why something happens and try to understand (ofc there are always assholes, but hopefully not the majority). Screaming/blame/ridicule make me wonder if there is not some structural issue...
In seventies when I was in school (yes, I'm old) I had a classmate who wasn't able to recognize faces. We all knew that it's a thing, accepted, that he can make errors recognizing us and didn't think much more about it. I certainly remember reading about it as well.
It's interesting because there are two diametrically opposed ways to interpret what you said
One is - everybody thinks they have disorders, so just ignore that feeling it'll mess with you.
The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more
In my experience the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's helpful to neither completely ignore nor ruminate over one's traits, but just _be aware_ of them.
It's been very helpful for me to pay attention to and think about how my own personality compares to others'. For example, I tend to be a people-pleaser, but I used to think that everyone was just as people-pleasing as me, which only reinforced the people-pleasing because I didn't feel right putting my own needs first when everyone else was already sacrificing their own needs (or so I assumed).
At the same time, medicalizing these things paints them as "abnormal" disorders that need to be "cured", overlooking any of the positives these traits bring. When it comes to my people-pleasing, I like it about myself that I care about others. As long as I recognize that it sometimes comes at my own expense, I can begin to make more conscious decisions about when to allow the people-pleasing to flow versus when to try to subdue it.
Disorders are labels for things which significantly negatively impact people’s lives. Thinking of them in terms of a spectrum generally means stretching a label past the point of meaning.
Well, if you're approaching this as a hard-scientist that's not the case (for psychology).
Because "disorder" may be on a spectrum, because "negative" and "impact" may be on a spectrum. Conditions like depression follow a bell-curve, there's no clear line between depressed and not, and we can draw a line in the sand, but statistically there's no justification for where that line falls.
One way to try to draw a line is "the point at which a certain intervention is no longer effective."
For example studies find CBT therapy reduces depression scores for depressed people ~.8 standard deviations (for a while).
But why not try CBT therapy on happy people? Maybe it's even more effective on people who are already happy. Well the reason why not is likely just because of the clumsy nature of healthcare -- interventions are thought of as "treatments" for "conditions", even though that lens doesn't always make sense.
There’s a meaningful line in the sand for treatments with major side effects. CBT therapy may be “fine” for normal people, but the most effective treatment for depression is ECT which has major side effects. Including a ~1 in 50k chance of death.
Saying something is a bell curve distribution is an approximation, it doesn’t mean there’s actually a continuous function out to infinity and negative infinity.
When to resort to ECT is a subjective decision of doctor and patient. It is clear it should come after other treatments failed. But there is no clear line.
Spectrums extend continuously from normal to disorders. So if you believe depression is a spectrum you must also believe that no treatment is necessary for some people with depression. However if depression is a disorder there may be some cases that are on the margins that aren’t quite depression that still warrant some forms of treatment.
DSM V has depression as depressive disorders, but lists “Schizophrenia Spectrum” and “Autism Spectrum” so I invite you to consider what distinction for spectrum is being used.
> a key facet of a "diagnosed" disorder tends to be whether or not it (negatively) affects your life.
Which also brings us to an important point that is totally missed in the article and most of the discussion imo: maybe one of the (many) things that have changed is that lives are more negatively affected by stuff nowadays (or more reported to be so). We live in increasingly complex societies, we have to socialise with more and more people and navigate more demanding and fluid social dynamics. Traits that can be advantageous in a certain context can be disadvantageous in another (and affect one's life negatively).
An engine is an assembly of parts. When an engine breaks down it does so because it broke down. An engine does not exist without its cylinders, fuel system, gaskets, lubricants, etc.
I believe your analogy is flawed. Can you restate your first statement in any other way?
Someone who is clinically depressed isn’t just sad, they are unable to return to normal. Things that help normal people feel better simply fail, it’s a meaningfully different situation. Similarly treatments for depression like electroconvulsive therapy shouldn’t be applied to normal people.
OCD, clinical addiction, etc are all more involved than just feeling the desire to do something. The lack of control is the issue not just the momentary impulse.
Intrusive thoughts are fine, acting on them isn’t.
What is normal human behavior though? Is it some combination of things that's gonna end up being so rare that only so many people fall under it, and is it normal if it's so rare? Is it gonna be "what most/average people are", and if so, well then, isn't everybody gonna have something going on, and isn't that just normal then?
With how widespread it is, labeling, self-diagnosing, inquiring about yourself, is kind of normal human behavior. It is everywhere, and has been historically. Putting it like it's just 'labels for significant things' and then 'normal', and that these things would stand far enough apart to actually make a clear distinction without dismissing people in between is pretty much just wishful thinking. There's way too many things and even more combinations of then. It's gotten so complicated and convoluted only because it is that way. Wishing for a binary clarity in a complex world.
Full range is a specific set. What does that range consist of? Also, seems odd to go from going on about "stretching a label past the point of meaning", but then put normal as some range that's just about vaguely everything. Can normal not be defined? Is it somehow more deserving of being afforded to be a vague spectrum or being under less specific definitions? Where is the point of meaning with "normal"?
By specific set I mean the behaviors actually exhibited, someone either grows a beard or doesn’t you can’t be doing both. Meanwhile either choice is normal.
The “full range” is anything that doesn’t cause you or another significant distress, major impairment, or prevent functioning in society. Eating hot sauce is uncomfortable, amputating a limb is several steps beyond uncomfortable.
> Can normal not be defined?
It’s defined by what it isn’t. There’s ~8 billion people in the world and the majority of them are functioning as should be obvious by our societies continuing to function.
I’m sure ECT is being misused occasionally, but what I’m referring to is the underlying condition such treatments are addressing as well as the research associated with finding what treatments are useful in which situations.
Seasonal affective disorder and bereavement-related depression may have similar symptoms on the surface, but there’s different treatments due to differences in underlying causes.
Some conditions may be a continuum with the same underlying cause taken to different extremes, but that continuum need not be continuous down to normal human behavior.
> everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more
I think this is subtly incorrect. I would phrase it this way:
> everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do... And they think that makes them different and therefore deserving of special treatment.
We all live on continuums of mental health, and reflecting on that is important. But it's unrelated to what's happening here, there's not much reflection, just self labelling and demanding special treatment based on these labels.
Someone strongly on the autism spectrum absolutely needs special treatment, some just a little, some a lot.
But somebody who watches a TikTok about autism and recognizes, or thinks they recognize, similar behaviors in themselves, does not need it (except in the few cases where it is actually undiagnosed autism, of course, but that's a very small minority).
It sounds like you're presuming those who put a label on themselves don't want to change themselves at all; one could also imagine that those who put a label on themselves want to change themselves most of all
These don't mean the same thing. You can be the thing you are and not be helpless. For example, if you have ADHD that's just a part of who you are. That doesn't mean you can't take medication or form processes to help yourself and mitigate the effects of ADHD.
Also, in my experience, people who choose to never label themselves are not better off. They typically do have some sort of condition, sometimes multiple, and they actively choose to do nothing about it because they're in extreme denial.
I see this with parents all the time. "My kids doesn't have ADHD! Stop trying to label him!". Okay great, but little Timmy is about to flunk out at fucking third grade. Let's do something about it.
Those who do not see or do not believe a label can easily believe that's just the way they are. Those who see and believe a label can easily use it to identify what they can do to help themselves.
Every society has always been broken and always will be broken in certain ways. For most people, recognizing that isn't actionable. But they can change themselves.
> The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more
What if the first part of this is true (we all have a smattering of disorders), but thinking about them more just makes things worse?
There is even an argument that putting a label on something will allow them to think less about it. They can put it away in a box rather than continually beating themselves up over it.
My parents did psychology and they always warned us about this.
Bayesianism helps but isn't taught well enough in school. Basically, we fail to handle the false positive and false negatives into the calculation, and this happens a lot with psychologists as well. This is really the point where people say untrained 'professionals' are dangerous - they can't evaluate that inaccuracy of the diagnosis itself.
Precisely. I would posit that many of those are no different from those who start studying psychology formally struggle with statistics because it requires a shift from intuitive, qualitative thinking to rigorous, quantitative analysis, which can be challenging for those without prior exposure. Psychology curricula often include courses in statistical methods or research design, which demand skills in mathematical reasoning, data interpretation, and abstract concepts like probability distributions or hypothesis testing. These topics can feel alien to students drawn to psychology for its focus on human behaviour and emotions rather than numbers.
> now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.
As I understand, this is mostly affecting young women who are much more mimetic than young men. Is this also affecting men at (nearly?) the same rates? I don't see a lot of short form video content from men talking about their emotional issues. However, there is virtually unlimited content from women.
To be clear about my comment: I am not trying to be anti-women here, just point out a trend that I see.
I remember someone telling me a story of a horoscope type thing that was handed out to people in class after ascertaining their birthdate. People were asked to comment and thought things were accurate... until the professor had everyone compare their horoscopes. Theire identical horoscopes.
I think this is exacerbated by the acute rise in real autism cases (not self-diagnosed) going from 1 in 10,000 clear to 1 in 31 cases in children, in the span of 50 years.
As people learn there's something gravely wrong with how they interact with others, struggle with social situations, etc. — and they validate that by observing enough "normal" people interacting or watch enough Hollywood entertainment depicting perfectly rehearsed conversations — in desperation, they seek a remedy in everything from personality systems ("everything must be labeled and explained") to psychiatric treatment just to cope with the lack of frequent, validating, normal interactions; and in many cases, aren't improving because of how isolated their lives have become.
This is something I've observed in my own life and in friends who share similar challenges.
> People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.
This is part of the cause of the current situation though - that putting labels on yourself gets you more empathy than you would have gotten as a "normal" person.
At least as of one decade ago psych professors still give that warning. I remember being warned not to do that in psych 102. It's always bothered me a little that everyone seems to completely ignore it.
The "tiktok self diagnosis" thing is more like a moral panic. It is not really an attempt to feel unique and healthcare professionals would do a lot of good to their patients if they understood this.
> if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.
Where do you see uniqueness? If anything, it seems to me that people are making themselves not unique, but more of "someone who is part of large group of same like individuals".
According to Google, any physical symptom is indicative of cancer.
According to social media, any personality quirk is indicative of ADHD.
I am diagnosed ADHD from a qualified professional, took medication, found it a great help, and I’ve come around to believe it’s all bullshit. Yeah, you have ADHD symptoms, yeah it’s disrupting your life, yeah you cannot find concentration and motivation. No, you’re not special. You’re not genetically born with pre-frontal cortex deficiencies. It’s, simply enough, an epidemic of massive proportions. We’ve created a society of distracted, gratified, unsocialised lazy squirrels all but interacting with the world through a piece of magic glass; what do you expect?
I was diagnosed adhd well before mobile phones. Also, mri scans show adhd so yes, it is a prefrontal cortex deficiency.
Let me give you some old man advice. Untreated adhd feels sutble to the person but its not subtle to everyone around you. You think your calm but come off like a zany, pacing autistic person or incredibly anxious. Alcohol and drugs can make you even more spazzy or impulsive.
Dont believe me? Go ask friends and coworkers how you come off. Your going to be shocked, trust me.
Every adhd person i met who told me what you just said was a spazzy mess or incredibly rigid/disciplined/control freak to counter act the adhd.
They were rarely away how much of a spazz we come off as even with treatment.
The word “disorder” is loaded, but it is interesting to also look through the lens of the Social Theory of Disability. For the rise in diagnoses for autism, ADD, gender dysphoria, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia etc.
Just as we now view the historical labeling of women as suffering from “hysteria” as a systemic failure, not a personal pathology, we should interrogate whether current diagnostic regimes will look just as crude and institutionally convenient in 50 years
Many social and health-related challenges we label today as “disorders” may in fact be downstream responses to structural issues in how society is organized — education, labor, healthcare, media, food, and housing. It’s worth asking: what if we’re pathologizing reactions to a sick system?
Generations identifying as trans:
Gen Z: 2.8%
Millennials: 1.0%
Gen X: 0.3%
Baby Boomers: 0.2%
Silent Generation: <= 0.05%
A lot of it has to do not with the label itself but with the industry. Where someone in the past would be called a “tomboy” or “femboy” today they would have a different diagnosis, the DSM-5 would be consulted, etc.
Similarly with ADHD if a kid would have been called “rambunctious”, today they might be labeled as having a “disorder” and medicated with literal amphetamines, instead of for instance reforming public schools. (To be clear, I am talking not about exteme/acute cases but overdiagnosis of relatively mild cases.)
We can look at other examples (eg Finland’s schools where children can climb trees and have much lower ADHD diagnosis rate) as one way to compare.
Or in the past, anorexia and eating disorders were a form of body dysmorphia, and some such images were actually promoted by industries such as fashion modeling or ballet performance. And when I say promoted - I mean also heavily enforced within the industry itself.
Industry in USA works with government, together. For example the factory farms (overusing antibiotics, abusing animals) and ag-gag orders, criminalizing whistleblowing and exposing them. Or monsanto and intellectual property enforcement. Or pistachio farmers in CA and water shortages. Or bottling companies and clothing companies putting out metric tons of plastics and microplastics, while regular people are told they can’t have a straw or a bag, and must recycle (itself revealed to be mostly a govt+industrial scam, shipped to China etc.)
This is across the board. Obesity and diabetes are a major epidemic in USA but instead of questioning high fructose corn syrup, highly processed starches and sugars in everything, people are told they can fix things themselves with diet and exercise. Actually it has been shown that obesity and disabetes in mothers is correlated with autism in their children. It has been shown that there was a serious correlation between obesity, diabetes and covid morbidity but the latter was taken extremely seriously but the former is not.
Same with plastic recycling, etc. or going vegan. Or buying free range. Or whataver. The individual is kept distracted.
In USA medicating things downstream is the default. One in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. Teenage girls have the highest levels of “sadness” (most outlets don’t want to say depression) etc.
Of course when it comes to depression and gender dysphoria we get extra political sensitivity due to activism around those issues. Of the usual character: the INDIVIDUAL is the one that has to make all the downstream adjustments and cope with the SYSTEMIC upstream issues, which are not questioned much. The individual is even told to embrace their label and tell others it is great (eg “big is beautiful” for obesity, celebrating the result instead of reforming the system).
Until AI takes the jobs, the social compact has become: both parents have had to work for corporations, to afford the expenses that could previously be paid by one “breadwinner” in the family working for corporations. And they stick their kids in public schools and elderly parents into nursing homes. And then medicate them if they don’t like it, because the DSM 5, school administrators or nursing homes staff say that this is the best way. Everyone is afraid to speak up against the system, they would rather perpetuate it and cover their own ass.
There was a time when people derided USSR people for drinking a lot to cope with the failures of their economic system. But now with men on opiates, women on antidepressants, high rates of teen suicide ideation, elderly and kids being medicated — perhaps we should rethink our own economic system. There are a lot of “problems” that people are experiencing and it may be from upstream systemic causes. But they are kept distracted by govt and corporations with the idea that they can fix it by their individual actions, which include recycling, dieting, and placing a label on themselves that the industry then helpfully gives them medications to manage it.
Is this surprising? 20 years ago in many parts of the world the only way to survive as a trans person was through prostitution. You would be forced to live as an outcast, far away from "normal people". There were barely any legal protections, you could often not change your legal sex, finding any information about what this is or its treatments (not a fetish, something that millions experience, can't be "converted away", hormones exist, etc) was nearly impossible. Most people would see you as a freak.
> A lot of it has to do not with the label itself but with the industry. Where someone in the past would be called a “tomboy” or “femboy” today they would have a different diagnosis, the DSM-5 would be consulted, etc.
This is not true. Trans people don't go to a doctor and ask them if they are trans. Rather trans people generally arrive at the realization of what they are by themselves, usually before seeking any professional help about it. The DSM is not consulted (and if it is, it's done post-facto by someone acting as a gatekeeper and trying to fill boxes).
Many people who called themselves femboys in the past ended up transitioning after becoming more informed about the whole topic and realizing that transitioning their sex and living as their true self is an option rather than something they had to do in secret.
Why is this specific thing completely unquestionable for self diagnosis without any kind of test? It seems to be treated as if no child could possibly feel slightly less than the ideal representation of their sex and end up embracing the trans identity just like someone might embrace ADHD or autism because of some minor common personality trait. The difference being one annoyingly reminds people theyre ADHD every time they do something untoward, and the other could be rendered infertile due to hormones pr castration.
We don't view it as unquestionable, we question it quiet a bit. Like, a lot actually. And people do change course if they want, that happens sometimes.
And on the topic of infertility, it's complicated. Many people have no desire to have children, and many people are infertile anyway. I'm infertile due to cancer, and little did I know this was pre-determined at birth. I didn't even make it to my mid twenties before that chicken came to roost.
But I face a lot less stigma and questioning about that. Everyone is quick to accept I'm infertile and that's that, and there's nothing anyone could have done. If this happened in my 50s this would make more sense. But, I didn't. I became infertile around the same time many people choose to transition. And yet, my infertility isn't a topic of discussion.
If we want to reduce the incidence of distress in people and families, we need approach all these issues with compassion and an open mind. The open mind means considering various possibilities, while still being rational.
Yes, one theory is that everything “just happens to be” innate from birth, and unchangeable, and we simply discover it later. This essentialist type of theory may in fact be the best one for extreme cases of any condition. But we have to be very careful applying essentialism across the board — is it true for even mild, increasinly widespread cases? Could we also not investigate the factors upstream of the issue? Not just before birth, but also in the environment, in the socialization, culture, economics, etc. And if we find factors that heavily seem to affect it, should we not consider trying to fix the problems upstream such that the “disorders” downstream become reduced in many cases?
In the case of gender dysphoria, and to a lesser extent of depression being caused by serotonin, is too politically charged to start with. Many extremely creative people we know were born biologically male - the Wachowskis, Justine who made redbean, etc. transitioned their identity. They are adults who make a decision to live in ways they feel are more authentic to themselves amid the current culture and technology and that is their choice, as it should be. But we have to be careful not to therefore say there are no major issues in society upstream of millions of people who are experiencing distressing conditions, and try to embrace and normalize those conditions as opposed to trying to reduce the incidence of them.
Let’s look rationally and scientifically at every other example with similar conditions but without the charged atmosphere, to get a feeling for what the Social Theory of Disability and similar approaches would say. The key is to think systemically, and to accept that an identity is socially constructed and reinforced, that people are nudged all the time by culture around them, while they and the people around them are coerced by economics into stable behaviors and arrangements that may lead to distress (eg both parents working for corporations and neglecting their children and parents, to afford the rent because they have been made to expect and enforce a certain level of decadent spending that their ancestors never afforded).
1. Obesity. Now, to be sure there have also been attempts, with varying degrees of success, to normalize being obese and even celebrating this condition and some encouraging others to embrace the lifestyle. Yet we know that there are real public health issues upstream of the condition, including but not limited to unprecedented processed sugar and starches in everything, high fructose corn syrup, overuse of antibiotics on factory farms etc. the reduction of minerals in our vegetables etc. in short massive changes on an industrial scale that affect millions of Americans.
Imagine we were to ignore this and simply be content with embracing obesity as a “identity” to be accepted and was always around, but finally people were willing to become their true selves, would be scientifically and socially derelict. It would also be defeatist and lazy from the point of view of public health and social reform, would it not? And yet there have been serious attempts to normalize the Big and Beautiful identity as something we should embrace have more of in USA. The thing is, both can be true: “fat shaming” can be bad, while simultaneously it also bad to not have a public health investigation for upstream causes of obesity — yes treating it as a disorder to be reduced.
2. Eating disorders like Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia. On the surface, they share many characteristics with Gender Dysphoria, namely a distressing mismatch between the body you have and the identity of how you wish it to be and how you want to be perceived. In fact there have been entire industries promoting and enforcing body standards for their participants to enter and keep participating, such as fashion models and ballerinas etc. But in these cases when a person comes to the doctor and admits that they are indeed looking to be thinner, the doctor is told by their industry to so the opposite thing than in the case of gender dysphoria. The doctor does NOT tell them to embrace their anorexia as an identity, and modify their body, but instead tries to get them to how much of their identity is actually socially constructed by others around them, and this is true not just for young and impressionable kids but also adults. When it comes to eating disorders, or some issuss of body dysmorphia, the distressing body-rejecting condition is managed in a completely opposite different way, and it is considered correct to point out the social and economic factors.
In fact, human body modification has a rich history going back thousands of years, and using all kinds of technology available to tribes. Some tribes and cultures embrace it as an identity. (As one small example, lip disks in some African cultures.) The people who choose to practice these modifications may be embraced with a special status and identity. But we looking from the outside can clearly see the societal and cultural constructs behind nudging and reinforcing the identity. So what I am saying is, look systemically, when you analyze public health issues.
3. Clinical depression. Many people here on HN have experienced clinical depression and I remember they have insisted for years that people should just “let it go” and it’s “just how things are”, and medications like SSRIs are the only real way to manage it. Over a decade ago people said Tom Cruise was a dangerous idiot, after his interview with Matt Lauer where he warned against overprescribing amphetamines, opiates etc. to treat these conditions. But once again, while the pharma industry and our US society at large has normalized this sort of overdiagnosis, “medicalization and treatment” of conditions, it was not always the case.
In 2022 studies and meta-studies came out in reputable scientific and medical journals questioning the efficacy of SSRIs at all vs placebo, and throwing into question the whole theory of serotonin being the main factor behind depression, and whether or not it is really preventable or manageable through changes in lifestyle, diet, mindfulness. But again, perhaps far and away the biggest questions were not systemically investigated: what is it upstream in culture and economics that systemically causes more Americans to be clinically depressed?.
More to the point, teenage depression and suicidal ideation is extremely high. Almost as high in the wider teen population as it is in the trans community! (I was shocked at the statistics.) So if something distressing rises so much, then it absolutely behooves us to look at what changed in society upstream of them. For example, the rise of tiktok and instgram and other social media as used by teens, for their body image and other things. Surveillance capitalism pushing certain things not just to teens but all of us (outrage, clickbait, echo chambers, even adults are more tribak and angry than ever, thanks to algorithms). Notifications that pop up at any time and distract us.!Instead of having the political will to address these issues and incentives, we accept them as a normal part of life. We are about to accept AI and robots that way, letting the industry “disrupt” anything and everything about culture, and leaving out-of-work men and women to figure it out (wringing our hands about usage of opiates and antidepressants while pharma industries gladly generate steady recurring revenues).
3. ADHD. I would call it the modern “hysteria” except for boys instead of women. We know hysteria was just a lazy catch-all to medicate women downstream of societal issues. In 50-100 years we may say the same about ADHD, as we have done with lobotomies etc. Do you see where I am going with this? I will leave the rest as an exercise for the reader for the sake of space here.
4. Autoimmune disorders on the rise as microplastics build ip in our bodies, while clothing companies put it in our clothes and bottling companies put out metric tons into bottles we drink from, but we throw up our hands and say there’s nothing we can do. While our ancestors reused glass bottles and washed forks, we discard plastic forks shipped from somewhere, into a landfill. Day after day without a thought to the next generation. Species are plummeting. One third of arable land is desertified. Our generation is living on an ecological credit card, that our children would have to pay. But we are told to shut up and work. Embrace and medicalize the conditions. We really have no time to organize against this stuff anymore. (Maybe we will once AI takes out jobs?)
Whether it’s obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, eating disorders, depression, autism, and yes gender dysphoria etc. we can just stop at theories that essentialize new types of identities or we can actually take a public health approach where we look at them as “disorders” (word use by OP) that we want to minimize by gradually changing society. Not just for kids, but especially for them.
Lest you think I am just pontificating without actual solutions, here are some:
1. Gradually phase in a UBI for all US Americans. This will increase their disposable income and let them purchase goods made by startups (good for YC) as well as corporations. Let the money trickle up into the economy and tax the corporations. Our country is untold trillions in debt, it’ll have to print trillions to service that debt. May as well be like Alaska and give the first hop to each citizen equally. Then increasingly tax the corporations and their AI / robots / automation, and use that to pay down the debt over 30 years — after it has helped everyday Americans! PS: Alaska has had among the lowest Gini index of all states since it started this.
2. Reduce the 40 hour workeweek protections to 30 hours, as some countries did, or even 20 hours. Free up people from the hamster wheel so they can spend more quality time with their children and elderly parents, rather than school administrators and nursing home attendants (and their AIs). Stop normalizing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8
3. Gradually phase out factory farm practices, be more like Europe. Go after corporations that pollute. Make the corporations switch to using biodegradeable materials rather than plastics and forever chemicals, rather than trying to forcing individuals dat the end of the production line to do that.
4. Consider implementing public health programs in schools like John F Kennedy did, modeled on the La Sierra high school. Same with math and STEM. Shorten the school day and let kids run around. Let children climb trees like in Finland.
Double blind testing has been done on this so none of what your essay is saying has not been tested or studied.
Putting adhd or depressed people in a paradise situation does not make them not adhd or depressed.
Ive lived in a few different countries. Societies that dont label or believe in psychology just outcast the mentally ill as weirdos and encourage them to drink away their troubles.
I think comparing LGBTQ+ identifications with mental illness is dangerous. Not too long ago we were quick to lump homosexuality in with these, despite the fact homosexuality is more of a state of being evidenced by real-life actions people willingly take. That being, sex with the same sex.
Transgender people often suffer gender dysphoria. You're correct that it's possible that gender dysphoria might be a downstream effect of society. Namely, we are an extremely gender-segregated society. There's truly only one way to be a man, although there are multiple ways to be a woman. People feel forced and confined to a very small subset of behavior and self-expression.
Existing between genders is, unfortunately, untenable. Society is just not built for that. But existing as the opposite gender seems to be perfectly doable. I'm not saying that it's that simple and all transgender people would disappear if we live in a society with no gender roles or expectations, but certainly they heavily feel the pressure of those gender roles and expectations.
> Transgender people often suffer gender dysphoria.
That's the definition of it.
> You're correct that it's possible that gender dysphoria might be a downstream effect of society. Namely, we are an extremely gender-segregated society. I'm not saying that it's that simple and all transgender people would disappear if we live in a society with no gender roles or expectations, but certainly they heavily feel the pressure of those gender roles and expectations.
I don't think this is the case. Strict gender roles might make trans people's dysphoria worse, but it's primarily about a strong desire to be the other sex and not have your current sexual characteristics. Even in a world where everything is unisex, a trans person would still feel that discomfort - for a trans girl/woman, that you wish your voice were higher and not like a man's, that your face seems alien, that your genitals are wrong, literally anything sexed about the human body. It's orthogonal to whether a man can wear a dress or makeup. Not all trans women are even that feminine. And if it were about gender roles, then you'd expect more trans women to exist than trans men, given "there's truly only one way to be a man, although there are multiple ways to be a woman."
There's really two components to gender identity: the socially constructed stuff, which is most of it, and the biological stuff. Usually changing the biological stuff just lends itself to better socially constructed stuff.
Most trans people I know, for example, have no desire to change their genitals. Probably, I'm guessing, because nobody sees that. So their genitals have pretty much no relation to their gender identity. Which makes sense when you think about it. I mean, I gender everyone in my life, including people I see only for a few seconds. But I see very, very little genitals. I'm really just guessing, and everyone is.
It's very complicated. Of course men can wear dressed and makeup and such, but that is a very high-friction activity, borderline dangerous. Women can do that, however. So then I question if there are transwomen out there who would be satisfied in a world where anyone can wear anything. Such a world does not exist, so we don't know.
> So then I question if there are trans women out there who would be satisfied in a world where anyone can wear anything.
So long as they look in the mirror and see a woman. There are trans women already who just wear jeans and t-shirts and other unisex wear in their everyday lives. There are also trans women who will never come close to passing even after a long time on HRT and surgery and wearing the most feminine clothing, and it's just tragic.
- People who have transitioned surgically (depends what surgeries the person that says it considers necessary)
- Using some biological distinguisher (this lets you refer to people who are currently repressing as trans, and makes it an inherent property of a person that was predetermined)
- People who want to transition (socially, hormonally, surgically)
The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.
I agree, though possibly for different reasons. Those support systems may or may not be weaker than they were in generations past, but they are certainly more likely to say "I can't help you, go get professional help" than in the past.
In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression, the "help" out there is criminal. It is not a disease we have a cure for, in fact it's not clear to me it's even a disease in most sufferers, but a healthy and rational response to societal decay. I do not believe some disorders will ever be satisfactorily explained by individual-centric medicine, in the same way history will never be satisfactorily explained by great man theory.
One thing that makes me nervous about a culture that is so quick to forward people to therapists, is that therapy is not some ironclad medical practice, like you might imagine heart surgery to be.
Therapy, and psychology in general, is one of the weakest areas of science, still based mostly on mysticism, large personalities, and weak statistical correlations. And that is assuming you even can get a "good" therapist, and not some schmuck who just happened to nab the degree.
I would go so far as to say that 90%+ of problems that are served in therapy sessions are better served by the regular participants in an intimate social network, friends and family, than some "expert" who is incentivized, knowingly or not, to send you into the pharmaceutical pipeline or, as this article describes, hand you a bunch of random labels you can forever use to psychologically handicap yourself with.
I know where you're coming from, but despair is never the logical response. Whatever the situation is, it's better to do something about it, even if it's just to rage and call for help, rather than to quietly despair.
Regardless of how bad things are, we still have hope, both as individuals and as a civilization.
My partner is disabled and her transplanted kidney is failing. She will, in the next year or two, need dialysis and then a kidney transplant. Her Medicaid will be cut. The hospital she goes to will be closed. Both as a result of a bill that just passed. The average kidney transplant out of pocket costs $250,000, and because her first transplant happened before she met me, my insurance will deny her coverage because it's a pre-existing condition. We are in the process of trying to move to a different location, get her a job while she's going through kidney failure (not easy since nobody wants to hire a sick person, and definitely not at a workload that would give them benefits), and I'm in the process of trying to move us out of the country (I'm a dual citizen, she is not, so that's holding things up).
At what point in that is despair not a logical emotion, even when we're doing something about it? What is illogical about being so overwhelmed with circumstances that it makes you question whether waking up tomorrow is a net positive or negative? Please explain.
Despair seems eminently logical in your situation; I felt it, when I put myself in your shoes, reading your comment. That is not to say it need take precedence, or supremacy, to that most human of emotions: hope. I have hope, that you and your partner will prevail, and live a life agreeable to both your terms. I’m sure many who read your story will too. Please, lean on hope, not despair.
> Regardless of how bad things are, we still have hope, both as individuals and as a civilization.
No we don't. Evidence: falling birthrates is the society collectively deciding that live ain't worth it. Personally, I think this is the real reason why we don't see aliens - any advanced civilisation will eventually reach a point where it realizes that life ain't worth it.
If my finger is broken and someone says "Cheer up! Your neighbor lost his leg and is in an incredible amount of pain", I may feel sympathy for my neighbor but, crucially, my finger still hurts just as much.
Right, it won't change the fact that the finger injury is sending pain signals to your brain. But it just might change what you do in reaction to that signal.
Some of you guys need to cowboy up and quit whining about trivial problems. A broken finger is a minor injury (nothing even remotely like a lost leg), and usually easily managed with basic medical treatment. Get it splinted, pop an ibuprofen, and move on. It seems like a lot of HN users have led such soft, sheltered lives that they fall apart when faced with the slightest adversity.
Why is that a reason to cheer up? When I think about it, I’m miserable most of the time—and knowing that life was even worse for most people throughout history only makes me feel sadder.
Turn that around and ask yourself why that's a reason to be miserable. Your sadness is a choice. Be miserable if you want to but that won't improve the circumstances for yourself or anyone else.
Not sarcastic. Only people who are ignorant about history believe that things are really bad today. If you live in an industrialized country that isn't in the middle of a shooting war then things are objectively pretty awesome compared to the average conditions that humans have endured.
Only ignorant people think individuals can find comfort in averages.
Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
> Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
Whoa now. That may be true within a strict scope of the "arithmetic mean" definition of "average", however, the idea of average as a 'concept' is much older. As an easy example, early references to agrarian yields (crop farming and how much food they produce) talk about average size of crop harvests, etc. Early tablets from Mesopotamia talk about average yield size, and those are dated 700ish BC.
Cheer up, the lake of shit you’re caged in is at its lowest level on record.
Slightly more seriously, things will be on an upward trajectory until they aren’t. There are some decent reasons to think we might be nearing the peak.
That's a meaningless claim, devoid of any evidence. At most points in human history there were decent reasons to think we were near the peak. And yet with some occasional temporary valleys, average human living conditions continued to improve.
At most points in human history, the global economy was not so tightly integrated, and major powers didn't have the ability to devastate the globe in an afternoon.
There is a significant meaning to my claim, which is that it's unconvincing to make exactly the sort of "it has always worked out before" argument that you're making here.
I don’t see these as opposing ends of a spectrum. I think they’re largely independent variables.
Anecdotally, the people I know who have become most immersed in therapy speak are also the most socially connected. The therapy speak and associated language have become tools for establishing themselves within their social support system, communicating cries for help, and even trying to use therapy terms to shield themselves from accountability for their actions by transforming it into a therapy session.
It was also possible to buy afford a house and a small family on a job that doesn't require much training or special skills. It's easier to deal with (often meaning "ignore") undiagnosed mental issues with your own roof over your head.
> is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely.
I disagree! There was never a good support system at all. We used to just man up and live with it. Now that stress is reaching it's new heights. We can't cope with it.
I'm very curious as to how you come to the conclusion that 'stress' has increased. I don't suppose it's that the world is more stressful, WWII, cold war, a thousand famines throughout history, what makes us so stressed that we can't cope in some way that we used to be able to cope?
I have wondered - but have no evidence either way - if the stress we encounter nowadays differs to stress of the past. At some point very long ago most of us were stressing about things like food, water, surviving the night. Now most of us are stressing about things like work pressure, debt, global disasters. I wonder if the nature of the stressors have changed from immediate and acute to increasingly abstract and chronic? And potentially, if the quality of life profile is different in the two cases due to different coping mechanisms?
Very anecdotal which makes me think this: immediate physical stressors like exercise are uncomfortable but I get through them fine. Chronic stressors like climate change are totally ruining my quality of life.
At least they knew that this was temporal but heaven would be eternal. There was a point to things. When you stand for nothing you fall for everything. There's no story left in which we play.
chronically worrying about climate change is no different than chronically worrying about death. it's simple, stone age, existential fear.
ancient men and women coped with existential fear by either embracing that everything is a cycle, or inventing some semblance of immortality by raising children or believing in life after death.
I guess I have no stress about climate change because it seems very normal to me that society and biosystems occasionally collapse. The stress comes from thinking there's something that can be done to stop it, and feeling that you're unable to achieve it. Maybe that's me throwing my hands up and accepting death instead of trying to stave it off, I just want to throw out there that the stress is self imposed, not environmental.
I have this personal theory that some time after an external stress-related impulse (be that negative - ww2, cold war, becoming paralyzed, etc, or positive - inheriting money, winning the lottery, not having to work for the rest of your life, finding the love of your lufe, etc), the brain adjusts and one comes back to the baseline of their perceived normal stress level. And that’s why we see people who are always happy and seemingly stress free despite having nothing, and ones that always seem stressed to the max despite having everything
When you eliminate problems in people's lives, they do not suddenly feel that they have no problems. Instead they lower the bar for what they consider a problem. If the bar gets lowered too far, suddenly the previously minute things are problematic and there may be many of them.
Stress is caused by our internal perspective of our problems, not by some external unchanging measure of it.
Most of our suffering is in our imagination (Seneca) and our imaginative lives have never been as big as today. The world we think we live in has never been as big. The lives we think we could live have never been as many. The bad things that could happen to us are so much more plentyful and destructive than the bad things that do.
Also people used to smoke and drink a lot of alcohol. So it's possible that stress has objectively decreased, yet subjectively increased, as we are more aware of it.
But yeah it's an interesting question, and with the Internet as well. The 1980s world I grew up in as a kid (in Czechia) was more dangerous than the Internet-focused world of today; yet young people seem to be more stressed by the latter.
That depends on the time frame. Tobacco only spread beyond the Americas in the 16th century. And really poor people have never been able to afford much tobacco or alcohol; those are luxury products.
Your leaving out that people with mental and even physical issues often were outcasts for revealing them to their family, friends, and community in the past.
If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that they did and just simply passed it forward or didn't talk about it.
i don't know what the ratios are but a LOT of people fell through the cracks.
it's just that the birth rate was high enough to continue the population growth, and there were socially acceptable ways to ignore the inconvenient problems (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)
it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.
now the stigma is gone and we're finding EXPLICIT paths to treatment, tolerance, and embracement of mental health, neuroatypical brains, spectrums, etc. Is there overpathologizing? Maybe? Hard to know! The stigmas still aren't gone. Go read the comments on any video providing tips on how to parent children on the spectrum and see neurotypicals freaking out about how soft the current generation is.
the western world seems to have peaked in tolerance in the 2010s, and is now backsliding into authoritarianism and fascism. that's trying to recreate a lot of those original support systems (by destroying the new ones). It's a bold plan, let's see how it happens.
> it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.
I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.
Heck no. We have “it’s always the quiet ones who go first”, to remind us what it was like from that time.
Most people suffered, and made the ones around them suffer as well. On top of that, you are in no position to move to an “average” position on the behavior spectrum, because it’s fundamentally outside your biological operational parameters.
There are TONS of relations which were kept in place, because of society, keeping people who made each other worse, in permanent proximity.
Survivorship bias is real.
We’re the ones who inherited the world with more knowledge than past generations, it’s up to us to do better with it. This will include getting better at diagnosing.
1) the most talented people with cognitive differences made it out for sure. But not every person on the spectrum is "amazing with technology" in a useful way. But not all are, and the ones that weren't just didn't make it. Today they do.
2) those people still needed luck. Luck that they were able to come up in a society that didn't expect more from them than to perform a "function". Things like meeting a spouse were "easier" because there was a more rigorous social structure. Depending on which society this was in, potentially to the detriment of your grandmother who didn't have a lot of choices.
2b) and luck that the community around them accepted them. That wasn't JUST because he was a farmer, it's also because he hit the other markers of inclusion whether he wanted to or not.
People in that day and age were not cognitively free. Is cognitive freedom preferable? Well that's the question of our age. We weren't supposed to just kill god and stop. We were supposed to replace a new humanist secular philosophy to replace the theology to find purpose to humanity.
We didn't, society is now full of anxiety and malaise, and the right wing is rising promising to fix it by a RVTRN to the old ways regardless of who they harm.
You're downvoted but you're correct. Disordered people who did not offer some sort of economic gain in a market were simply institutionalized. Autistic people who were not high functioning were pretty much as good as dead. Same thing goes for depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. We had no systems in place for people who cannot work. Physical disabilities were more of the same. If you could work, it was okay-ish. You'll still get treated as a freak and discriminated against daily, but you weren't completely shut out of society. If you couldn't work, however...
Ah, I see. I think the ‘label’ (ugh – what a terribly awful way to describe a diagnosis) and the beatings are orthogonal, though.
In my parents’ time in a (then) Dutch colony, nobody was diagnosed with anything (that was only for crazies), but all the men knew how being hit with a belt felt (daughters were spared, from what I’ve been told). Self-medicating with alcohol and beating your kids if they ‘misbehaved’ was just the done thing, as far as I’ve been told.
This is to say that anyone who showed (what we would now identify as) neurodivergent behaviour probably would’ve been beaten, but this then wouldn’t have precluded them from going on to start a family and business (and maybe beat their own kids).
Actually, this is probably still how it works in many parts of the world. Even here in the Netherlands, beating your children was only outlawed as recently as 2007.
There is substantially more going on than "tolerance vs intolerance". We have a huge influx not just because of changing diagnosis standards, but also because the financial benefit for getting a diagnosis has also expanded.
The views of people you are trying to label as fascist are more accurately described as individualism vs welfare state.
I can second the assertion. It's absurd that people really believe folks are getting benefits from having a mental disorder. It's literally the "welfare queen" nonsense just directed at a new group.
You don't even get social benefits, no one excuses your behavior just because it has a label. You get told it's your fault for not managing your disorder properly. Have you seen how we treat people with visible, obvious, undeniable disabilities? Like shit.
Ayn Rand has a lot of friends here. She also described the neurodivergent as "subnormal" and thought that society should do nothing to help them or the handicapped. Additionally, she believed that "normal" children shouldn't have to ever interact with those who were mentally different as it would harm the "normal" children.
Depending on the specific services in an area: everything from subsidised legal access to medications, to access to accommodations in schools seen as favorable (private environments to take tests, or extended deadlines).
Some areas have specific assistance to parents of children with a diagnosis. Some have easier access to disability support services and payments.
Turns out that the poorer a nation is, the less reported autism they have. That could be because there is no benefit to the diagnosis or it could be because they have less healthcare in general and a real diagnosis can easily take 4-8 hours of clinical time.
Or it could be because poorer countries actually have lower rates of autism. I'm not claiming that's the case, just that we don't have any reliable data on it one way or the other.
By definition roughly half the population in any society must belong to a below average family and/or below average communities.
And it seems pretty likely that those with below average capacities at handling, processing, reflecting, etc., on these issues would be concentrated there.
> It's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis
I claim the DSM-5 is why. We changed diagnostic criteria then we diagnosed. People who used to be "normal" were suddenly "undiagnosed until late in life." But the people themselves hadn't changed much, just the diagnostic criteria.
DSM-5 took a bunch of distinct disorders and rolled them into one new disorder called Autism Spectrum Disorder. The only problem it solved is to reduce the number of disorders with unknown pathologies.
My classically-autistic son who needs a lot of support apparently has the same disorder as a nerdy guy who comes across as a bit abrasive, doesn't understand the point of small talk, and would rather work on Linux kernel patches on a Saturday night than hit the town.
I agree with everything you said except for the last paragraph.
The people who, according to your theory, want to reverse the tolerance trend and slide towards fascism/authoritarianism didn't pop out today. They existed and lived in society in the 2010s too. So, from a logical standpoint, what changed?
Nothing changed - mostly it seems the American condition is a side effect of dedicated partisanship and asymmetric political behavior since the 1970s.
The media apparatus in America has split into a center and left, and then a right wing which has different norms and produces its own products.
That in turn has created a durable political coalition that self referentially calls itself when it needs to support its descriptions on reality.
It’s significantly more effective at producing narratives, and moving ideas from the fringes to the main stream news channels.
Since it has little traffic with the left and center media channels, it avoids counter claims and norms on journalistic standards.
So you can now primary Bipartisan politicians, and then the ideas that gain media attention are the ones that reinforces party talking points. Counter views simply do not get air time.
What we are seeing today, is the progression of those forces, as the narratives are never challenged.
The parent comment didn’t even pose a theory as to why. People can change beliefs over time. Weimar Germany had less Nazis in it than Nazi Germany, which would be equally confusing under your framing.
Material conditions degrading further with no end in sight, a massive influx of money towards right-wing populists appealing to a frustrated middle class, etc. Same story as always. How can a country slide into authoritarianism? It seems impossible until it happens, and by then we can hardly tell we're there.
I'm pretty sure current highly interconnected society elicts more spectrum behavior then back when 90% of the populace was just digging soil for grains.
It worked for the large majority. It now no longer works for that large majority, and practically also does not work well for the rest. We have in this sense regressed, thanks to the social liquidation of capitalism.
I'm suspicious of the use of "we" here since I don't feel like I'm a part of this discourse. Also:
>Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful
In the past from, say, 30-40 years ago, if you failed to arrive at appointments and meetings on time you probably weren't labeled "lovably forgetful," and you probably would face punishments for having certain personality traits. We're changing in how we understand those kinds of differences now, and it's not all for the better, but in general the discourse now is better than how things were in the past when neurodiverse folks tended to receive a lot of punishment, invective, bullying, and ostracism.
I've been autistic my whole life, but I'm from the older set where there was no understanding of such things, we used to get bullied a lot, sometimes quite violently, and social ostracism was typical then for folks on the spectrum. I'd be thoughtful about romanticizing the past or get taken in by the false feelings of nostalgia - it's wrong to imagine people used to deal with the neurodiverse in glowing light and thoughtful acceptance, no one ever said I was "lovably forgetful."
Mirroring this, I have ADHD and experienced a lot of harsh judgment as a kid for my behavior at home, and in school. And the resulting shame from that judgement stuck with me for a long time, I was even diagnosed early but didn't accept the label until adulthood, and didn't work through the reality of my differences, and remedy the shame until recently. The label of ADHD helped me immensely, to connect with others and to understand and be sympathetic to myself.
If labels make you uncomfortable maybe that aversion itself is something worth holding and looking at.
As another example, I was treated horribly by a ex-spouce for years, and for some reason I didn't leave, and only covered up for my spouce's bad behavior. Retrospectively it was destructive, but in the moment it felt like the right thing to do (in a very roundabout way). I don't want this to happen again, so I'm trying to understand and catch behaviors that got me there in the first place.
But if we drop the false nostalgia and think of about the overall "we think too much and feel too little" sentiment - i can relate to that.
When I was young, unsure about myself, and frequently derided when I stated my preference for quiet evenings instead of going out and meeting people, I grasped at the notion of "introversion" the moment I found it. It made my feelings and preferences legitimate during a time when I perceived that people were telling me that I was wrong for being that way.
Now, more than two decades later, after a bit more life experience, I cringe when someone labels me as an introvert - they aren't wrong per se, but they also unload a bunch of assumptions attached to that label on to me, 90% of which are inaccurate/unrelated/tangential.
A good friend of mine told me that labels are useful, but warned me to not make them my entire identity. He turned out to be right.
You opened up how you feel about a thing and your parents derided you for it. Did it change you? No, but it surely made you feel like shit. This is a social deficit in your parents, and asserting yourself as "introverted" is the workaround.
It's funny how op was primarily complaining about how annoying it is to have a load of assumptions dumped on them and you read their post, assumed the derision they described came from their parents, and made it about that rather than the point they were trying to express.
“mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”
Because there's now a payoff for those. Those girls proudly display a whole slew of these on their 'bio' because the societal framework they live in 'scores' them on their 'oppression/victim' status.
Otherwise-comfortable people searching for anything in the “matrix of oppression” to cling to. Because for the past decade and a half that’s been the easiest way to insert yourself into the attention economy.
I knew a gal who grew up in a perfect family with everything she could ever want so she had to invent a victim status and write a book about it magnifying non-problems into protected class level oppression status in order to fit into the woke crowd. Grievance entrepreneurship.
Isn't this almost a requirement for getting into some prestigious American universities via selection based on a personal essay? You can't just be like "I had a great childhood in an upper middle-class family with parents who loved me and supported me".
Interesting article. It reminds me of TVTropes. It's the most systematizing (as opposed to holistically) way of looking at media, decompose it into parts (tropes) that are shared with other media. It feels like approaching the ultimate in the Western scientific orderly systematizing thought.
This came to mind for me as well, if anything I think “Measuring The Marigolds” is in slight opposition to the article and supplements it.
When the article got to using a pros-cons list for having kids, that’s where I found the "put away your calculator and enjoy the beautiful sunrise" moment. You can systematically think about things and still have a personality especially for something as important as having a child. :)
I think a lot of this boils down to that not everything is black and white in life and it sucks to think that way, like assigning labels and using therapy speak this way. Which I very much agree with the original article on.
The part that seems to be lost in all this is that there's really no purpose to learning/exploring/explaining unless it points to action.
Knowing you have ADHD, childhood trauma, attachment issues, etc. is useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action or if you don't intend to take action.
Unless you just enjoy the learning for the learnings sake, seek to learn so as to plan and execute.
> Knowing you have ADHD, childhood trauma, attachment issues, etc. is useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action or if you don't intend to take action.
That’s not actually true, and misses the point.
Knowing you have ADHD, alone, helps you stop blaming yourself and hating yourself for those things that are caused by the ADHD. It doesn’t excuse it, but understanding that those things aren’t moral failures are a huge deal to those who actually struggle with ADHD.
Moreover, most people with actual undiagnosed ADHD have spent their entire lifetime building coping mechanisms to manage it. Recognizing those does help build others in the future, even if just knowing changes nothing right then.
I understand what you're saying, but experience has taught me that many many many people use whatever the thing is (trauma, ADHD, whatever) as an excuse to act however they want whenever they want. It becomes a crutch, or a security blanket to let them just be okay with wallowing in the negativity and externalizing every problem.
There has to be a happy medium. I have some neuro issues, and yet I understand that while I may not be able to control the issues themselves, only me is responsible for my own actions. That is lacking in many folks who share my diagnoses. We dropped the ball somewhere and I don't know where, to be honest.
Some people find excuses anywhere they look. But we shouldn’t stigmatize those who don’t on behalf of those who do; the vast majority of people are not that way, which is why they stand out when they are, imho.
And it is more important to not stigmatize talking about it at all than it is to optimize for some people not using it as an excuse.
Experience has taught me that your assertion is from a privileged position. Congratulations for being closer to the neuro-populous side of the spectrum. Your experiences can only represent your unique case.
Your comment made me realize that maybe we're just going through the transition to a collectively better understanding of people. Right now we sort of have to pass through the clinical diagnosis/therapy terms in order to recognize something as not being a moral failure/making someone less valuable as a person. And then the next step we're building to is maybe like acceptance of people's differences without needing to make reference to diagnostic labels. Kind of like what's happened with queerness: past - fluid, undefined, marginalized; present - labels, understanding, less marginalization; future - moving beyond the need for labels in order for people to accept and understand.
If someone is overly aggressive, or rarely fulfills promises, or is very negative about things, or has a very fragile ego — it absolutely makes them less valuable as a person to others. Just look up any definitions of the word “valuable”
For me, having people consider "moral failures" aspects of their personality is the root of the problem. We should not have that except for the most horrible things (murder, etc.). Still, after living in a couple of different countries, it is definitely not done to the same extent everywhere. We probably should all pay more attention not to impose random sets on "standards" on others.
> useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action
Knowledge almost always results in some for of action.
Fore example if I know I have schizoid personality, I don't need to stress out about getting to know people just in case I might at some point start needing human contact. Because I know I won't.
Fascinating article. It's think the author's experiences are fairly context-dependant, with where you live, the political leanings of your social circle, your online community etc. But I have noticed an increase in the pathologizing of normal human behaviours and traits. Maybe not all character flaws should be fixed.
You mention a resistance to pathologizing normal human behaviors. That could stem from early experiences where you were perhaps judged or misunderstood for simply being yourself by caregivers, teachers, or peers. If, as a child, you were expected to conform tightly to rules or suppress emotions, you might now feel protective of traits that others try to label or correct. Therapy can be a space where that defensiveness is explored gently, not to shame you, but to give voice to the younger parts of yourself that may have gone unheard.
I was exactly the child you describe. I was frequently punished for speaking out, did not express my emotions since anything was met with rage and cruelty, and I still suffer from the consequences today.
Therapy is the second worst thing in my life to happen to me. There were the tens of therapists who put me down or told me my life experience didn't constitute "real trauma". By remaining in the therapy system for so long, years and years, and chasing support I could not actually be offered, all I received was a slew of new trauma (of once again having my lived experience denied) and a hole in my savings. Not kidding, I could have set all that money on fire and have turned out better than I did.
But far more damaging than that was how I was pushed into seeking out labels and spurious diagnoses that only covered up the true causes of my shame - my caretakers and the medical system that acted as their apologia. The idea sold to me (indeed sold, with thousands of dollars of uninsured medical practices) was that with an ADD or other diagnosis under my wing, I could start "really" healing, that the "true" causes to my dysfunction were finally in front of me after being lost for so long.
I now disagree. I was goaded into believing I was a product of unfortunate circumstances instead of malicious incompetence or the just plain abuse and neglect I really did suffer. I was bucketed into the same labels everyone else uses to navigate their problems without regard to their appropriatness and was told it was ME and MY condition that was the beginning and end of the problem. Instead of providing a cohesive narrative, that only served to alienate me further.
We need to stop treating symptoms as labels to be celebrated. Therapy-speak needs to be societally ostracized and die out. My label was the consolation prize to the unfairness and abject cruelty I was subjected to in life. Nothing could be more insulting to the fiber of my being. I am now just myself. I refuse to be medicalized any longer.
Having gone through therapy for 10 years, nah. Having someone tell you what you already know isn’t helpful, unless you have a need to feel heard. Most people just know the bottom line.
This response sounds kind of effed up in the context of the article. I don't think everyone needs therapy, especially not if they're happy. Leave them be.
That was hilarious. Perfect, absolutely pitch perfect, therapy brain. You are a gifted satirist. I love how you end on the part that’s most important to the character of the therapy worshipper, the defence of the core of their identity, that therapy is an unalloyed good.
I am leery to discount anyone's mental health struggles because often enough they are very real. But it can be galling to see very functional people blame the smallest imperfection on a condition many people find debilitating. ADHD and Autism are prevalent ones now, but it also is almost a cliche to call yourself OCD for a bit finicky. I think there's also an element of blaming your shortcomings in life on an incurable condition so it's not your own fault.
I dislike the "you don't have adhd, you live in capitalism" meme in general, but there is a big difficulty in knowing how much you might be overloading yourself, trying to get to an unattainable normal because your actual material conditions are not normal.
If you're working 60 hour weeks for most people there's not much saving you from having a very messy life! But your peers might all also be in that environment, and you will see people who navigate that somewhat successfully.
Of course you could be working much less and simply "be lazy" and suffer downstream of that. You might be two mindset changes away from being a lot less stressed.
Or you might have a medical condition that makes certain things harder! Or you might not.
At the end of the day there are medical conditions that exist and are fairly scientifically proven to exist in some form and have treatment. And plenty of people who spend time saying that stuff doesn't exist, so there's vocal pushback against that which rubs some people the wrong way.
But there's also just human introspection (which is part of how we grow). The new thing is that this introspection often happens more in the open, a lot of times with the whole world watching.
Even 20 years ago you might talk with other people around the world but it would at least be in more closed spaces.
To some extent I think it’s valid though. The inability to want to sit in a chair and reorganise spreadsheets for 8 hours straight isn’t a disability, it’s a natural response of your brain telling you that this activity sucks and you should get up and move.
Combined with the change in society where most active jobs are being replaced with sitting down at a computer.
This isn't really my original point but the reason I dislike the "you don't have ADHD you have capitalism" meme is that ADHD's intentionality symptoms isn't about attention but about self control[0]
So if you "really actually" have ADHD[0], that isn't just manifesting in not getting work done, it's manifesting in saying things before speaking, issues with addiction, issues with self-management leading to hygiene issues etc.
Loads of social effects that go beyond "don't want to work".
Me having a job or not isn't what's causing me to insult a friend by snapping back at them in a way that I _know_ is wrong. It's not causing lasting damage to social relationships because of my behavior. Capitalism isn't causing that.
And hey, meds help my management of those things. Even if I had all the money in the world these are things I would like to continue managing.
the idea of "its capitalisms fault" is that capitalism is responsible for placing these "self control" constraints on people.
capitalism is the thing making too much choice, and to many choices over time.
capitalism set the context for you snapping at your friend, where you are doing work you dont want to to avoid being homeless, while they are doing different work and you feel like its unfair that their work is different from yours.
if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them
> if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them
These interactions are not in that sense, they are in the "I say some stupid unvarnished opinion first and immediately realize there was a better way of saying it" variety. It is not downstream of me being stressed out about money or work or whatever. These are things that happen when I am in a perfectly normal mood, not thinking about how to pay rent or whatever.
I have plenty of social failings that are very much unrelated to capitalism. I have also had bad social interactions downstream of money/capitalism/etc too! But that's its own thing
Maybe you subscribe to some grand unifying theory here but I don't. Social structures and norms existed before market capital, and they exist in spaces fairly separate from the economic sphere ("those don't exist!" you might say, but I believe they do exist, at least in a time-and-space limited fashion).
Subsuming all of my issues to capitalism is unsatisfying. Thinking about the texture of it all (and potentially identifying some things that really are linked to that, and become as solvable as gravity[0]) is more valuable to me. I think it's also valuable to others.
> The inability to want to sit in a chair and reorganise spreadsheets for 8 hours straight isn’t a disability
I mean sure, but that's also not what ADHD is. It's how ADHD gets described, by medical professionals too, but in my lived experience the attention deficit part of ADHD is the least bad part.
It's the executive function stuff that's real fucked up. You know how if you gotta do something you don't reaaaally wanna do it's kinda hard to get started? Imagine instead if it was nigh impossible. Imagine if it happened with things you DO want to do. All the time. On the outside you just look lazy, while on the inside you're screaming at yourself to go do the thing for hours. Imagine being unable to attain your goals specifically because they are your goals.
Imagine the only way to keep your house even slightly clean is to wait for the planets to align and give you the power to even start cleaning. Half the time it happens at 1AM, but you can either clean until 3AM and be completely fucked at work the next day or just not clean at all until the next time the planets align, which might be the next day or next month.
Imagine being told your entire life you're a lazy fuckup that's not living up to their potential.
Yeah not being able to do boring shit for 8 hours straight is normal. Not having sufficient executive function is a real handicap and being told that it's a moral failing repeatedly will really fuck up a person for a good long while.
ADD / ADHD denial is a pet peeve of mine because I know people with it who have experienced before and after treatment. It’s absolutely real. It’s not a consequence of “capitalism” or screens or anything else circumstantial.
Why is it everywhere now? Because we diagnose and treat it. In the old days what did we do with ADD kids? Hit them. What did we do with ADD adults? Call them stupid and lazy.
I always feel like these "We do this new horrible thing that's taking over" articles are always blown out of proportion- sure, _some_ people talk that way, maybe it's even trending to talk that way for a significant group of people, but it's not true of everyone, all the time. To me, this trend seems largely confined to youth culture and social media.
I also found it ironic that part of the OP's argument was that nobody has personality anymore, they just have problems to solve, and this article seemed to be doing the same thing, but for culture at large; reducing it to a problem to be solved.
> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.
This is the rejection of science applied to a less common target.
psychiatry is at best informed guesswork , mental conditions are merely labelled groupings of symptoms , the negative effects of psych drugs outweigh positives in a significant proportion of cases , people existed for thousands of years with functional coping mechanisms that were thrown in the bin to make someone else rich and the populace was brainwashed to think it was their fault
We live in increasingly complex societies with more and more demanding social dynamics. In the past, it was all much simpler, though at certain costs, that the article fails to mention or romanticises. Not all quirks were celebrated or "funny" and not all people survived to tell beautiful stories.
Moreover, a lot of things were simpler in ways that are becoming less and less ok. People now can divorce; marriage is not even need to start a family. Navigating relationship dynamics was simpler in the sense that there were (more or less) specific roles each gender should abide. Many marriages were arranged, especially if "it was taking you time", thus you did not have to figure out dating yourself.
I don't think that therapeutic discourse is a good strategy. Medicalising personhoods and relationships is bad, but going back to a (romanticised) past cannot be a solution at all. Raising to a higher consiousness would be an actual, good solution, but that takes time. It is uncertain if we have that with the speed that things move nowadays.
I'd say - everybody has a personality which is not who they really are. The personality is "simply" the response and defence mehanism of the ego of trauma inflicted during the early formatory years during childhood. It's really interesting what an automatic-machine a person is. Unaware that he is acting machanically in most cases. Source - the Enneagram and Gurdjieff.
We all have a personality and it IS who we “really are.” We also all have the ability to construct personalities that misrepresent our inner lives. Doing so creates a certain kind of stress and relieves other kinds of stresses.
Over the course of our childhoods we experiment with personality, and discover the elements that allow us to have stable and satisfying dealings with the world. We may cultivate several different personalities— each of them the real us in some respect.
Of course there are many elements of personality that are autonomic or otherwise habitual. That doesn’t mean personality is somehow not real.
A con artist or an actor can don a fake personality, but all that means is they are telling a kind of systemic lie to the world. This requires a lot of energy to maintain. Your real personality is that which minimizes required energy.
Are you the clothes you wear? No you are not. In a similar manner - your personality is what you show to the world. A construct based as a response to some trauma (or something else very influential, but usually trauma) inflicted on you as a child. i.e. your personality is the clothes your real self wears. It doesn't mean it's not part of you - it is.
I am not the clothes I wear, but personality is not "clothes." If personality were clothing then removing it would be a simple and painless matter, after which you would be interacting with the world "without personality." This is absurd. You can't have no personality. All you can do is replace a personality with a different personality. Your personality is the totality of patterns by which you present yourself to the world.
This is not the same thing as what you show to the world. "What you show to the world" implies that personality is merely a veil that covers stuff. It's not a veil at all. It's an interface. The "real you" that acts through this interface is beyond words, personality is not "showing it" because it can't be shown, but rather mediating it via actions.
Some of my language patterns come from watching and interacting with my stepfather. He was big man with a loud voice and an iron work ethic. I didn't get along with him when I was a kid-- in fact had to leave home after threatening his life-- but as I became a man I decided that I was going to force the world NOT TO IGNORE ME. So I tried on his tough-talking, Navy veteran persona and found that it fit me. Now I'm 275 pounds and have a loud voice and I know how to use it.
I'm not PRETENDING to be something I'm not. I am using a style of interaction that fits the "real me." I AM a man, and I SPEAK as a man. And my template for manliness is my stepfather. At the same time I'm also an intellectual, and I adopted certain patterns from my biological father. I also borrowed patterns from the writings of C.S. Lewis and Tolkein. Sometimes I channel Gandalf and sometimes Boromir.
Children have become adults in this way since a million years ago. There's nothing false about it.
This makes it sound like our personalities are a function of our own agency. What about genetics?
I agree that our personalities are partly a function of our past lives (trauma as you say), but that's only part of the picture surely.
i disagree , while most people do exist in a provisional life (to the uninitiated please search this term of mr. jung's) , this does not discount the possibility of evolving further
IIRC a "disorder" is a personality trait that is extremely strong; specifically, strong enough to significantly negatively affect one's life and relationships without medication or therapy (real therapy, not "talk to someone" therapy).
For example, sometimes people talk about lowercase "t" and capital "T" trauma. Lowercase "t" is when something affects you enough that recognizing it elicits an emotion, e.g. some people fell uneasy when smelling saline because they associate it with getting shots when they were young. Uppercase "T" is when the emotion is overpowering, e.g. soldiers who wake up screaming or experience lifelike flashbacks when they see military equipment, or people who can't visit a location without panicking because it reminds them of a negative experience. Only uppercase "T" is diagnosed PTSD, although that doesn't mean lowercase "t" is never a problem, it's just not life-altering and can be worked around without medication or therapy.
We have regular adjectives for the manageable "lowercase" version of disorders. "Obsessive" for OCD, "antsy" or "trouble focusing" for ADHD, "strange" or "peculiar" for Autism. I do think someone can be "manic" or "depressed" without having diagnosed Bipolar or Depression. Unfortunately, language is defined by how it's used in practice, so if most people call themselves "ADHD" when they don't have real diagnosed ADHD, you'll have to use their meaning to understand them, and eventually it'll become the norm; but you can speak and write the non-disorder adjective to help counter it. Worst case, we still have "diagnosed X" to distinguish from "X" (unless people start using it like "literally" to mean figuratively...)
Believe to know more. As someone who has managed to live comfortably in the margins... I have never been more miserable than recently. What changed? This unsolicited assistance.
I was a perfectly fine and productive remote worker before the pandemic. Now, every bit of energy I have goes towards "no, really, I'm alright" and the leagues of hustlers.
There is a lot of this content out there about mental health and there is a lot of it that tries to explain everything people do. Much of the issue I see is that it is taken to extremes and is very much driven by algorithms pushing particular pieces of content. And if it is ambiguous enough it will reach a larger audience, a beneficial sign for the account posting it.
There's no room for nuance that perhaps the person who is generous both has qualities of a people pleaser but is a generous person because once upon a time they did a generous thing and it made their life happier. Where it becomes a mental health issue is when it starts to reduce the quality of your life and your relationships significantly.
The bigger issue is that each of these things seem to be labelled as problems and how they can be solved, not managed nor be normal human behaviors. At the extremes, yes perhaps they need to be managed to a higher degree, but everything else is still what makes up peoples lives.
I myself am swarmed with reels about anxious/avoidant attachment reels with any random man/women and their dog trying to talk ambiguously about human behaviors and providing an explanation for them.
For young people sitting on TikTok and Instagram late at night being bombarded with mental health related reels trying to explain your behavior and other peoples behavior you like or don't like. It's best to give that type of content a break.
> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything.
To explain everything shallowly by looking for direct cause and effect and not a multitudes of causes and effects. That complexity is too much to think through comfortably whilst living within it and having an unreliable experience of the self, especially in the younger years. Labeling causes with an easy broad moniker provides temporary comfort, relieving the individual of the burden of deeper reflection.
They're trying to explain everything but what they're actually doing is labelling everything with dubious labels and then putting social pressure on people to act like their labels. Under the guise of acceptance they're alienating everybody from each other by trying to put everybody into a bucket. It's best to notice this kind of thing but not put too much energy into refuting it because it's just not where conversations or attention should be, this kind of thought should wither in obscurity instead of seeking some kind of victory over it.
Haven't we been doing exactly what you say since like forever? Aren't "asshole" or "creep" or "nice" just labels coined a long time ago that already distort someones actual behavior or some situation between 2 people? Or used for being mocked or commended? I say at least in current times the new generations are expanding that vocabulary in trying to be more precise but the people that are more of a following type keep defaulting to exclusionary behavior.
I often see a generalized notion where refusing to be a person doing a bad thing instead transforms into being a person with doing-bad-thing-syndrome, which then distills to doing-bad-thing-syndrome-sufferer. It removes agency, but also accountability, so it's a good way to coast through life with learned helplessness
2. Personally, I think the being more knowledgeable about (and conversant in) common psychological issues is great. Much better if we have a label for "depression" rather than just thinking "The world and everything is awful and I'm the only one who feels this way." Same for anxiety, attachment, all of that.
3. If young girls happen to co-opt it in a way you find self-absorbed, get over it, stop trying to police it and make a fake moral panic over it. It's no worse than astrology or whatever other loose avenue of self-exploration would be otherwise happening.
It to me sounds like the author fundamentally misunderstands the whole thing, this just is soaking in boomer energy. That is -- the premise that recognizing these trends is somehow shaming/bad and it's "better" if we all use loosely-defined unscientific terms like "nice-person" rather than looking at and challenging our overly intense and dysfunctional people-pleasing or whatever.
The way gen-z uses these terms, is that they aren't some hardcore disorder, but as a common parlance for real and addressable things to change about oneself (e.g. that talking on the phone can be uncomfortable, or making an appointment is stressful). Like gen-z may say "Oh I have insecure attachment" and they just mean "Sometimes I'm afraid to reach out for fear of rejection" and that's a healthy thing to talk about, even if the term they used is used a different way in the DSM.
Unfortunately (but given the slant of all her other articles, most likely intentionally), the author suffers from one major oversight:
The absence of labels is just as much of a marketing gimmick as their presence. Even anti-identitarianism will be weaponized. Even nothing is something. Eliminate all the labels and concepts and redundancies, and you are yet left with a "natural, unspoken, normal default" state of being.
And as it turns out, there are plenty of forces out there willing to exploit that appeal towards the "the unspoken", for either financial or political gain. The question remains, then: who or what gets to determine this unspoken part of life?
The genius of social media is that they propagated some labels and then they let people do the hard work of adjusting their personalities and belief systems to more closely adhere to those labels. Likely driven by mimetic desire for status and recognition. Adherence to well known labels provides instant recognition and validation.
Then when it came to 'targeted advertising', social media advertisers could just target the labels and reach a huge amount of people because those people had already fine-tuned and optimized themselves to be receptive to that kind of messaging.
Their personalities were homogenized to the point that the focus groups ended up being representative of the real people behind the labels.
I’m reluctant to blame therapy-speak and diagnoses of legitimate mental health disorders for the lack of personality in a lot of folks.
Instead, I lay blame at several altars of the modern world:
* Late stage Capitalism desperately trying to source novelty and products by convincing everyone they’re a “brand” to be marketed and sold to others
* Social media algorithms forcing people into bubbles for the sake of advertising revenue and data harvesting
* An “awakening” of modern mental health awareness (especially post-pandemic) that’s both (likely) engaging in overdiagnosing while also laying groundwork to understand people for who they are, rather than trying to shove them into neat little boxes of compliance
* The internet and free exchange of information enabling a lot of disparate researchers and experts to realize that these issues aren’t unique to a single cohort, but are likely environmental in nature to some significant degree
Add it all together, and you’ve got the current “label” era of personalities - shorthand for how you’d like others to see you and explain your quirks or eccentricities, but of questionable health if not accompanied by actual therapy (pharmaceutical, medical, behavioral, or otherwise).
Could this be an evolution of astrology? Or an evolution of the underlying attraction to astrology? This need to label things (libra vs scorpio vs etc) and the assignment of character traits and behaviors to these labels? This need to push for explanations beyond our control? And perhaps these psychological labels are even _more_ attractive since they have the veneer of science and rationality behind it.
I feel like the author is, funnily enough given the context, lumping in self-understanding and self-reflection of any kind into a single category. A tool (analysis) that is used to grant you agency is equated to an identity kit (a label) that removes your agency and puts you in the box that the author describes.
You can have great self-understanding and self-realization about your childhood, your parents opinions and personality without letting it define your life.
You should not blame the analysis itself, but blame the projection of your personality to the result of it, which it encouraged by platforms that make money of it, like TikTok or BetterHelp. It can be fun to do an MBTI or Big 5 test to see common patterns in oneself, it does not mean that you have to structure your personality around the outcome.
To me, it sounds like the author is vouching for being unthinkingly driven by biology, tradition, and impulse in a society where most of this is also commercialized. Your govt wants you to have children to supply pensions, your impulses are driven by the advertisements that you have been bombarded with during the day, there is extreme prodding towards certain kinds of sexual looks or behaviors that influence what people find attractive. You are as much of a product when you follow the impulses than when you dont, the only thing is that with self-reflection you have a small change to question and think about why you want a certain thing.
I personally think that people living by the authors suggested way of living in a western societal moment of individualism have a maximum chance to regret their life at the end of it, doing everything "default" that society and tradition has taught you is "natural and human" instead of living the journey on your own terms and doing what you actually like.
> We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent.
While I agree about the over-labeling (which is a way to be sortable by algorithms that need to push or penalize our social media presence) I wouldn’t throw away the baby with the bathwater.
There is a difference between being generous and being a people-pleaser, and it’s an important one to know for people with this trait. Years ago you would have never thought of this as a (mild) neurosis, but it can totally be. Being aware of it can help immensely in leading a more fulfilling life.
This is true for all the other examples mentioned.
That said, the piece should just be: social media has polluted and ruined mental health awareness in the same exact way it has ruined and polluted so many other aspects of the public discourse.
I agree with this and you hit the nail on the head with the last point.
The big issues is the prevalence of so called therapists and psychologists putting these labels on social media in such an ambiguous way that draws users.
Our kids should have mental health professionals talking to them about their struggles and helping them identify these things. Not 100s of instagram or tiktok reels algorithmically sent to us every night.
Psychology (professional and layman) has helped me immensely, but I also recognized it can be a trap. I had a therapist for a couple months help me through an intense depression, but I could also feel when it was becoming naval gazing, so then I stopped.
Psychology is a means to an end. But some people are attempting to make it an end. I do feel a cathartic release to get a 'diagnosis', but this catharsis is transient. There is infinite sub-categorizations to achieve infinite catharsis, but each further division, brings diminishing returns.
I hope that this trend is going to burn itself out. There is no promised land in medical psychology as popularly experienced. It can be used as a scaffold to leap into a higher self-awareness, but then it must be left aside.
Speak for yourself, It's not impossible to uncaringly live your own life of your own choices, quirks and characteristics without agreeing that you're somehow "disordered", and pigeonhole yourself into idiotically cheap social media and pop culture labels of X or Y. Just refuse to participate in the herd-guiding on something so basic as personal tendencies and flaws.
It's a shame that too many young people do the opposite and have bought so widely into a therapy culture of tagging so much of the complex human world into little boxes of psychological disorder (founded on some very, very shaky evidence and clinical understanding) to cause further internal trauma. This itself has become a bizarre and sickly fad but not an inescapable one.
Eh. There are a loud social-media savvy cohort of mostly young, mostly female, mostly suburban American people and this is the lens they see the world through and they have a disproportionate representation in the available media to consume. The people that don't think this way which is the vast majority of people just don't talk about these things too much and don't accept the premise of the people who do... but don't disagree with them because those people are exhausting.
People who aren't that interested in talking about themselves just have other interests and don't want to engage in the shallow philosophy of psychology of the social media gen-z class.
To those with a bit more age and life experience than myself, I ask if you have noticed a rise in "categorical thinking" over time. To clarify, I mean thought processes that are mostly surface level and focus on attributing qualities or conclusions to things based on observable characteristics. Sort of "they display x so they must be y which means z"
It’s surprising that this article doesn’t mention LGBT or disabilities at all. The same effect extends to those two. And, in the same vein, it’s females “buying” it.
"Female" is primarily a scientific or biological term that refers to sex, not gender. When used as a noun for humans, it reduces women to their reproductive capabilities and strips away their individuality and humanity, making them seem less than fully human or equivalent to animals. For example, "female" can refer to any species, while "woman" specifically refers to human beings.
Here it's clearly being used in a derogatory, dismissive sense.
Why would it be unrealistic for 20% of women to like women too at least somewhat? It is not stigmatized anymore. And statistically, males are more more dangerous partly due to strength and partly due to ideologies they sign up for. So, a woman a little attracted to other woman has more motivation to admit it.
The phenomenon of men having sex relationships with other men in male only environments (jail, army) existed before. They reverted to heterosexual relationships when they left the environment and would not call themselves "bi". It is opposite side of it - clearly having something out of same sex relation did not made them bi, because it would be shameful.
Oooh, boy. Almost no-one wants to talk about it because it's considered harmful (or even taboo) to blame being gay and especially being trans on social contagion and similar phenomena.
If you point out that a controversial phenomenon is very dependent on social elements, you also invite discussions whether something should be fine-tuned in our society to influence it, which turns into a political issue.
I somewhat agree that there is a problem but there is a glimmer of hope. As these medical terms are used more in everyday speech they lose their medical connotations and just become new words for personality traits. A lot of people who casually describe things as ADHD are using it more as an adjective than a diagnosis. We have had medical terms make it into this usage before: moron, hysterical, humourous (we're going all the way back to the four humours).
Love this article. If you'd like a book that works deeply through the topic of commodified humanity, Minima Moralia by Adorno is painfully pertinent here.
I think what (may have) changed is that we now have "acceptable" labels. ADHD is fine, autism is fine, alcoholism, schizophrenia, not great, pedophilia, very very bad, even if you have never acted on a child.
I don't remember past "acceptable" pathologies, or what was considered a pathology back then, it included being gay. It you have a pathology, then you are mad, and if you are mad, then you lose your rights, at best, you are considered like a child, at worst, you end up in a place worse than prison.
Now, if you are diagnosed with an "acceptable" pathology, you actually get some advantages, people are expected to tolerate your quirks and you get full freedom like normal people, you may even get some welfare benefits as you are considered disabled.
To summarize:
Before: You are diagnosed as autistic, you end up in an asylum and lose your freedoms. No one wants that, so you avoid the label, it is just a personality trait.
Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits and people find it cute on social media. You want the label.
It is not utopia, it is my country, France. And while public healthcare looks better than in the US, it is absolutely not a utopia, from understaffing, bureaucracy and fraud, it is not without problems, even putting aside how much it costs in taxes.
But the idea is: in current society, for some pathologies / personality traits, you are better off with the label than without the label, so people will seek the label rather than avoid it, they would be crazy not to...
But it sounds like this is not really meaningfully true outside of France, then?
Here in the Netherlands, there isn’t any such thing as an ‘autism benefit’ or ‘ADHD benefit’. Only if your condition is so debilitating as to make you unfit for work, then there is a benefit that you could apply for, but not in all circumstances, and only if an unemployment doctor is convinced by your case.
The overdiagnosis and therapy talk is real, and is causing way too many people (most of them children) to take brain-altering pills on a daily basis.
I find the article to lack nuance, but it is time that this hazardous trend stops, and if it needs to go through social media shaming for some people to realize this sucks, then I am all for it.
My 6-year-old is a pain in the ass (got thrown out of 2 schools already). His psychologist says he has a hard time controlling his emotions. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who suggested he has some form of mental illness (OD, ADHD, ASD, we’ve heard it all). Thankfully, here in France, both his psychologist and his teacher are really wary of the trend, and are very careful not to put a mental health label on a kid who doesn’t have any other problem than being a pain to adults.
See the main problem is the question of suffering. People would say: but your kid suffers from being a pain to adults. Wouldn’t you want to help your kid not suffer?
Well yes sure, but the suffering is society-induced. It’s not that his personality is a medical problem, it’s that he doesn’t fit within the expectations. If he’d been born the son of a monarch, it would be accepted that he talked back to adults and throw tantrums, and he wouldn’t feel like shit. And I am not trying to say my kid should be allowed to yell at his teacher, but all of that setting isn’t natural - as in primates don’t go to kindergarten - so who’s to say what’s normal?
It is the same for what the person describes in the article. We live in a society where people do suffer from not meeting society’s expectations. The suffering is real, and so the diagnostic is often oozing.
But when 10% of children are diagnosed with ADHD and given amphetamines so that they can get through the day, we should probably ask whether it’s not the society that’s sick.
I appreciate the spirit behind this article, and yes, something real has been lost in how we relate to ourselves. But it doesn’t go far enough. The problem isn’t merely that we’ve traded quirky personalities for medical labels. The deeper, subtler tragedy is believing that identity itself is something fixed, stable, and real.
Identity is a seductive illusion. It promises meaning, coherence, and comfort. Yet beneath this comfort lies a quiet tyranny. Once we define ourselves, we imprison ourselves. The fixed “I” we cling to doesn’t stand scrutiny, not scientifically, not philosophically, not psychologically.
Consider neuroscience. The self, the stable “I,” is nowhere to be found in the brain. What scientists find instead are fleeting processes, overlapping patterns, temporary states. Neuroscientist Anil Seth, in his book “Being You,” argues convincingly that the self is a kind of ongoing hallucination—a comforting fiction the mind generates moment by moment. There’s no stable core beneath it, only fragments, constantly rearranging.
Philosophy has long understood this. David Hume, centuries ago, searched for the self within consciousness and found only sensations, perceptions, shifting sands. Nietzsche echoed this idea, mocking the notion of a stable self as merely a trick of language, a grammar-born illusion. Ludwig Wittgenstein, too, dismantled the belief in private inner truths. For him, meaning emerges not from introspection, but from the shared dance of language and action. To think there’s a stable self hidden deep inside is to misunderstand how language, thought, and reality interact.
Freud, despite the distortions of modern therapy, never saw us as coherent beings either. For him, the human psyche was a theater of conflict, desires clashing beneath consciousness, forever hidden from full awareness. Freud’s contribution wasn’t mechanizing the mind, but revealing its profound contradictions. Unlike later theorists such as Lacan, who mistakenly reduced humans to mere patterns of meaning—Freud knew that beneath our carefully narrated lives lay irrationality and mystery, impossible to tame fully by analysis.
Yet today’s therapeutic-industrial complex tries precisely that. Therapy, once an exploration of human depth, now resembles a dating app business model. Platforms like BetterHelp and Talkspace profit not by curing distress, but by prolonging it. You pay, endlessly, to decode yourself. Success for them isn’t resolution, but endless self-inventory, endless labeling.
This is where the concept of “mental health” itself becomes subtly oppressive. It implies an ideal state, a normal range, a standard we should measure ourselves against. Ian Hacking described this phenomenon as the “looping effect”: labels shape behaviors, behaviors reinforce labels, and individuals get trapped in a feedback loop of self-pathology. When identity becomes a medical diagnosis, we surrender our autonomy, our ambiguity, and ultimately our freedom.
Trauma, too, has morphed into social currency. It’s become the dominant metaphor for interpreting every aspect of life: attraction, friendships, career choices. James Davies, author of “Cracked,” highlights how the psychiatric model strips our lives of meaning, reducing complexity to clinical symptoms. But not every strong feeling is a wound; not every quirk a disorder. Of course, painful things do happen—sad things, terrible things—but we speak as if these things always happen to us, placing ourselves at the center of a chain of causality and consequence. In reality, events simply happen. There is no inherent meaning, no cosmic intention. How we weave these accidents into our personal story is entirely our decision. How we let them shape or influence us is our choice alone. It is precisely here, in this decision, that our ultimate freedom lies.
Here’s the core of the matter, the radical truth that’s rarely stated plainly: there is no fixed identity to discover, no true self hidden deep inside. Identity is a myth we invent because life feels safer if we pretend there’s something stable beneath the chaos. But life resists stability. We are never fully known—not even to ourselves. The moment we accept this, the instant we let go of trying to pin ourselves down, we become free to live.
Happiness is not the reward of endless self-exploration. It’s not a puzzle we solve or a mystery we decode. Happiness is a decision, a leap, an act of rebellion against the tyranny of labels, against the logic of suffering. We don’t find happiness by understanding every trauma or categorizing every impulse, but by letting go, by accepting uncertainty, by choosing desire, will, and joy despite everything. This is what Kierkegaard called the leap of faith—not into religious belief necessarily, but into life itself.
Ultimately, identity is not something we have. It is something we do, something we perform, something we constantly recreate. The human condition is not static being but perpetual becoming. Nietzsche said it best: we must become who we are. And in doing so, we reject the cage of identity entirely. We are not diagnoses, symptoms, or personalities. We are simply alive, driven by desire, moved by joy, ever-changing and never fully defined.
Yet this does not mean giving up on growth or self-improvement—quite the opposite. It is precisely because we are not limited by a static identity that we can truly act, improve, evolve. But nobody can do this for us. Nobody can save us from ourselves, not a therapist, not a romantic partner. The responsibility for our existence and happiness lies entirely in our hands.
By letting go of identity, we open ourselves up to genuine change. Free from the suffocating need for recognition, our relationships become richer and more authentic. Most relationships are neurotic precisely because they are driven by demands for validation rather than true acceptance. When we stop begging for recognition, when we let go of the myth of identity, we allow ourselves, and others, to exist in all our beautiful complexity. Relationships cease to be transactions of self-worth and become genuine encounters: open, curious, generous.
In the end, perhaps the bravest act is not endlessly “working on ourselves,” but simply living—boldly, messily, without apology or explanation.
Sometimes I think about what I've read in a book about Japan.
Something along the lines that Japanese people are analog while Westerners are digital.
We try to explain everything, every emotion, feeling, how things are. But sometimes talking about things strips them of their mystery, of the unknowns. We talk too much and get entangled in meanings and what was formless and fluid before suddenly becomes defined and limited.
I'm a bit dual about this thing. I see it around social media and in people talking.
I got diagnosed almost two years ago, and it has been a relief in a way because it finally explained a lot of the struggles I had, helped being less blameful about myself and learn physiological keys around how I am and why.
At the same time, I really don't think it would have helped me knowing this much earlier in my childhood, and sometimes the tentation to use this as an "excuse" is strong like described in the article.
I wouldn't wish an earlier diagnostic to my kids, and try to approach things with an empathic approach instead.
This is the same mental mechanism that makes me hate (pseudoscience) personality tests. Many of my friends that use them fall for similar trap of "labeling" themselves.
When those labels aren't informative or accurate at all, it ends up becoming a chain rather than liberation. "Oh Im MBTI-4acronym, according to that personality test, I'm an introvert so I should skip this public event!".
We are inherently complex and multi-label, even with the worst simplifications. That's confusing and frightening to many, so we seek an "oracle", authority, that can tell us who we are. Problem arise when those are false prophecies.
And they are almost always false. (to varying degrees) Social media mental diagnosis is exactly the same. And crucially they're very wrong over time [1]. So it end up as a shackle to stunt their growth. It completely stops the trail&error process, exposure, and creates a self reinforcing cycle so the label becomes deeply rooted as an identity. There's really no substitute for "trying out yourself to see what works for you, and make sure your trials are set up so you can learn something from it" when it comes to self discovery.
I wish psychology was a bit more scrutinized field. The amount of popscience garbage they give out, and how many people use these model to judge and limit themselves in their life is so sad to see. Probably one of the primary reasons I would keep social media far away from kids (if I had any).
There's a lot of boomer men writing in all caps whose special interest is either trains or WW2 who, if were in their 20s today, would easily be categorized as autistic. Older men, for most of their lives, lacked both language and social permission to think of themselves in those terms.
The entire construct of "disorder" is defined by what a given society is willing to accommodate or tolerate at a given moment. Thus, the problem with the article is that it assumes that we live in a homogeneous social landscape. We don't, so things that negatively impact someone life ie: the definition of a disorder, are age dependent. The threshold for "impairment" is not a universal biological constant; it’s a moving, socially negotiated boundary. Diagnostic categories themselves are historical artifacts, trailing behind the societies that create them.
The failure to recognize this is assuming an objective social reality, that frankly, never existed and never will exist. It only serves to reinforce existing, unexamined, contingencies of a specific time and place.
out on the fringe there is lots of personalities as they say, the difference between bieng eccentric and crazy is a million bucks, or comunities with lots of recent imigrants, low density rural areas, people with improbable jobs,
pilots and doctors who worked war zones, free divers working on barges for $19.50/hr, smoke jumpers, musicians and movie people, folks working the front lines in not for profits dealing with homeless and people with aids, serial entrepenours, et cetera
but then ,I guess, maybe I move around more than most people........but as for the mass of people following "the plan", ya they are a bit extra tweeky and way too easily spooked, way too much into there "feelings", and "comfort zones", "saftey", and "processes".......plus they are stuck in environments where they are subject to people who are outworking and over achiveing the fuck out of everything and bringung out the worst passive agressive shit in people, that they then get to feel guilty about.
it's a shit show alright
There are some interested points hidden in a of projection from the author here.
>We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent.
....says who? Who talks like this? I've been fortunate enough to travel a fair bit in the last year and I haven't found any city or country where this is the case.
This advice is cliche at this point but go touch grass. Get off the internet and talk to an actual human, because most actual humans don't talk the way this article says they do.
If everything around you is using therapist talk maybe you're hanging around too many therapists. That certainly happens with people who hang around exclusively with, say, software engineers.
It's good advice. I have met people who talk like the post mentions, but the reality is that they just spend way too much time on Instagram and TikTok.
Not like me, I'm on Hackernews, and would never integrate stupid stuff into an important representation of my personality. Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!
Agreed. And about the HN thing, when I worked for a software startup in SF, it became a joke on our team how often strangers ask "what's your stack" instead of talking about the weather. Python 2 vs 3 was the talk of the town for a while.
> Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!
Only if you have a personal blog in Times New Roman, with an RSS feed, all diagrams in ascii art, no JS, and especially no scroll-jacking, high contrast font (ideally black on white), and keep in mind that we will find out if you’re not self-hosting your email, in which case you’ll have to profusely apologize.
I actually have most of this. The blog defaults to the user's system font, I think, and it has an RSS feed + very little JS (maybe none, depends on how hosted Mataroa works), etc.
Unfortunately I don't self-host my email, so I must apologize profusely.
I was joking but maybe I really should do this. I'm lacking a lot of Linux fundamentals, let alone NixOS fundamentals, but I also love my setup so much. Here's the commit that made my wallpaper an animated hobbit house!
I didn't use Nixvim or any of that cool stuff though. I stole a little Bash project called Tilde from my friend Victor Engmark to keep all my dotfiles in a repository and then symlink them to .config/ on all the machines I use.
Seattle is brimming with “new money”. I think the article is describing a sort of quasi intellectualism that is common in circles of people who are more educated than some, and paid more than most.
I don't think money has much to do with it. My kids' social circle covers a wide socioeconomic range and this heavy use of psychology is pervasive across it.
Yes, the author is deciding How People Really Are by looking online, when the distortions of online discourse are also what she is complaining about.
On the other hand, most interactions I have with people are devoid of this kind of involved emotional inquiry. There is neither the non-psychological characterization of people ("he wears his heart on his sleeve") nor the psychological characterization ("he is anxiously attached"). I talk about these things with some of my family, some of my friends. Never with acquaintances. That is: in normal (not online) life people don't generally talk about having ADHD until they've reached a significant level of trust; and ADHD is about the easiest thing to talk about compared to any other issue.
Maybe this an artifact of the more reserved WASPish circles I run in. We're all very polite. We don't give each other nicknames. We don't gossip. We avoid making assumptions about a person's character. I don't think this serves us particularly well... and maybe therapy talk is our way of getting past this, couching these ideas in acceptably academic language. But without that language (and even with that language) we mostly just don't talk about it.
Not to discredit you, but I see it around me. One of my best friends is getting tired of his girlfriend always being “so introspective” and described what she does and journals about as what the author mentioned
As a child, my dad’s brother fell out of a bunk bed and got a traumatic brain injury that would kill him 15 years later.
My dad experienced real trauma but was told to bottle it up. After 30 years, he finally went to counseling and it was transformational for him.
By contrast, I had some mean fifth grade classmates who still live in my head in uncomfortable social situations…
Did my dad have trauma and need to put a “label” on it? Yep. Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...
As a society, we’re responding to the fact that a lot of our family and friends are living with the weight of a past which haunts them or psychological challenges which deeply affects their ability to relate to the world.
I think it’s ok to be overweight on therapy-talk. Kind of like how a little too much inflation is ok after a long period of zero inflation…
But I do think we should let younger people have more time before they get labeled/diagnosed. There’s a lot of 15 year olds who are just kinda weird…
Isn’t the point of labeling something as a “trauma” to be a signifier for the moment or behavior that affected you greatly and not something that meets an arbitrary level of awfulness, especially by way of comparison? Your father lost a brother, which is definitely certainly traumatic, but my grandfather lost a son. Does that equate to a greater trauma, therefore nullifying your father’s loss? I would say no! Comparing traumas means in my mind that nobody can ever heal because someone else will always have experienced something that was in some way worse.
Not all bad things are trauma. According to the APA: “Any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning. Traumatic events include those caused by human behavior (e.g., rape, war, industrial accidents) as well as by nature (e.g., earthquakes) and often challenge an individual’s view of the world as a just, safe, and predictable place. Any serious physical injury, such as a widespread burn or a blow to the head.”
It’s not useful to compare trauma, but not all negative things that happen are trauma.
And perhaps more importantly, not all trauma causes PTSD, which is a defined set of symptoms later in life.
It can mean they suffered serious health problems for 15 years until a particularly bad seizure or some such took them. TBI can cause long-term conditions like epilepsy, physical disability, organ dysfunction, sleep problems etc.
I was very struck reading about about a mass-shooting "survivor" dying 20 years later and it being considered a murder. It sounded wrong but when reading the account of the terrible health problems they suffered every day until their death, I was left in no doubt it was not just murder but a far crueler one than those that died on the day.
That makes sense. I naively assumed that if someone had survived ~15 years they would more or less be likely to live as long as anyone else, but on reflection there's no real reason to believe such a positive thing.
> Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...
You might be selling yourself or others short with that notion of trauma that excludes what sounds like bullying.
I personally don't find traumatic impact to be determined by the severity of the event. If anything, it feels like I am built for the "big stuff" like family tragedy and during such events, where others have fallen to pieces, I can step up, I am more focussed and capable than normal. A stoic acceptance of such events comes naturally, it's life, it happens and I know I am needed.
In contrast, small events: rejection, failure, embarrassment, conflict etc. can be paralysing, debilitating, brain-breaking poison that I can't escape with out great suffering and effort.
The cases that cause me effort are expressly where the impact is irrational. Natural grief, sadness at misfortune etc. heal with time but irrational impact is where an inconsequential grit of sand has seized the entire gearbox and only grow without attention.
Something I noticed a few years back. If you click just ONE post/video/reel/advert that is even remotely related to ADHD on any platform with an algorithmic feed, where you have previously never clicked before... It will feed you content implying that that particular neurodivergence both applies to you and is the source of all your problems, for MONTHS, even if you never click another one.
The only other thing I've seen that behaves this way in the algorithm is far right-wing clickbait. Everything else just disappears after a few days if the algorithm detects you've lost interest.
I have a different perspective on this. I've always been interested in reading about the science of left handedness, because I am one. It's interesting to see how my brain is literally wired differently than others. How motivation and language processing are in different hemispheres of my brain compared to righties. But I never thought something was "wrong" with me, I just thought it was interesting.
Those who actually have diagnosed afflictions like autism and ADHD may also be interested in their brain wiring.
I think the trend comes from completely normal people who want to find an excuse to be a victim, which means they can defer responsibility of their lives to their "mental disorders," which of course has the effect of making highly insufferable people.
Its hard to charitably respond to this article. Having more taxonomy doesn't remove anything. You haven't lost anything. You are just angry about change.
when the taxonomy is weaponized then we have lost something. taxonomy that is used in earnest to improve and adapt is fine. when it used to promote victimization that begets the control of other people it's a net negative.
having labels shoved down my throat is not a life i find to be worth living nor one that i find to be in my own best interests , nobody is stopping you from disagreeing which makes me wonder what makes you so angry about it ;)
If 2 people use words, and the intended meaning is properly conveyed between them, they used the correct words. I feel like you might be getting lost in the symbolic.
well that's an ironic point for you to make considering it appears my point was entirely miscommunicated , I'll try again by saying that people are addicted to labels and identification which in my opinion is not in anyone's best interests , if it still seems to you that I am lost then this conversation is itself a bit lost too
Move out of the city, at least 30 minutes past the last bumper-to-bumper traffic area. Wait 2 years. All this will seem not just foreign but very strange, as in how do people possibly subject themselves to this sort of nonsense?
... So we're supposed to see ourselves as static objects, unable to change or without causes of our behavior?
It won't be long before we see our genes as something that happened to us. At some point there will be questions about why our parents didn't change them, or why the government lets some change or select their genes but not others.
I guess this essay rubbed me the wrong way. Where they see — I'm not sure what it is they see, maybe embracing responsibility or self-actualization — I see people wanting to improve themselves, understand.
Personality is labeling, it's just labeling without explanation or goal.
Haha it’s just the quest for uniqueness in a socially acceptable way combined with a desire to be protected by victimhood.
It’s pretty funny to see but it’s just kids being kids. The majority grow out of it and the truly mentally ill develop this Munchausen form.
Hopefully I’ve developed good tools to deal with it by the time my kids are older. The victim form is hard to break out of once you’re in.
The worst is there’s nothing to learn from these people. It’s like trying to learn sprinting from a guy who keeps yelling “As a peg leg, as a peg leg, …”
Just earlier this evening I had not one but two commenters issue replies to the effect that successful deception in the public sphere, business and politics, is a marker of high intelligence. And that's just a depressingly direct example of what really seems to be a profoundly entrenched worldview "coming out of the closet" in the last decade or so especially.
The thing is, when you can't talk about seriously antisocial behavior with massively bad consequences for large numbers of people, when the real bad guys seem out of reach, all that angst has to go somewhere. And so everything is a disease or toxic behavior in the small, the family member or coworker has is a narcissist or a toxic personality, but like grinding everyone into poverty and pushing the world into avoidable war is just, how the world works.
If you put the small change shit in the swear jar where its always gone, nor you're asking very different questions about why things seem bad for everyone.
It's true that the fortunes of humanity go through better and worse seasons, but the fact that it's been winter before doesn't make me any less eager for spring.
Reminds me of the "How did you take that picture?" Reddit meme. Who is the observer when we conceptualize of ourselves as deconstructed beings? Occasional self-awareness and reflection can be insightful, but when will you get back into the cockpit and fly the plane?
90's culture had so much more emphasis on being legitimate (and its many self-defeating imitations). Being legitimate is something that cannot be attempted. Only self-evidence can ever be cool. Only existing as the actualized output and never its abstracted model inputs can be genuine. Through that lens, one's own dignity demands not deconstructing. You should observe and react to what you learn, but whatever fractures are incurred must come back together and be owned. Otherwise you are pretending not to be the person in the cockpit, not the person flying the plane. It's a lack of responsibility. You will not do or do not. You will "try" because you are not in control. You will never be cool.
The engineer wants to isolate pieces of the system. Play the game again to study the situation, learn the pattern, and overcome the error. This is where it applies that no man crosses the same river twice. When people say, "life has no reset button" it does not simply mean that there are consequences but also that that every moment always remains, flowing incessantly, regardless of how it is scrutinized and analyzed to fit into a maze of dots and figures. We cannot own things by going backward in time to try again. Winning the game after many iterations is never cool. The losses must be owned or the pilot is merely creating a lie that they themselves understand while holding a result out to others as evidence of their coolness. It is trying too hard. It is illegitimacy, and its self-knowledge will seek to pull back the curtains on itself so that the pilot will not betray the plane.
Living intentionally constructed is a thought that must itself be forgotten. The idea is a map. Supposed externalized awareness of the being who rides in the skull cannot exist. It is a construction, and once the construction is used, it must be discarded as a map that was used to achieve some perspective. We can remember things far away. We can catalog and connect patterns over time, but the ALU cannot look at itself as lines in memory. The ALU lacks any self-description from which to feign deconstructed awareness beyond control bits that are necessarily less information than the registers, program, and data under computation. It all must vanish to a fixed-point un-calculation.
It's an aesthetic with some jagged edges. You'll always move forward based on what you believe because there can be nothing else, and if you are wrong, you will be wrong. You must own it. There are no outs besides simply admitting mistakes. But what is the opposite of dissociated? Is it worth it to live in your skin? Is it worth it to forget the distances that do not exist between yourself and the controls?
Labels are incredibly simplistic and reductive. Try to compress the entire written works of Shakespeare into a single word. You can, though it would not do his command of the language justice.
Moreover there is the problem of ensuring that when two parties exchange a single label, that label maps to the same referent or construct in the mind of both parties; otherwise you end up in a situation where two people use the same word to refer to different things, yet still think they are both talking about the same thing. Confusion at this layer leads to Tower of Babel-esque effects.
Language is powerful; in a Sapir-Whorfian kind of way, it determines the primitives out of which we compose larger, more complex ideas, but more importantly it also provides a serialization format that allows us to record thoughts and revisit them at a future time. Such thoughts can also include thoughts on ourselves, who we have been, and where we are going; the collection of such thoughts is one's narrative, and "narratization" [0], the process of creating that story of who we are, is an essential characteristic of human consciousness [0].
Subversion of the language we use to describe the self, and the media through which those languages are recorded, is thus altering the life narratives of large groups of people. "Therapy-speak," or overly medicalized language that originates from a fundamentally materialist worldview, does not treat of the existence of a rich inner psychological (i.e. "metaphysical") life, much less offer the terminology to describe it adequately. This therapy-speak gets recorded in our social media as a hyperreal [1] depiction of ourselves, and as one media scholar put it, "we become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." We create this therapized narrative of ourselves, and thereafter this therapized narrative shapes us. The therapy narrative becomes the totality of our self-concept, and, lacking any language to describe the inner life, dispenses with the inner life entirely. Now there is only the label and the physical matter of fact, qualia be damned.
The inner life, after all, is not scientific; it is not an objective phenomenon, nor can the qualia of everyday conscious experience really be adequately quantified in a way that truly captures its character. Science never intended to treat of such matters of the psyche, or the mind, or the soul, whichever of the three terms you would choose to describe the one subject under discussion. Traditionally, such questions would have fallen to spirituality and mysticism; and, I have a suspicion that the sudden interest in "identities" of all stripes is really a resurrection of the old language of souls and psyche into a more modern, secularized context, as a pushback against overly fundamentalist materialist worldviews that do not admit of the existence of any part of the human outside the biological facts of its genetics and chromosomes.
Modern psychology has lost touch with the rich storehouse of symbolic and mystical language used to describe matters of psyche for aeons: that of gods, and demons, and spirits.
This has been a common trope since at least the 90s among conservatives.
The author's other post is fanning the "porn addiction" moral panic, and they're subscribed to someone who says that atheism is bad and only Christians can save the world.
None of this really matters to their argument of course, but it does give you a sense of their motivation.
Their argument, of course, is nonsense and is far outside the consensus of research psychologists and medicine.
> Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.
Could this be because modern women have far more social expectations placed on them than boomer men did, and are thus struggling generally speaking more than boomer men had to?
I think the question is notable though — there’s having the challenge, and then there’s considering it as part of your identity. Personally I wouldn’t; my various issues are just things I’ve got going on, but I don’t think of myself in those terms. Maybe a cause for parts of my “identity”, but not actually a part of it
>Could this be because modern women have far more social expectations placed on them than boomer men did, and are thus struggling generally speaking more than boomer men had to?
No. "Mental health" concepts have just become prominent in the mythos of young women. Everybody has their struggles and competing over who has the most is not a productive area of discussion. Contemporary young women really like talking about mental health and have their own culturally shared version of psychology diagnosis and treatment. It's not necessarily any better or worse than any previous as psychology has always had a tough time with rigor.
LOL speak for yourself- if you're American maybe. Rest of the world, not so much. I deeply resent these articles which claim to speak for everyone but irresponsibly push destructive narratives like this. Like a least have a discussion before shilling your depressing viewpoint as the truth.
Well no, I'm Australian and I agree with the post.
Also, on the same coin who are you to say the rest of the world is no different, or is.
Perhaps the better response is simply that people shouldn't draw broad conclusions, as neither I or you can do that for anyone, including on behalf of the rest of the world outside of the US.
the west exhibits these traits moreso than other cultures , the west also has a pervasive influence on other cultures , the topic at hand is an incredibly important issue and focusing on the american god complex instead of the perversion of our souls contributes to the problem by distracting from it
Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.
But there are a few things we can learn from this:
- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.
- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.
- most mental disorders are an issue of degree and not something qualitatively different from a typical experience. People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.
> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.
This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok.
There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Many young people lean into this and label everything as a defensive tactic.
A while ago, one of the trends was “time blindness”. People who were chronically late, missed meetings, or failed to manage their time would see TikToks about “time blindness” as if it was a medical condition, and self-diagnose as having that.
It was bizarre to suddenly have people missing scheduled events and then casually informing me that they had time blindness, as if that made it okay. Once they had a label for a condition, they felt like they had a license to escape accountability.
The most frustrating part was that the people who self-diagnosed as having “time blindness” universally got worse at being on time. Once they had transformed the personal problem into a labeled condition, they didn’t feel as obligated to do anything about it.
This parallels the debate about free will and determinism. If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?
Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can: "Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1]
i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too.
If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual.
[1] https://philarchive.org/archive/HOBFWA
The problem is conflating one's identity with the label allows a person to project all of their problems onto the rest of the world.
By "being" the label, one has little to no agency over it. Without agency, there is no responsibility, nor incentive to change. Without responsibility or incentive to change, there is no problem for the individual; rather the problem is everyone else.
This isn't just something that a person can do to themselves- it's something society can do to people. The phrase "bigotry of low expectations" describes a behavior of assuming that a label identifies a person, and that they have no personal agency to overcome it. The behavioral shift of everyone around that person molds the image the person has of themselves to a limited, restricted version of what they're actually capable of.
You can force agency, ironically, by applying subjective labels that require irrational amounts of hard work to shake off (not just a change of perspective, tho a permanent one also requires undue amounts of schlep)
Like "unwell"*, "uncool" or "has bad taste"
In the barbaric old days, like you mean, there was racism (no longer objective)... Nowadays you can deny my suggested labels are cruel, plausibly, even in court!
*"Sick" is now a term of endearment, alas
> could you still hold people responsible for their actions?
Surely this is trivially "yes". If their actions are deterministic, then your responses to their actions must also be deterministic, including holding them responsible (punishment, firing, etc).
Even stronger if you believe things are deterministic there is no reason not to hold them accountable. You don't try to argue with a broken clock for it to become more punctual, you just trash it.
If you have a mechanistic view of humans, you know that punishment can cause changes in behavior, so you would use punishment to cause the changes that you would like to see. Punishment is fully compatible with determinism.
[dead]
> If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?
I've been thinking about an escape hatch here:
Imagine that all philosophical notions of free will were incoherent. In that case non-philosophers' use of "free will" would either be a) inherited from this philosophical incoherence, or b) pretentious/ambiguous nomenclature that reduces to a more practical, well-defined term-- e.g., self-determination, freedom from tyranny, etc.
In reality, it seems like in the vast majority of non-philosophers mean "free will" as a short-hand for one of the more practical, workaday terms. The only edge case I can think of is the use of "free will" in the history of Christian theology, but I very rarely see that come up in non-academic situations.
If my supposition is right, then we can practically swap out nearly all instances of "free will" for the relevant non-philosophical, well-specified lay terms. And the continue to hold people responsible for their actions based on the centuries of case-law, common law, social history and medical knowledge that led up to our modern era. Perhaps more importantly, we can incrementally level up our understanding of responsibility/justice based on modern research into human behavior, while completely avoid digressions into philosophical determinism.
In fact, I'd speculate that college philosophy "free will 101" classes are a kind of unwitting bait and switch. I bet if you did a survey, most prospective students would be expecting a class that sharpens their teeth on one of the workaday synonyms, most often something like "self-actualization." But that has about as much to do with "free will" that as "coffee bean calligraphy" has to do with Javascript. (Alternatively: it would be a fun prank to do a "free will 101" class that teaches students to stand up for what they believe in, resist tyranny, etc. :)
Edit: clarification
In a deterministic universe, the future is still affected by (and can be improved by) shaming people for behaving poorly, even when they have a predisposition towards such behaviour. Think of it like integral windup in a PID controller. The feedback provides an error signal that accumulates to (in most cases) move the person's outputs in a direction that will reduce the poor behaviour. Eventually their brain will start predicting the negative feedback and alter its outputs to produce more acceptable behaviours.
Whether this is best described as "learning", or as "internalised <whatever>", or as "trauma", is left to the reader.
> If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?
This is a good example of where over-thinking a topic in abstract terms causes some people to lose sight of the big picture.
Take a step back and think about what you’re saying: If nobody could be held accountable for their own actions, does the concept of accountability disappear? It’s a farcical claim.
But you’re right, this is essentially what is being argued: By invoking therapy speak and formal sounding labels, the person wants you to kindly box up any accountability or consequences under the label and direct them at the abstract notion of the labeled condition, instead of the person responsible.
This is why I experienced so many people getting worse at punctuality after learned the phrase “time blindness”: They used the therapy speak to transform themselves into the victim, at which point the pressure to improve their situation diminished because they believe victims couldn’t be blamed. The temptation becomes strong to label everything negative this way as it’s a nice escape hatch to externalize accountability.
>escape hatch to externalize accountability.
It's harder to escape from "has bad taste" than from "irresponsible" :)
>Bad taste leads to crime
Useful reminder (originally Stendhal's, that Lead poisoning is always indirect)?
OT warnings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweetener
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3027955/
Wouldn't it then absolve me of my personal responsibility to reprimand the person?It's not me choosing to hold people responsible, it's just something that happens (or doesn't, depending on what was determined)
I am interested in this topic, but I do sometimes find the compatiblism argument difficult to distill down to its essence without still leaving a sense of unfulfillment.
From my understanding, compatibilism boils down to accepting that everything may be pre-determined, but people are still free to make choices as long as they are uncoerced.
The argument from that quote above is a little bit subtler and aligns with my thinking. I don't believe we have free will in any sense, either everything is pre-determined, or it is random, and I can't even think of a definition of free will that would make sense (just like the compatiblism one does not to me). But clearly there is a feedback loop going on, and so it is inherently in the species best interest to hold people accountable for their actions, because the act of holding them accountable forms part of the inputs that lead people to make choices. Not doing this is not a great survivability trait overall. Doing so, we survive a bit more.
But I'm not sure that is strictly necessary to call oneself a compatibilist.
Reminds me of this 1996 essay, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died": http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/courses/psy115w/Fall02/TomWolf...
TL;DR: It argues that what comes after "God is dead" (Nietzsche) is "the soul is dead" (or less poetically, "the self is dead"), i.e. we become convinced we have no agency, but mere biological and environmental automatons with the concomitant lack of moral accountability.
(Credit to earljwagner's 2023 post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37950313)
Thank you for the link. Amazing article, and 29 years old at that.
The dilemma of determinism has the other side - if free will is indeed truly free, i.e. it may introduce causes that themselves do not have causes, the accountability is lost as well, for there is no continuity.
Reposted to address: labels on clusters of belief such as "free will" and "determinism"
tlb or pg has a pithy saying that I can't find now goes smth like
"we should avoid labels [on people] not because they are useless (they aren't) but they are hard to get right. Adding the cost of being wrong to that makes them not worth it"
There's some connection to the "build skill or taste?" dilemma threaded earlier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469163
You can make proper use of labels-- that requires taste. To build skill, you try to find new labels that can go viral ;)
E.g you combine them like Hobart :)
Why have you typed out the full word for everything in your cmmnt except for “something” and people’s names?
I guess pg is Paul Graham. Who is tlb?
A tik
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
'Trevor L. Blackwell', co-founder of YC
Pls help
This is simultaneously funny and sad. I wonder when alcoholism will get a front row seat during zoom meetings (or even IRL meetings). "Can't help it hick I'm an alcoholic".
I think a lot of societal change these days can be summarized by the idea that self-labeling is seen as transforming something into "everyone else's problem".
Modern treatments do actually treat alcoholism like a disease. The one that cant be cured, but can be managed.
It is trying to remove the shame from the equation, because it is not a productive emotion. It makes people postpone and avoid steps necessary for treatment.
Yes but the issue here is that treatments exist for alcohol use disorder and that one cannot use the simple presence of alcohol use disorder as an excuse to dodge accountability.
And yet people are using things like "time blindness" as excuses.
I think socially it's because addiction is stigmatized heavily. Despite having real psychological disorders that fuel it, addiction is still largely viewed as self-inflicted. Of course this stigma doesn't come out of nowhere - people who are addicts almost always devolve into dangerous and asocial behavior. If someone is an asshole who stole 50 bucks from you to shoot up, it's easy to think they're a heroin addict because they're an asshole. But really it's the other way around.
As the great philosopher Hedberg once said, alcoholism is the only disease you can get yelled at for having.
Mitch Hedberg was a genius.
This is interesting point.
Western society has basically built a hyper capitalist system that creates individualistic consumers, but has failed to hold individuals accountable to minimum standards.
The bar has never been lower and we just sort of amble on as a lonely, isolated society so long as the stock market grows quarter to quarter.
No that is ridiculous. Stop blaming capitalism for every problem in the world, it just makes you look childish.
Especially when it comes to alcoholism. As if the soviet union was a bastion of soberness with a high bar or something.
> Stop blaming capitalism for every problem in the world, it just makes you look childish.
Economics is intertwined with every other study. We can't pretend socio-economics isn't real, social interactions fuel the economy and the economy influences our social interactions.
Also, making connections to way capitalism might fuel addictive disorders, such as, say, talking about advertising of alcohol and tobacco, does NOT mean that we are saying communism is perfect. Communism fuels disorders in other ways. It's actually quiet childish to take any analysis of capitalism as a praise of communism. It's the sort of "team sport" mentality you see in politics among the most uneducated and reductive among us.
If you want to criticize capitalism on a website run by literal capitalists then the onus is on you to propose a better alternative. So far none of the other economic systems that humans have applied at scale have worked out better. I mean Islamic fundamentalist theocracies have lower rates of alcoholism but that advantage comes with some pretty severe downsides.
But nobody is trying to prove or show a better alternative, that's my point. A critique of capitalism doesn't mean we should dismantle capitalism.
I don't get it, because we do this with other stuff all the time. I program in C#, guess what? I have plenty of critiques of C#. That doesn't mean I want C# to go die, I love C#. It seems to me everyone understands this... until it's capitalism. And then, suddenly, it's our first day on Earth.
Also capitalism, like everything, is not just one thing. It's a complex beast and there's infinite possible implementations of a capitalist economy. Nobody actually wants raw, unregulated capitalism because that sucks major ass. Yes, that's a technical phrase.
Meaning, we can, and should, be looking to progressively improve our economic system. I mean, it's what we've been doing since forever.
It was created because those hyperindividual consumers will not enact any political change as it requires numbers and solidarity, something that our society of snowflakes finds disgusting. Everything else is a byproduct.
Oh you have time blindness? How unfortunate! That's just like my check-writing blindness I just got.
I think after a few expressions of time blindness, they'll discover that their contracts have continuity deficiency and their career vertical expression challenges.
The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.
>The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.
"A child who isn't disciplined at home, will be disciplined outside of the home" - old African proverb.
The issue is kids growing up without being taught accountability, but instead that they're perpetual victims of "the system" created by evil old white men, and therefore nothing they do is ever their fault. This is the fault of the parents, school system and society as a whole who coddles kids giving them the false sense of security that they can always have their way, right until they hit the brick wall of adulthood featuring employment, bills, debt, responsibilities and self sufficiency.
"Disciplined at home" is being a maybe not perpetual but victim of the system for something like 18 years though.
I don't get where this idea that kids are coddled with comes from. They usually are not even allowed to wear the cloths they want or choose the food they want and get pushed around to silly extents.
Kids almost never gets it their way.
In order to hold someone accountable for their actions you need to allow them a choice in the first place. Disallowing children from making choices is one way of protecting them from the consequences of a bad decision: by not allowing them to make it in the first place. That is what coddling is, protecting from the environment. Protecting them from the choice is just a more extreme version of shielding them from the consequences.
Ye. But the hard problem as I see it is the "the consequences of a bad decision" part, for which many "bad decisions" have no consequence but the arbitrary punishment from adults itself.
I.e. not cleaning up toys from the floor. Staying up late. Wearing different colored socks. Playing or speaking too laud. What ever. The consequences of those are really complex or fuzzy and the threshold level for breaking the rules arbitrary.
Also the subset of "bad decisions" that maybe have some distant future bad consequence, i.e. eating too much ice cream, are even harder. Or all the 'none will like you if you do that' things you need to teach kids.
> Kids almost never gets it their way.
Speak for yourself. I've seen 2 year olds being able to choose their clothes and if they don't get their way, they throw a temper tantrum so bad they vomit.
And I fear, the child will turn into another Cartman. I.e. spoiled beyond any belief.
There’s enormous variation, from giving the kid whatever they want, to giving them no choice and then punishing them for doing what they’re told.
If you imagine it from the perspective of aliens with very different biology, it’s kind of crazy that this important and difficult task is given to people with zero training or qualifications.
I've seen this kind of thing and it annoys me to no end. However that seems to be a small minority among many.
But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.
Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ? Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power? Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with? Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Again, I agree with you that some are hiding behind these things in order to deflect blame, but let's not pretend that the young don't have every right to be mad at us.
>Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ?
Who said they should? Nobody should ideally, but that's the way the world works: shit rolls downhill. And being a cheeky little shit at work, will not result in a revolutionary change at the top of corporations leadership the way you imagine, but will just result in your direct manager's career being at risk due to your behavior, so you're giving him no choice but to cut you because they're not gonna die on your hill for you. Cultural changes take a long time and need to involve 90%+ of the workforce, not just a few.
>Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
You know why. Because the rules are made by those in power, and people choose to rise to power in order to make the rules by which others are held accountable.
That's why young people are engaging in the "lying flat" or quiet quitting movements, and voting outsiders of the establishment like Trump, Mamdani, etc. They want to flip the monopoly board over because they know they were dealt a shit hand. And while I'm not that young anymore, I totally support their movement.
Who is "us"? Youths are welcome to get as mad as they like but seething with impotent rage and posting hot takes on social media isn't going to get them anywhere. If they want to improve the world then first they'll have to work hard and pay their dues just like every other generation before them.
Or they could try to start a revolution, but frankly most of them are too weak and fragile to attempt anything that involves real sacrifice and risk.
> But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.
As young adults always had, since the dawn of time.
And as they've received and comprehended the answers, most quickly stopped asking.
That is part of what becoming an adult, without the "young" bit, means. It's not like these things are unknowable, or that the "system of things" is secretive. It's all rather obvious - it just takes a little time and experience to figure out the questions and notice the answers.
----
> Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement?
Because that's how it works. It's not that different from asking, why should they suffer the consequences of a tree falling on them and crushing them? Because they happened to stand under it at the time, duh!
Society and civilization aren't fixtures created by nature/God - they're built out of human interactions. People pursuing all kinds of interests, alone or in groups, navigating around each other, cooperating, convincing or coercing each other. It's all abstract systems created and maintained by strangers. And the unfortunate reality is, someone screws up somewhere badly enough, everyone downstream of it suffers.
The sad irony is, the consequences they ask about come from mismanagement of systems that were created in the past to shield people from consequences of failure of earlier versions of the same or similar systems! That's what civilization is, in a way - stacking systemic solutions to problems of previous systems!
The silver lining is in hoping that every iteration makes less people suffer consequences and to a lesser degree.
> Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
It is invoked much more often than they think, but they're not able to recognize it - it looks different than with people not in power. And it needs to be different, because the situation is different too.
> Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with?
Why is it OK for them to yell at old disgruntled people for things they have nothing to do with? Yelling is easy. Understanding that almost no one individually has much influence on how things are, that can unfortunately take a lifetime.
> Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Because that's how life works. It was the same for us when we were young, and for our parents when they were young, etc. Young people don't know shit about life, and don't even realize that yet. Over time, they acquire knowledge, experience and relationships, and various kinds of power - and along the way, they are treated more and more seriously, until they themselves become the people "running things" and start hearing the same questions they used to ask from the next generation of kids.
----
To be clear: I'm not saying that things are all ideal, or even perfectly fine. I'm just saying that the answers to those questions aren't mysterious, and figuring them out is exactly what growing up to be an adult in a society looks like. It always has, which is why you can see the exact same complaints about "kids these days" and "old farts" showing up in every period in history, all the way back to ancient Greece and earlier.
> The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.
Decades of studies refute this.
This has been the worst thing about my experiences on Threads. A lot of people make what they - and the US mainstream, apparently - defines as a heterodox personality their entire sense of self. So almost everyone is some combination of queer, "neurospicy", a witch, "creative", and so on.
This often seems to come with some assumption of moral superiority.
But under the label many of them are absolutely mainstream people. Their posts aren't genuine spontaneous comments - they're calibrated and calculated as a marketing exercise for "engagement" and to promote a product, course, Insta lifestyle, and so on.
I realise it's tough out there and everyone has to hustle. But there really aren't many who acknowledge the gulf between the vocabulary of rebellion from the reality of "Please buy my course on how to be anticapitalist." (Actual example - not made up.)
If I looked I imagine I'd find a mirror image of hustle conformity and superiority culture on far right boards, only more so.
It's all quite weirdly Social Media™.
Edit: to add, I'm not criticising specific subgroups. I'm very aware the US is a dangerous place and being certain kinds of person significantly decreases your life expectancy.
It's more how social media has somehow distorted the online experience of those subgroups away from straightforward human exchange into commercial opportunity without people being aware of it.
Some young people in that phase of their lives where they grow into being responsible for themselves start missing the times when they were not responsible and try to extend those times with any pretext they can come up with. It's quite human but should of course not be encouraged.
I'm sure there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition, but you do realise time blindness is a real issue, right?
https://www.simplypsychology.org/adhd-time-blindness.html
I don't watch TikTok videos, I don't use Instagram, but I have been plagued by these symptoms my entire life, and don't really care about others opinions on it. You probably don't have it if those symptoms don't resonate with you, but there are plenty of people who genuinely struggle, and there's likely some overlap with those who have undiagnosed ADHD.
The problem isn't that time blindness is a fake issue.
The problem is that many people incorrectly self-diagnose as suffering from conditions like time blindness. Which they do for a variety of reasons: To externalize accountability for why they're late, to feel special, and so on.
A comparison is the large number of people who claim "gluten sensitivity" and maintain special diets. Now there are serious medical conditions like celiac disease that require one to avoid gluten. But the vast majority of self-diagnosed "gluten sensitives" do not have such conditions. Researchers conclude that for many of them there is no physical basis for their self-diagnosis.
Among other things this phenomenon makes it harder for people with actual conditions to be taken seriously, because there are so many impostors.
I assume that your solution is having a professional diagnosis.
Sadly this doesn't really work due to the current state of psychiatry where many people with legitimate issues are being denied a diagnosis and treatment (see for example: trans healthcare and gatekeeping, adhd healthcare, etc). It is even more weird because often when you go to two different doctors you will get different results.
Not to mention that usually to even explore the idea of getting an official diagnosis you start with a self diagnosis.
> But the vast majority of self-diagnosed "gluten sensitives" do not have such conditions.
If you believe that you have celiac but for whatever reason you haven't been able to test it yet, then there is no harm to try going glutten free. The real issue is how many people deny the very existence of glutten sensitivity and put these people in danger. If you look at communities of people with the disease you will see what I am talking about.
No that's not how it usually works. People with a serious mental health condition don't usually start with self diagnosis. Instead they are referred to a mental health practitioner by another healthcare provider, a school administrator, or the criminal justice system because they are unable to function effectively in society. Many mental health conditions impair the type of objective metacognition needed to reliably self diagnose in the first place.
> If you believe that you have celiac but for whatever reason you haven't been able to test it yet, then there is no harm to try going glutten free. The real issue is how many people deny the very existence of glutten sensitivity and put these people in danger. If you look at communities of people with the disease you will see what I am talking about.
You just made one hell of a strawman argument about what GP said.
He merely stated that “the vast majority of self-diagnosed ‘gluten sensitives’ do not have such conditions”, as you quoted. This comment jibes with my experience.
The two folks I know who have full-blown celiac end up projectile vomiting for hours if they consume even small amounts of gluten (e.g., gross contamination in a fryer or on a cutting board).
The two folks I know who have milder versions were able to figure out that they needed to be tested in fairly short order due to “digestion issues” when they ate gluten.
On the other hand, the dozens of other folks I know who claim to be “sensitive to gluten” have no real basis when saying so. When I mentioned to them that I have friends with celiac, and I empathize with them, and I suggest they get tested if they haven’t yet (undiagnosed celiac is real), the answer I get are nothing short of glib - “oh, I’m just on a keto diet, and this is an easy way to do it”, “oh, I just found that I feel bad after eating things like cake” (sugar crash? diabetic?), or “oh, I’m fine, I just want them to make a fresh one (of whatever) for me”.
Your defense of folks who claim a problem that they can (often) fairly easily determine that they don’t have is enabling those folks’ dysfunction — that is, lying to themselves and (per this thread) using labeling as a defensive tactic.
People who actually have celiac need very specific accommodations. But the multiples of people who claim “gluten sensitivity” when they don’t actually have it causes large swathes of the general population to disbelieve the folks who really do have it.
It’s ok to call out the poseurs for what they are while still looking out for folks who have celiac or might have celiac and don’t know it yet.
That's half my point, which is why I lead with agreement on that very problem, i.e. people self-diagnosing when they shouldn't. The top-level comment seems to attribute all such people who identify with those symptoms as doing so because of a trend.
Most wacky things start with a kernel of truth, so yes, the real tragedy here is people with a genuine psychological issue getting drowned out by a wave of trenders. The trenders denounce medical gatekeeping as exclusionary, but it’s also what protects resources for the genuinely needy, and what protects them from unnecessary medicalization.
> The top-level comment seems to attribute all such people who identify with those symptoms as doing so because of a trend.
I think the only source of disagreement is in the way you chose to frame it in absolutes, i.e., "all such people" instead of "people".
Framing anything in absolutes counts as a strawman argument, because all you need to do to refute it is find a single case, no matter how isolated it is, where it doesn't apply.
So you didn't think they were dismissive or trivialised the issue? I mean, I can sympathise with the frustration of people somewhat 'giving up' after labelling their own issues, but it's not a logical conclusion to assign it all to a trend. That's what they appeared to be blaming and I didn't see them say otherwise, in any of their comments.
> So you didn't think they were dismissive or trivialised the issue?
What issue would that be? People falsely claiming they suffer from conditions they do not have? Or is it when they claim they struggle with a condition they self-diagnosed but somehow don't even bother to seek medical help not even to verify a diagnosis? Because if there is something that harms those who actually have to endure these conditions is people making fraudulent claims and trying to capitalize on everyone's goodwill.
> I mean, I can sympathise with the frustration of people somewhat 'giving up' after labelling their own issues, but it's not a logical conclusion to assign it all to a trend.
Is it "giving up", or is it just abusing a label they clearly know doesn't apply to them? You're somehow avoiding the elephant in the room and the whole point of this thread, which is the problem created by fraudulent claims by attention seekers.
This isn’t such a great example. You don’t need to have celiac disease to benefit from avoiding gluten. I suspect some people avoid it because they feel better in some way. For myself eliminating gluten (or wheat, I’m not sure how to differentiate that) has been life changing, it immediately made breathing through my nose effortless, made concentrating easier, etc. I can tell you eliminating gluten is not easy, you have to cut out a lot of common foods, eating out is almost impossible. If someone is sticking to that diet they probably have a very good reason. I think a lot of people should give it a try at least and not worry about this being part of some fad. I’m a bit ashamed to admit but I only tried it because of a South Park episode...
You can differentiate that by buying some pure food grade gluten and eating that. There's a lot of stuff in wheat beyond just gluten. Of course this won't be a truly scientific controlled experiment but maybe good enough for your purposes.
Most restaurants have menu items with zero gluten, so eating out is hardly difficult. Not much gluten in a plain steak, potato, and vegetables.
i would encourage everyone to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. you interact with these people in passing, they deal with themselves all the time. you might find them grating or difficult to work with, and that's fair, but i would hope people wouldn't extend "i dont like this person" to "I dont believe this person has a disability and they're making it up and i assume this because i dont like them"
neurodivergence can and frequently is a real debilitating disability. it is really fucking hard to cope with in a society that actively punishes it, and is full of perspectives like yours that invalidate these very real conditions.
i understand it's a difficult thing to wrap your head around. it isn't super visible like someone missing their legs. it's a really complicated, nuance spectrum of problems that are also really difficult to understand by people who don't have it, and frequently the people who do have it also don't know they have or understand how it impacts them
You think that society now, more than ever, punishes this after what we've been discussing—numerous instances of people glorifying it and (attempting to) excuse poor behavior through it?
i didn't say more than ever, but in fact in a way it is: having a job and being able to support yourself is increasingly knowledge and skills based work, whereas in the past things were much more labor focused, which is a better fit for people with ADHD.
yes ADHD is better recognized and better treated these days. but as this entire comment section shows, there is still tons of stigma, misunderstanding, and a lack of compassion for a real disability
That article is not claiming that “time blindness” is a real standalone condition. As the other commenter already explained, it’s not among the conditions with actual diagnostic criteria and agreed-upon symptoms.
The first sentence claims that it’s something people with ADHD might experience, not a specific condition. In other words, it’s just the therapy-speak way of saying “chronically late”.
Note that the date on the article is also very recent: Only a few months old. This date is after the trend was popular on TikTok. It was likely written in response to the trend, as a way of capturing search engine traffic from people searching for it.
This is representative of the issue I was describing: There’s a sense among some people that using the therapy-speak terminology for something transforms it into a different type of personality attribute, for which they can’t be held responsible. Saying “I have a problem with being on time” and “I have time blindness” are functionally equivalent, but some people want to believe they the therapy speak labeled version warrants different treatment.
So because those people are ignorant of the nomenclature, they must not really experience those issues? I never asserted that it was a standalone condition, in fact I attributed it as related to undiagnosed conditions that do have names.
Applying formal-sounding nomenclature does not transform accountability like you’re suggesting.
Also, being able to Google a TikTok-famous phrase and get hits from SEO-targeted blog posts like this doesn’t really make it official nomenclature. They’re just trying to capture traffic with trending keywords. This is a very obvious SEO article.
Saying “I have a problem with being on time” and “I have time blindness” are functionally equivalent. Applying therapy speak doesn’t change the situation.
This is all very much missing the point, though. Someone who believes they have “time blindness” should recognize that they have a higher need for additional measures to address their issue, including more use of time keeping aids, alarms, and even accountability from external parties. Trying to use a labeled condition to escape accountability for one’s actions is not only unhelpful, it goes against the entire purpose of therapy.
The problem becomes more clear when you imagine the same idea applied to other issues: If someone is constantly lashing out and yelling at people, they don’t get a free pass for saying they have “an anger issue”. They’re still accountable for the consequences of their actions, regardless of what name you put on it.
The intersection of this with employment, specifically, seems hairy to me.
Is time blindness a disability that requires accommodation? To what extent, and who decides? If not, what makes it different from other disabilities that do get accommodation or some kind of protected status?
(These are meant to be rhetorical questions, but I’m sure someone has a direct answer, so I’d be interested in that too, because I really don’t know)
JAN[1] says "time management" is a disability (limitation, in their words) that requires accommodation.
[1] https://askjan.org/limitations/Managing-Time.cfm?csSearch=10...
Employers only have to provide accommodations for actual diagnosed disabilities. And even then legally required accommodations only have to be reasonable. If the job fundamentally requires showing up for meetings and completing assignments on schedule then employers don't need to allow disabled employees to be late.
AHDH is an actual diagnosed disability. If I have to take meds that would leave you tweaking for 3 days then employers better allow me being late sometimes.
> better allow me being late sometimes
That would depend on the jobs requirements, wouldn't it? In some roles that might be a complete deal breaker. For example, anything customer/client facing. If you can't perform the jobs duties with reasonable accommodation, maybe you should find another job?
Similarly, if you are 3 feet tall you'll likely never be the worlds slam dunk champion. Not even if they provide you with a step-stool. It's not your fault, or the employers. Sorry, I guess.
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> fun and easy
It's not fun or easy for anyone to find a new job. However, it's usually less painful than staying if you're poorly suited to your current role.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. The secret to living a good life is learning to take an honest inventory of your personal capabilities and then figuring out how to work with what you have.
I truly hope that things improve for you.
Don't talk to me about painful and please take the rest of your insufferable statements and shove them up your ass
Nope. A disability diagnosis isn't a blank check where employers have to accommodate everything you want. If the job requires being on time then at least under the Americans with Disabilities Act an employer is totally allowed to fire an employee who shows up late. There are some nuances here that won't fit in a comment so consult an employment attorney if you have questions about your legal rights.
You've really missed the point there, what I said was that these people who are using the term "time blindness" are not using official terms, and that ignorance does not detract from their life experience. Psychologists refer to this as executive dysfunction, which that article specifically mentioned.
I'm not sure why you're attempting to discredit it, was the Masters in Science of the author, and the review by a doctor not sufficient for you?
I never missed your point, I made no comment on people failing to hold themselves accountable for their behaviour. You certainly seem unable to comprehend that not everyone experiences time as you do.
> Applying formal-sounding nomenclature does not transform accountability like you’re suggesting.
"You have an unlicensed condition, citizen!"
That's not what they said. Whether your condition is diagnosed or not, it's your responsibility to take care of it. If you're chronically late, you should set timers or write notes or whatever helps—whether you've got class-A ADHD and take meds or just assume there's something wrong with your sense of time.
Just saying "I'm time blind, sorry not sorry, deal with it" is not an appropriate reaction to causing trouble to your surroundings.
You're missing my point. I'm not trying to deal with the 'conditions' that individuals or groups say they have. My point is that if a group says a person has a condition it's considered real, but if an individual says so, it's not. It's a point about deferring to authority over what is existent or not.
Who defines conditions, says that ADHD is real, for example? It wasn't in earlier generations. The are terms of social (group) art - special names that are generally accepted as meaningful.
In the USA it's mainly the American Psychiatric Association which defines whether ADHD or any other mental health condition is real.
https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm
Sure, I'm not disputing that.
Yeah this is sadly common. People with autism, adhd, or who are trans are infantilized and have their agency removed from them when dealing with the medical establishment. In a "I will tell you how you feel" way.
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> Im sure there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition, but you do realise time blindness is a real issue, right?
So is Munchausen syndrome, but somehow people don't self diagnose that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
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> Did you even search for anything before making that idiotic comment?
You acknowledged the fact that "there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition".
I, in turn, added to the fact that you pointed out that not only are there "those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition" but there is also a complex mental disorder where individuals play the role of a sick patient to receive some form of psychological validation.
This somehow triggered in you an emotional reaction. Why was that?
You can't see how, in response to a comment that was primarily about whether "time blindness" is real, which you quoted directly, your comment comes across as dismissing any self-diagnosis as Munchausen syndrome? Did you read about that either?
>Patients with FDIS intentionally falsify or induce signs and symptoms of illness, trauma, or abuse to assume this role. These actions are performed consciously, though the patient may be unaware of the motivations driving their behaviors.
I'm not convinced 'I have that!' statements quite meet the criteria for that. You may be thinking of malingering.
Yeah, but if you have it you need to compensate for it. It’s what calendars, reminders, todo’s etc etc are for.
Speaking as one with a huge challenge in this space. No one is going to go “oh, you have ADHD, well, I guess you don’t need to fulfil that expectation…”
Which is why I use those tools extensively. I never said these people shouldn't try to compensate for any deficit, my point is that what people describe as "time blindness" is a real problem, and should not be so easily dismissed.
Yeah, but the parent is moaning about people shirking their responsibilities because of a self diagnosis.
That might be a projection; just a punctual person peeved off with the chronically late; but I was just adding the point that being challenged in this area isn’t an excuse.
I’m on-time for work stuff; I’ve figured out how to compensate. Personal life, ok, different story, but the responsibility has always rested with me.
If you know you have time blindness and you still arrive late it is worse, because you knew it will happen and did nothing to prevent it
Sorry, but you clearly have no idea what it's like to actually deal with this, at all. If I try to be on time to things, I will be stupidly early, or still think I have time to do tasks A & B before doing C, because they invariably take more or less time than I estimate. Or I start doing tasks X & Y, because I'm easily distracted, you know because it's a deficit in attention. Don't trivialise what you don't understand.
Your advice is as ignorant as saying 'just do more fun things' to someone with depression.
I don't want to trivialize, as I am currently procrastinating due to axiety on something, I know it's not easy.
But yeah, let's be stupidly early. I think part of accepting that you have a mental condition means that your life will simply not be optimal. Which is harsh to accept in a society which values efficiency above all else.
You have to do something about it though. You either come up with strategies to work with the condition or what? Just give up?
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I think part of why time blindness / chronic lateness gets such visceral responses is that the behavior is a broken promise generator. The impact feels very personal.
Continuing with the walking stick metaphor...it'd be like if the person with the walking stick was frequently committing to go jogging, hiking, etc with others. They know the activity might be beyond their capabilities, but they keep saying they'll go on the difficult hiking trail or whatever. This impacts the plan for everyone else.
Saying you'll be somewhere at a particular time is a commitment to someone else. If you're making commitments and frequently breaking them, people will react badly to that.
Having had a number of chronically late people pass through my life, I've often heard "be there in a second", "I'm on my way", "5 minutes, max" and similar phrases once the person is late. What I rarely hear is proactive acknowledgement and ownership of the issue.
The commitments you make as a chronically late person need to include your chronic lateness as a factor, just as the mobility limited person should take their limitations into account before signing up for the group hike.
That's a good assessment, but it misses the fact that the person with the effective dysfunction genuinely believes they will 'be there in a second', because they cannot accurately assess time. The lack of forthcoming contrition is not difficult to explain, shame discourages people from drawing attention to their faults. If it's happening frequently, one would always be feeling 'faulty'. Aversion to that is expected.
So you agree with nomdep? If you know you have time blindness it's a good opportunity to do something about it. I tend to choose the be really early option because that works for me. But it can be stressful for sure. And I probably don't get as much done as someone that can organise their time better. That's just the way it goes.
False dichotomy. You can both take measures to address an issue you have, and still know that won't always solve the problem. Being really early sometimes is the only option, but if you're always doing it, regardless of how critical it is, you're wasting a huge amount of waking life.
Everyone wastes a huge amount of waking life on something, whether it's sitting around waiting for an event to start or watching TV or scrolling social media. So what.
Some of us have families to take care of, and shit to do. I guess that's not you.
Lol. I actually spend a lot of time taking care of my family, and plenty of other shit to do besides.
So, knowing how much time and effort is required to maintain such responsibilities, you think someone with a similar situation, but who also has trouble being organised in general, has extra time to twiddle their thumbs for half an hour or something, before every single obligation with a time attached, just to be sure they don't get distracted? Do you have any comprehension of how ridiculous that sounds? If you're less capable of completing tasks you need more time than a typical person to do so, not less. They don't give students with ADHD less time in exams to ensure they can break task and put their pens down on time.
Still pushing those preconceptions, eh? Is this how you approach everything you could learn from? Assume you know all the answers before actually studying? Your teacup is full.
Do or do not, there is no "try". If you know you have to leave home at 7:00 AM to avoid being late then just set an alarm at that time. When it goes off then walk out the door, even if you're in the middle of some other task. Like if you're brewing coffee then just unplug the machine and leave: no coffee for you today. Don't allow yourself the opportunity to get distracted. Simple.
I’m not arguing against your basic point as I completely agree arriving on time is my own responsibility, but when I do what you suggest, i forget my house keys lol
If you can you might want to install a door lock that uses a code number instead of a key.
Reminds me of my doctor who thought that adhd was not real and his solution to my issues was "just do it lmao"
You're really missing the point. No one here is claiming that ADHD isn't real. It's listed in the DSM. But there are practical techniques that people can use to improve their lives regardless of whether they have a mental health condition or not.
I think you're oversimplifying ADHD and its impact. It's not just a matter of using tools or strategies. ADHD exists on a spectrum, and it's often comorbid with other conditions like anxiety, autism, or depression. What works for one person might completely fail for another, especially if their challenges are layered or more severe.
Also, saying “regardless of diagnosis” is invalidating the real need for accommodations. People with ADHD often require not just personal effort, but systemic support, whether that’s in school, work, or healthcare.
He did not deny that it is in DSM or that there are people who fit the definition provided there.
Usually such techniques tend to not work when they are suggested by people who haven't experienced the consdition and haven't put serious thought into them.
I get that he didn’t say that here, but I’ve seen other replies leaning toward the idea that “it’s easy if you just try hard enough” and that’s what I was addressing, too.
I am talking about my psychiatrist. I think you are responding to the wrong person.
this response is like hearing someone has crippling depression and telling them "have you tried just thinking happy thoughts? have you tried thinking about things in a happier way?"
here's the real thought process (edit: the writing is all over the place but im not gonna spend more time editing)
it's the night before, you know you need to leave at 7am, you pick up your phone to set alarm, and you see a text from jimmy, you spend 3 minutes texting jimmy, put your phone down, and move on to something else completely oblivious to the fact that you didnt actually set an alarm. i never CHOSE to text jimmy, there was zero percent of my brain that said "i see a text from jimmy, but i should set my alarm first because i might forget otherwise, so im going to set an alarm and then text jimmy just to be safe". this is what it means to have lack executive functioning. I will find myself making actions i did not make a decision to do, and the smaller the action it is the more likely i will do it without having ever decided to do it. for example, i will be focused writing software at my desk. 30 seconds later im standing in the kitchen, looking in the fridge, pulling out a sandwich, and it occurs to me: i never decided to stand up and go to the kitchen. the decision making process literally never occurred. I have to literally TIE MYSELF TO MY DESK to stop myself from doing stuff like this.
luckily, you wake up accidentally at 6am. crisis averted! you still have 20 minutes before you need to get out of bed. no problem, scroll hacker news. it's now 6:35am and oh shit i should have been out of bed 15 minutes ago, i didn't set an alarm for that because i didn't think i would lose track of time when im literally staring at the time in the corner of my screen, i rush out of bed and jump in the shower thinking this will take a couple minutes, no big deal. however adhd makes you chronically underestimate how long something takes, because im generally really unaware of how much time elapses when i shower because i have time blindness. it's not 6:45am and i need to be leaving out the door, but my shower actually took 10 minutes, and im now soaking wet and still have to get on my clothes.
but wait, i need to take my meds, i really really cannot forget that. so i go grab my meds, but then wait i need water. so i go fill up my water bottle for the day like i always do, but its dirty, so i need to wash it first, and at this point im hyperfixating on doing what feels like a necessary step because part of adhd is losing bigger picture context and longer term rewards, my brain told me "i hve to take meds which means i need water which means filling water bottle which means washing it" and my brain literally doesn't ever take a step backwards until it's now 6:55am and i finally took my meds and FUCK i'm not 20 minutes late.
repeat at every single step of every single day for the rest of your life. this is also why people with adhd have the stigma of being lazy. the reality is that we can and often get less done when it's not something that intrinsically motivates us (most things) because everything is THREE TIMES HARDER. we're constantly stumbling, constantly having to set a million timers, having fatigue of so many timers, so sometimes we're over confident in not needing them because it's not reasonable to set 40 freaking timers every day, but then one in five times we slip up, and now im 5 minutes late for a meeting, and i show up and my boss is being pissy because he thinks im some self diagnosing tiktok idiot because has no idea what this looks like and how it impacts me despite trying really really fucking hard and absolutely hating it
>i never CHOSE to text jimmy
Yes you did. You are an adult human being with free will.
Another one that just doesn't get it. In that scenario, if you texted Jimmy, it would be a choice, if someone with ADHD did, it wouldn't. Again as stupid a response as telling someone in a wheelchair they chose not to walk upstairs.
Not everyone's experience is the same as yours. Denying that only makes you look like an idiot.
this is like saying someone with depression is choosing to be sad.
this lack of executive functioning is a cornerstone of ADHD. this isn't a controversial opinion, it's universally accepted fact of the disorder
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You're really missing the point. I'm trying to help by giving you practical, actionable advice which has worked well for other people. When it's time to leave, take the kid out the door even if that means carrying them out in the middle of a meltdown. This teaches children discipline and makes them understand that they can't get their own way by acting like spoiled brats.
the problem is that ADHD impacts every single action of every single day for the rest of your life with no cure. yes you've fixed the coffee situation, but there are literally 50 other things i have to do every morning, sometimes they're things unique to that morning, and while i work really hard to be mindful of creating structure in my life to help cope with severe ADHD, it's not reasonable to have 50 separate techniques for the 50 things i have to do every morning and follow all of them perfectly or even have all of them perfectly setup.
there is massive, massive emotional fatigue to the amount of effort that getting through a day with ADHD entails, and this is on top of other things like having a ton of sensory sensitivity where literally just being around bright lights, is being bright outside, the sound of traffic, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, car horns, a door shutting loudly, someone clinking dishes while serving coffee, all cause emotional reactions in me that are intense enough for me to physically cringe. i literally cried while driving home a week ago at night because the oncoming car headlights are so bright the entire drive and i have to drive with one arm stretched out to block them from my view and etc etc
my brain is not an easy place to live. i am cognitively capable of understanding what technique can help with what issues. the problem is both recognizing every possible way my adhd can fuck things up and the amount of mental and emotional drain it is to have to consider everything all the time lest something fall between the cracks.
Did this person ask for the advice? Also, treating children without empathy, like objects, is not the solution to the problem.
Demonstrating empathy is great but it's not a valid reason to tolerate misbehavior. And being on time for school is more important.
No one is saying that structure or boundaries aren’t important. Of course they are. But what is being challenged here is the assumption that a meltdown = misbehavior. Sometimes it is. But often what looks like “acting out” is actually communication. Discomfort, overstimulation, unmet needs, not manipulation.
Teaching kids discipline without empathy doesn't create resilience. It creates shame, masking, and fear of expressing emotions. And yeah, being on time matters. But so does understanding why the kid is melting down in the first place, especially if it’s a recurring thing. Otherwise, you’re just dragging a panicked, overwhelmed human out the door like a bag of potatoes and calling it a parenting win.
I’m sorry people are so dismissive of your reality. I really don’t understand why they feel a need to insist you are just lazy when you are clearly intelligent and hard working, but struggling due to wiring you can’t directly control.
People aren't being dismissive. The point is that whether someone is intelligent and hard working is utterly irrelevant to everyone else, especially in a work environment. What matters are results, not inner qualities.
Yes, you are, and punctuality ≠ productivity.
That rather depends on the job. Punctuality = productivity for many jobs, especially those in manufacturing, food service, agriculture, education, hospitality, transportation, security, etc. In the real world certain things have to be done on set schedules and anyone who can't reliably show up on time is worse than useless to those employers.
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Oh, come on.
“It takes me 15 minutes to get to my destination. I should leave 5 minutes earlier than I need to in case there’s traffic or whatever.”
Set an alarm for 20 minutes before you need to get there, and leave when it goes off. Done.
I will absolutely trivialize it because everyone I’ve ever known that’s like that simply leaves at the time they’re supposed to already be somewhere. Or yes, they get distracted and start working on stuff that they know will take 30 minutes when they need to leave in 10. Thankfully we all have mini computers in our pockets that tell us exactly how long it takes to get somewhere that can also easily set alarms.
You clearly don't have these issues, and I doubt you care about anyone who does, because your "Oh, come on." response positively reeks of 'that's not my experience, so other people's can't be that different.'
It's never just one thing like travel time, it's scores of steps in a routine, which aren't always the same, and can easily be derailed by anything unexpected. You can estimate how long something you do frequently will take, based on how much time it took previously, and still get an inapplicable answer because distraction is a constant problem, and the executive function deficit means you literally do not think 'don't do that, get back on task' in the moment. You know how long everything should take, and still struggle to apply that when you're doing the routine.
Everyone has issues. For instance, I have idiopathic hypersomnia - I'm tired literally all the time. I don't get to say "Sorry wife, I'm just not going to be able to work."
There are things we're good at and things we need strategies to mitigate. I may not have ADHD but I have friends and family that do, so I'm familiar enough with it. What steps in a routine are needed to leave the house? Find your keys and wallet? Always put them in the same place. Go to the bathroom and maybe check how you look? Set that timer I talked about 3 minutes earlier. Other people with your condition can handle it; so can you.
Why is it that you think you're offering life-changing advice? What makes you think I don't use repetition? What makes you think I've never tried timers? What makes you think I'm the exact same as person as your friends and family? What makes you think I don't also 'just get on with it'? Do you even think about what you're writing?
Everyone else manages to do it, you're not special. Be on time, or be a NEET I guess. You've decided you'll never be able to function properly so yeah you probably won't.
What a fuckwit. No, not everyone else manages it. I decided no such thing, you're just fabricating bullshit to feel better about being an arsehole to people who weren't born neurotypical. I have a career with pretty good pay and benefits, and you obviously didn't read anything else I wrote about managing my issues. I'd rather be late than a sociopath.
“Time blindness” is not named anywhere in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5, 2013) nor in the DSM-5-TR (text-revision, 2022). It is not recognized as a stand-alone disorder or an official diagnostic criterion.
Even if it were in DSM-5-*, would that mean it's a standalone disorder?
I haven't read much psychology, but this article suggests a lot of psychological diagnoses are just labels for symptoms:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the-mind-in-the-whe...
FYI: SlimeMoldTimeMold has been heavily debunked across multiple topics. It was popular for a while in rationalist communities for the multi-part series claiming lithium in the water supply caused obesity, until everyone realized the author has a serious habit of misrepresenting sources, claiming citations say things they don’t, and omitting contradictory evidence.
Thanks.
Any idea whether or not their characterization of psychological diagnoses is mostly correct?
I am not an expert on neurology or anything but for ADHD at least there is definitely a biological difference, it's not just a diagnosis of a bundle of psychological symptoms
It is treated with stimulants, but if you give those same stimulants to a non-ADHD person you will see very different results
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What a terrible analogy. Diagnosing a car with “broken-downness” would be like a mental health professional diagnosing you with “bad.” Diagnosed aren’t always great, but they’re not that ridiculous.
Still down a bit and you’ll find plenty of vagueness with mechanics. “You have a bad tie-rod end.” Ok, cool. What caused that, why did mine fail when my buddy’s didn’t, how can I avoid this? Shrug. Once you’ve got it down to a part, you just replace it with a new one. Can’t do that with mental health. “Your time management unit is bad, we can replace it with a manufacturer part for $2,000, or an aftermarket equivalent for $1,500.”
Things can be that ridiculous and still be our best effort.
Because that's a colloquial name given to a range of specific symptoms people experience, and it is in the DSM, covered by 1.e.:
> Often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities (e.g., difficulty managing sequential tasks; difficulty keeping materials and belongings in order; messy, disorganized work; has poor time management; fails to meet deadlines).
The DSM doesn't list all minutiae of every general problem.
You’re conflating symptoms with conditions.
Having a single symptom does not mean someone has the condition. The diagnostic criteria for the condition for which you took that quote (out of context) is more comprehensive. It’s not a simple matter of doing Ctrl+F on the DSM and seeing that something can be a symptom or something else.
This is more obvious when you start thinking of other conditions: Feelings of sadness are a symptom of depression, but not everyone who has feelings of sadness has depression.
The misuse and misinterpretation of the DSM has become commonplace in parallel with the use of therapy speak.
They did not bring the DSM into the conversation, someone else did. And the person you are responding to made no such conflation! They also made no such claim that "[having] a single symptom [means] someone has the condition." That might be how you decided to interpret what they said, but it is quite literally not what they said!
They simply stated that time blindness is a real issue and linked to an article which acknowledges exactly what you are describing: "Many people with ADHD struggle with a lesser-known but deeply frustrating sign called time blindness." (emphasis mine)
Thank you for joining in with some sense.
I'm really not, you've made an argument based on a semantic misunderstanding of my first response. I did not say "time blindness" was a condition, I said that people generally self-diagnose conditions, not just for those symptoms. I also described it as a set of symptoms in later comments.
Use a timer like the rest of us. There are solutions to the problem
Omfg. A timer, for everything! Why didn't I think of that? And I'd set this timer for getting dressed, and showering, and making coffee, and conversing with my children. "Sorry, son, I can't help you any further with practising shoelace-tying this morning, I only allotted 90 seconds for that." I should probably set a timer for setting timers, too. Don't want to take too long doing that. Undoubtedly, this will also solve the distraction issue because the proximity of a time measuring device to my neurons will rewire them all to be "normal".
You're so ignorant.
There is a pervasive feeling in our complex postindustrial society that one thing we are lacking is a little fucking slack, the sort of thing that might be unavoidably extended on a very regular basis in the primeval human tribe/clan. We get it where we can.
Turning employment and education into an up-or-out pressure cooker that thinks nothing of, for example, firing the bottom performing 10% of people every year, or failing a student who's fifteen minutes late to a final exam, is not what we are built, cognitively/socially/culturally, to tolerate. These people are taking a norm that we DO make a formal attempt to force tolerance on, disability, and trying to extend it to get the system to treat them more like a human being and less like a competitor.
Let's take a more consensus trend: ADHD.
ADHD barely existed as a recognized social phenomenon until the 1990's.
> I didn’t realize how much of a psychiatrist’s time was spent gatekeeping Adderall.
> The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
> (it’s because his colleagues are all on Adderall already – but telling him that will just make things worse)
> He goes on to give me his story about how he’s at risk of getting fired from his Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers position, and at this rate he’s never going to get the promotion to Vice President Of Staring At Giant Spreadsheets, so do I think I can give him some Adderall to help him through?
> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
https://youtu.be/xErFsi5AdQ0?si=x0OWNLy07fUr3Cry&t=702
Can't you just tell them to give you a doctor's note and then you'll figure out how to accommodate?
This was a huge trend on Tumblr like ten years ago. The millennials got bit bad by this and I guess genz inherited it.
Or maybe this is just how young people think when given access to this type of information.
And long before the internet there was horoscope signs that, somehow, still manage to stick around.
Time blindness is a real thing. However, I know it triggers peope snd it allows them to complain about people being late. "Time blindness" is about temporal processing, and I have it. I only mention the condition when people ask me questions about when something happened, because people think everyone is the same, I have to explain that I can't perceive time. It's real, etc. So exhausting, but they keep complaining about something they don't have. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.191...
> But there are a few things we can learn from this:
> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.
This is almost the opposite of what we can learn about this, and the article does a great job at pointing that out. It's a very recent social phenomenon. Yes, that contradicts your abnornal psych class, but think about it. 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)? In elementary, middle and high schools, at the workplace, in other majors? IME absolutely not, very much the opposite. The only ones who did so were the diagnosed, and then only mentioned it when very relevant. Let alone 100 years ago. Let alone the massive differences between different regions/cultures in desire for uniqueness, both historical and uniqueness.
This is a massive sociocultural phenomenon, absolutely not something inherent to the human psyche. Almost no one is born this way (strong desire to make themselves feel unique).
> 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)?
The “Aspie programmer” meme has been around since the turn of the century (at least)
https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/
I’m pretty sure people made reference to it when I was at Cal in the 90s but I can’t prove it. (The prevalence of social awkwardness, eye contact avoidance, hyper-interests, etc.). I don’t think it was as much about people wanting to feel special as trying to find explanations for the overall environment.
Exactly. If anything I think the vast majority of us engineers under-diagnose ourselves for where we fall on that spectrum (which is probably the safe career and social move in the millennial generation).
Almost every day of my whole career I've worked with people who were missing social cues and being disliked because they were misunderstood. I think an engineer is MUCH more likable if they genuinely say "Sorry if I'm loud, and I don't mean to interrupt, sometimes when I get excited I accidentally do this, I don't do it because I think my ideas are better than everyone else's."
Now obviously if somebody exaggerates a trait they don't have, says it in a self-important way, and isn't remorseful at all about the effect it has on people around them, and isn't trying to change it that's a shame.
But frankly imo the balance of that in software is I've met 1/2 in my whole career who came across as self-important about their conditions, versus against maybe 20% (dozens and dozens) weren't able/willing to communicate their oddities.
I don't think its necessarily untrue.
20 years ago you didn't open your phone to see videos by anyone that called themselves a therapist or psychologist say you might have ADHD if you have these xyz common signs. Or if you struggle to have difficult conversations with your partner you might have grown up in a chaotic household.
All very loose, quick and ambiguous explanations that do not provide any balance.
If someone sees it and goes "Oh gosh that loosely explains why I do xyz" they will take it, because is confirming something or its providing an answer to something they deem they struggle with that they didn't have any answer for before.
It's part of the human psyche to try and understand and answer things and we have a confirmation bias that limits our ability to think of both sides of the coin, not just the one that's constantly popping up on our mobile phones from so called therapists.
> 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic
The labels people use follow trends. Labelling (self or others) as autistic or on the spectrum is relatively new, but there have been trends for other disorders in the past. Neurotic, depressed, anal retentive, even phrenology - people worrying that the shape of their cheekbones mean they must be genetically stupid, or applying that to others. We have evidence of such trends going back 100 years at least, and probably more.
For sure, social media has amplified and homogenized things, as it does. But it's not a new phenomenon.
> Let alone 100 years ago. Let alone the massive differences between different regions/cultures in desire for uniqueness, both historical and uniqueness.
100 years ago we used to often arbitrarily decide what mental conditions people have and then proceed to extract out parts of their brain to try and fix it to disastrous effects.
20 years ago, in our math and tech focused university, people were literally pretending to have lower social skills then they had. People would do weird things on purpose and brag about social mishaps. Because lower social skills were associated with being genius and everyone wanted to be seen as a genius.
Obviously, if your deficit appears only when it is socially advantageous and disappears when disadvantageous, it is something else. But it was a thing.
They're doing it now because it gives them power and social status now.
The same story has been repeated dozens of times; An individual is bullied/ostracized for some hobby or characteristic, years later they find the same bullies now going all in said hobbies and characteristics.
The author's concerns would mostly all be ameliorated by logging out of TikTok and never logging back in. They seem to think that "TikTok" and "Society" are synonyms. They are not.
you seem unaware that over 60% (150M) of the US uses tiktok and around 70% of that (100M) are 18-30. it's unclear on the < 18 numbers but likely a significant number.
i don't think it's unreasonable, particularly when she qualifies gen-z, to conflate tiktok and society.
it's really out of hand. the brain rot, beyond just the psych labeling she touches on, is crazy.
70% of 100M is 70M. There are not 70m 18-30yr olds in the USA.
there's 28% gen z in the US. that's roughly 94M and 70M are on tiktok
You are pulling numbers out of thin air. First you claim 100m 18-30 year olds (the number is closer to 55m) and now you inflate gen Z numbers too (my count is less than 70M, and there is just no way that 100% of them are tiktok users). Here are some real sources https://media.market.us/gen-z-statistics/ https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/united-states-population-...
that's fair. i went off the AI generated answer. here's some links, i was off but the number is still significant.
50% users under 30 (gen z). only counts 18-30, estimate as you will for those under 18 (to be fair she only referenced gen z): https://explodingtopics.com/blog/tiktok-demographics
total users in US is 170M: https://backlinko.com/tiktok-users
your call on if 85M users 18-30 is "[gen z] society".
What do you mean by "brain rot"?
Generally it means “deterioration of creative or critical thought capabilities into facile but engaging substitutes for thought” - usually it means something like “taking the algorithm home with you; letting yourself become one with the endless torrent of memes that infinite scroll platforms hand pick and deliver into your brain”
It exists outside of TikTok (and Tumblr before it). It may not be as noticeable or strong, but it’s there.
Especially with children and teenagers - which is why labeling them early can be so bad (or good, if used sparingly).
It has definitely slipped into real life, amongst us, persons who don't use TikTok. And I've recently heard therapy talk related to relationships/love coming from a close person who I know for certain that doesn't use TikTok, and she's also in her mid to late-30s (so no zoomer).
Tiktok seems to have between 1 and 2 billion users. It's not just something for the terminally online
I would argue that TikTok is what terminally online means now.
When I first discovered that I suffered from a "new" condition called Prosopagnosia - by means of an online "Are you face blind?" test - everything about my life suddenly fell into place. It was a liberating self-diagnosis which gave me permission to admit that it was some small malformations in my brain that were the cause of my troubles, not some selfish malformations in my personality and social skills.
Of course a self-diagnosis is not enough. I discovered my condition while it was still in the early stages of research. I signed up to be a guinea pig for researchers, and got paid a handsome £20/hour to undertake various tests (including brain scans - I still have a 3d image of my brain stored in a box somewhere) to help people better understand the underlying causes of the condition. It was fun for a while, until some of the tests got more disturbing. I also got to learn about the coping strategies I had already developed, and how to use them in better ways to help lessen the impact of the condition on my social interactions.
Glad it somehow worked out for you. I find it very sad though that you felt somehow "guilty" (based on "selfish malformations in my personality and social skills"), which I would see as a toxic society pressure.
Not sure how, since as long as I can remember I thought all people are different, so it's just about finding some that you like and that can also accept you. I don't want to force my quirks and preferences on others, but they don't get to do that either. Of course that can mean some periods and/or situations when you are not part of "the group", but looking back, although it did not feel cool all the time, that was mostly beneficial, got to know more people and do more stuff while looking for people I like.
Developmental prosopagnosia wasn't recognised as a "thing" before the late 2000s. Before that, everybody assumed that being able to recognise someone was just something everyone, well, did. Failure to recognise a friend or relative in the street was seen as an affront, or a deliberate snub. Failure to recognise famous people in films or on the TV was something to be ridiculed. Prosopagnosiacs quickly learn coping strategies growing up in such a world, but those recognition mechanisms are significantly slower: they don't solve the problem.
It is amazing how upset even the most decent and understanding of people can get when they feel you've slighted them in some way. Having someone (you like/respect/love/etc) screaming abuse at you in the middle of the street because you failed to respond to their greeting, because you didn't recognise them and realise they were saying hello specifically to you ... is humiliating. Not knowing why this situation was happening on a regular basis - can you blame me for thinking that it was my fault? That I wasn't a reasonable, decent person? That the things being screamed in my face were accurate?
Hence my relief when discovering there was a label for my condition. Though, sadly, no cure.
> It is amazing how upset even the most decent and understanding of people can get when they feel you've slighted them in some way.
I personally think that shows hidden issues in said people - at least that they take things too personally and do not have some emotion control. It can be horrible for the people they get upset on, but there are many reasons why this can happen even without considering prosopagnosia. Me personally I think 90% of the times I am the one noticing people I know on the street. I never got upset and just think that most people are absentminded or tired to check people (I lived mostly in medium/big cities so it gets tiring).
I definitely don't blame you or the condition, but the social construct that makes you wonder if you are not a reasonable person if you do something "different". I would hope in a civilized society, the instinct should be to wonder why something happens and try to understand (ofc there are always assholes, but hopefully not the majority). Screaming/blame/ridicule make me wonder if there is not some structural issue...
In seventies when I was in school (yes, I'm old) I had a classmate who wasn't able to recognize faces. We all knew that it's a thing, accepted, that he can make errors recognizing us and didn't think much more about it. I certainly remember reading about it as well.
It's interesting because there are two diametrically opposed ways to interpret what you said
One is - everybody thinks they have disorders, so just ignore that feeling it'll mess with you.
The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more
In my experience the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's helpful to neither completely ignore nor ruminate over one's traits, but just _be aware_ of them.
It's been very helpful for me to pay attention to and think about how my own personality compares to others'. For example, I tend to be a people-pleaser, but I used to think that everyone was just as people-pleasing as me, which only reinforced the people-pleasing because I didn't feel right putting my own needs first when everyone else was already sacrificing their own needs (or so I assumed).
At the same time, medicalizing these things paints them as "abnormal" disorders that need to be "cured", overlooking any of the positives these traits bring. When it comes to my people-pleasing, I like it about myself that I care about others. As long as I recognize that it sometimes comes at my own expense, I can begin to make more conscious decisions about when to allow the people-pleasing to flow versus when to try to subdue it.
Disorders are labels for things which significantly negatively impact people’s lives. Thinking of them in terms of a spectrum generally means stretching a label past the point of meaning.
Well, if you're approaching this as a hard-scientist that's not the case (for psychology).
Because "disorder" may be on a spectrum, because "negative" and "impact" may be on a spectrum. Conditions like depression follow a bell-curve, there's no clear line between depressed and not, and we can draw a line in the sand, but statistically there's no justification for where that line falls.
One way to try to draw a line is "the point at which a certain intervention is no longer effective."
For example studies find CBT therapy reduces depression scores for depressed people ~.8 standard deviations (for a while).
But why not try CBT therapy on happy people? Maybe it's even more effective on people who are already happy. Well the reason why not is likely just because of the clumsy nature of healthcare -- interventions are thought of as "treatments" for "conditions", even though that lens doesn't always make sense.
> there's no clear line between depressed and not
There’s a meaningful line in the sand for treatments with major side effects. CBT therapy may be “fine” for normal people, but the most effective treatment for depression is ECT which has major side effects. Including a ~1 in 50k chance of death.
Saying something is a bell curve distribution is an approximation, it doesn’t mean there’s actually a continuous function out to infinity and negative infinity.
When to resort to ECT is a subjective decision of doctor and patient. It is clear it should come after other treatments failed. But there is no clear line.
Everything is subjective at the margins, but that’s ignoring the clear cut examples where it’s not going to be considered.
> that’s ignoring the clear cut examples where it’s not going to be considered
The 2nd sentence outlined when it would be considered and implicitly when it would not.
You seem to believe some cases of depression warrant ECT. Some do not. It's subjective at the margins. But don't call it a spectrum!
No that’s not what I just said.
Spectrums extend continuously from normal to disorders. So if you believe depression is a spectrum you must also believe that no treatment is necessary for some people with depression. However if depression is a disorder there may be some cases that are on the margins that aren’t quite depression that still warrant some forms of treatment.
Your definition of spectrum is not standard. And the disorder called depression commonly is called major depressive disorder clinically.
I could list a bunch of sources supporting what I just said but I’ll just say.
https://www.ifeet.org/files/DSM-5-TR.pdf
DSM V has depression as depressive disorders, but lists “Schizophrenia Spectrum” and “Autism Spectrum” so I invite you to consider what distinction for spectrum is being used.
So it’s a 1 or a 0? The kid is either full autistic or just a socially maladjusted asshole? No room for a middle ground with you then?
That’t not it, what many disorders are describing isn’t just the obvious symptoms.
ICE engines heat up because they burn fuel, but if it’s overheating in normal operation that’s from something else breaking down.
Not that people are so simple, but that transition point to disorder often represents a meaningful transition.
Much like addiction, a key facet of a "diagnosed" disorder tends to be whether or not it (negatively) affects your life.
As the guy said, if you think you hear voices but they tell you to go to sleep on time and do a good job at work, you probably don't need treatment.
> a key facet of a "diagnosed" disorder tends to be whether or not it (negatively) affects your life.
Which also brings us to an important point that is totally missed in the article and most of the discussion imo: maybe one of the (many) things that have changed is that lives are more negatively affected by stuff nowadays (or more reported to be so). We live in increasingly complex societies, we have to socialise with more and more people and navigate more demanding and fluid social dynamics. Traits that can be advantageous in a certain context can be disadvantageous in another (and affect one's life negatively).
An engine is an assembly of parts. When an engine breaks down it does so because it broke down. An engine does not exist without its cylinders, fuel system, gaskets, lubricants, etc.
I believe your analogy is flawed. Can you restate your first statement in any other way?
Someone who is clinically depressed isn’t just sad, they are unable to return to normal. Things that help normal people feel better simply fail, it’s a meaningfully different situation. Similarly treatments for depression like electroconvulsive therapy shouldn’t be applied to normal people.
OCD, clinical addiction, etc are all more involved than just feeling the desire to do something. The lack of control is the issue not just the momentary impulse.
Intrusive thoughts are fine, acting on them isn’t.
What is normal human behavior though? Is it some combination of things that's gonna end up being so rare that only so many people fall under it, and is it normal if it's so rare? Is it gonna be "what most/average people are", and if so, well then, isn't everybody gonna have something going on, and isn't that just normal then?
With how widespread it is, labeling, self-diagnosing, inquiring about yourself, is kind of normal human behavior. It is everywhere, and has been historically. Putting it like it's just 'labels for significant things' and then 'normal', and that these things would stand far enough apart to actually make a clear distinction without dismissing people in between is pretty much just wishful thinking. There's way too many things and even more combinations of then. It's gotten so complicated and convoluted only because it is that way. Wishing for a binary clarity in a complex world.
Normal is the full range of function not some specific set of behaviors.
Deciding not to get a drivers license is fine, being unable to get one because you can’t leave your home is an issue.
Full range is a specific set. What does that range consist of? Also, seems odd to go from going on about "stretching a label past the point of meaning", but then put normal as some range that's just about vaguely everything. Can normal not be defined? Is it somehow more deserving of being afforded to be a vague spectrum or being under less specific definitions? Where is the point of meaning with "normal"?
By specific set I mean the behaviors actually exhibited, someone either grows a beard or doesn’t you can’t be doing both. Meanwhile either choice is normal.
The “full range” is anything that doesn’t cause you or another significant distress, major impairment, or prevent functioning in society. Eating hot sauce is uncomfortable, amputating a limb is several steps beyond uncomfortable.
> Can normal not be defined?
It’s defined by what it isn’t. There’s ~8 billion people in the world and the majority of them are functioning as should be obvious by our societies continuing to function.
Are there people who don’t have clinical diagnoses of depression being subjected to electro convulsive therapies?
Addendum: I believe I’m close to figuring out what you are communicating but for me it’s not working.
I’m reasonably sure we’d agree that neurological conditions are complex and that labels only tell part of the story.
I’m sure ECT is being misused occasionally, but what I’m referring to is the underlying condition such treatments are addressing as well as the research associated with finding what treatments are useful in which situations.
Seasonal affective disorder and bereavement-related depression may have similar symptoms on the surface, but there’s different treatments due to differences in underlying causes.
Some conditions may be a continuum with the same underlying cause taken to different extremes, but that continuum need not be continuous down to normal human behavior.
It’s a 1 if it goes above 0.6
You just invented 0,1 again but gave a weird label to the 1.
> everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more
I think this is subtly incorrect. I would phrase it this way:
> everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do... And they think that makes them different and therefore deserving of special treatment.
We all live on continuums of mental health, and reflecting on that is important. But it's unrelated to what's happening here, there's not much reflection, just self labelling and demanding special treatment based on these labels.
Someone strongly on the autism spectrum absolutely needs special treatment, some just a little, some a lot.
But somebody who watches a TikTok about autism and recognizes, or thinks they recognize, similar behaviors in themselves, does not need it (except in the few cases where it is actually undiagnosed autism, of course, but that's a very small minority).
there's a third: everyone wants to feel special and also takes any excuse to not have to work on their flawed habits
There's an odd presumption there...
It sounds like you're presuming those who put a label on themselves don't want to change themselves at all; one could also imagine that those who put a label on themselves want to change themselves most of all
Those who see and believe that there's a label to parts of them can easily believe that they're "helpless", and "that's just the way I am"
> "helpless", and "that's just the way I am"
These don't mean the same thing. You can be the thing you are and not be helpless. For example, if you have ADHD that's just a part of who you are. That doesn't mean you can't take medication or form processes to help yourself and mitigate the effects of ADHD.
Also, in my experience, people who choose to never label themselves are not better off. They typically do have some sort of condition, sometimes multiple, and they actively choose to do nothing about it because they're in extreme denial.
I see this with parents all the time. "My kids doesn't have ADHD! Stop trying to label him!". Okay great, but little Timmy is about to flunk out at fucking third grade. Let's do something about it.
Those who do not see or do not believe a label can easily believe that's just the way they are. Those who see and believe a label can easily use it to identify what they can do to help themselves.
the ol' "name and tame"
>>>who put a label on themselves don't want to change themselves at all<<<
Maybe that wasn't the intention but label does shape perception.
Alternatively, society is broken.
Every society has always been broken and always will be broken in certain ways. For most people, recognizing that isn't actionable. But they can change themselves.
I don't see how this explanation doesn't also fall victim to wanting to feel special. It looks a lot like projecting in fact :/ cringe
> The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more
What if the first part of this is true (we all have a smattering of disorders), but thinking about them more just makes things worse?
There is even an argument that putting a label on something will allow them to think less about it. They can put it away in a box rather than continually beating themselves up over it.
The other idea is that people who go into the field are screwed up themselves... and are trying to work out how to treat/understand themselves.
My parents did psychology and they always warned us about this.
Bayesianism helps but isn't taught well enough in school. Basically, we fail to handle the false positive and false negatives into the calculation, and this happens a lot with psychologists as well. This is really the point where people say untrained 'professionals' are dangerous - they can't evaluate that inaccuracy of the diagnosis itself.
This is the best explanation I've seen so far: https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-...
That's a good one. Some people might like the "odds" based version of Bayes' theorem: https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-bayes-the...
Precisely. I would posit that many of those are no different from those who start studying psychology formally struggle with statistics because it requires a shift from intuitive, qualitative thinking to rigorous, quantitative analysis, which can be challenging for those without prior exposure. Psychology curricula often include courses in statistical methods or research design, which demand skills in mathematical reasoning, data interpretation, and abstract concepts like probability distributions or hypothesis testing. These topics can feel alien to students drawn to psychology for its focus on human behaviour and emotions rather than numbers.
To be clear about my comment: I am not trying to be anti-women here, just point out a trend that I see.
I always saw these labels as limitations, like if you say that you're a vegan, you can't eat all the other stuff.
It was because of that point of view that I always avoided labeling myself or my behaviour, because (in my mind) I did not want to be limited.
But I guess I'm the odd one.
I remember someone telling me a story of a horoscope type thing that was handed out to people in class after ascertaining their birthdate. People were asked to comment and thought things were accurate... until the professor had everyone compare their horoscopes. Theire identical horoscopes.
I think this is exacerbated by the acute rise in real autism cases (not self-diagnosed) going from 1 in 10,000 clear to 1 in 31 cases in children, in the span of 50 years.
As people learn there's something gravely wrong with how they interact with others, struggle with social situations, etc. — and they validate that by observing enough "normal" people interacting or watch enough Hollywood entertainment depicting perfectly rehearsed conversations — in desperation, they seek a remedy in everything from personality systems ("everything must be labeled and explained") to psychiatric treatment just to cope with the lack of frequent, validating, normal interactions; and in many cases, aren't improving because of how isolated their lives have become.
This is something I've observed in my own life and in friends who share similar challenges.
> People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.
This is part of the cause of the current situation though - that putting labels on yourself gets you more empathy than you would have gotten as a "normal" person.
At least as of one decade ago psych professors still give that warning. I remember being warned not to do that in psych 102. It's always bothered me a little that everyone seems to completely ignore it.
The "tiktok self diagnosis" thing is more like a moral panic. It is not really an attempt to feel unique and healthcare professionals would do a lot of good to their patients if they understood this.
> if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.
Where do you see uniqueness? If anything, it seems to me that people are making themselves not unique, but more of "someone who is part of large group of same like individuals".
According to Google, any physical symptom is indicative of cancer.
According to social media, any personality quirk is indicative of ADHD.
I am diagnosed ADHD from a qualified professional, took medication, found it a great help, and I’ve come around to believe it’s all bullshit. Yeah, you have ADHD symptoms, yeah it’s disrupting your life, yeah you cannot find concentration and motivation. No, you’re not special. You’re not genetically born with pre-frontal cortex deficiencies. It’s, simply enough, an epidemic of massive proportions. We’ve created a society of distracted, gratified, unsocialised lazy squirrels all but interacting with the world through a piece of magic glass; what do you expect?
I was diagnosed adhd well before mobile phones. Also, mri scans show adhd so yes, it is a prefrontal cortex deficiency.
Let me give you some old man advice. Untreated adhd feels sutble to the person but its not subtle to everyone around you. You think your calm but come off like a zany, pacing autistic person or incredibly anxious. Alcohol and drugs can make you even more spazzy or impulsive.
Dont believe me? Go ask friends and coworkers how you come off. Your going to be shocked, trust me.
Every adhd person i met who told me what you just said was a spazzy mess or incredibly rigid/disciplined/control freak to counter act the adhd.
They were rarely away how much of a spazz we come off as even with treatment.
The problem now is that the internet flattens that nuance
This explains why the MBTI shit is so popular these days.
The word “disorder” is loaded, but it is interesting to also look through the lens of the Social Theory of Disability. For the rise in diagnoses for autism, ADD, gender dysphoria, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia etc.
Just as we now view the historical labeling of women as suffering from “hysteria” as a systemic failure, not a personal pathology, we should interrogate whether current diagnostic regimes will look just as crude and institutionally convenient in 50 years
Many social and health-related challenges we label today as “disorders” may in fact be downstream responses to structural issues in how society is organized — education, labor, healthcare, media, food, and housing. It’s worth asking: what if we’re pathologizing reactions to a sick system?
Generations identifying as trans:
A lot of it has to do not with the label itself but with the industry. Where someone in the past would be called a “tomboy” or “femboy” today they would have a different diagnosis, the DSM-5 would be consulted, etc.Similarly with ADHD if a kid would have been called “rambunctious”, today they might be labeled as having a “disorder” and medicated with literal amphetamines, instead of for instance reforming public schools. (To be clear, I am talking not about exteme/acute cases but overdiagnosis of relatively mild cases.)
We can look at other examples (eg Finland’s schools where children can climb trees and have much lower ADHD diagnosis rate) as one way to compare.
Or in the past, anorexia and eating disorders were a form of body dysmorphia, and some such images were actually promoted by industries such as fashion modeling or ballet performance. And when I say promoted - I mean also heavily enforced within the industry itself.
Industry in USA works with government, together. For example the factory farms (overusing antibiotics, abusing animals) and ag-gag orders, criminalizing whistleblowing and exposing them. Or monsanto and intellectual property enforcement. Or pistachio farmers in CA and water shortages. Or bottling companies and clothing companies putting out metric tons of plastics and microplastics, while regular people are told they can’t have a straw or a bag, and must recycle (itself revealed to be mostly a govt+industrial scam, shipped to China etc.)
This is across the board. Obesity and diabetes are a major epidemic in USA but instead of questioning high fructose corn syrup, highly processed starches and sugars in everything, people are told they can fix things themselves with diet and exercise. Actually it has been shown that obesity and disabetes in mothers is correlated with autism in their children. It has been shown that there was a serious correlation between obesity, diabetes and covid morbidity but the latter was taken extremely seriously but the former is not.
Same with plastic recycling, etc. or going vegan. Or buying free range. Or whataver. The individual is kept distracted.
In USA medicating things downstream is the default. One in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. Teenage girls have the highest levels of “sadness” (most outlets don’t want to say depression) etc.
Of course when it comes to depression and gender dysphoria we get extra political sensitivity due to activism around those issues. Of the usual character: the INDIVIDUAL is the one that has to make all the downstream adjustments and cope with the SYSTEMIC upstream issues, which are not questioned much. The individual is even told to embrace their label and tell others it is great (eg “big is beautiful” for obesity, celebrating the result instead of reforming the system).
Until AI takes the jobs, the social compact has become: both parents have had to work for corporations, to afford the expenses that could previously be paid by one “breadwinner” in the family working for corporations. And they stick their kids in public schools and elderly parents into nursing homes. And then medicate them if they don’t like it, because the DSM 5, school administrators or nursing homes staff say that this is the best way. Everyone is afraid to speak up against the system, they would rather perpetuate it and cover their own ass.
There was a time when people derided USSR people for drinking a lot to cope with the failures of their economic system. But now with men on opiates, women on antidepressants, high rates of teen suicide ideation, elderly and kids being medicated — perhaps we should rethink our own economic system. There are a lot of “problems” that people are experiencing and it may be from upstream systemic causes. But they are kept distracted by govt and corporations with the idea that they can fix it by their individual actions, which include recycling, dieting, and placing a label on themselves that the industry then helpfully gives them medications to manage it.
> Generations identifying as trans:
Is this surprising? 20 years ago in many parts of the world the only way to survive as a trans person was through prostitution. You would be forced to live as an outcast, far away from "normal people". There were barely any legal protections, you could often not change your legal sex, finding any information about what this is or its treatments (not a fetish, something that millions experience, can't be "converted away", hormones exist, etc) was nearly impossible. Most people would see you as a freak.
> A lot of it has to do not with the label itself but with the industry. Where someone in the past would be called a “tomboy” or “femboy” today they would have a different diagnosis, the DSM-5 would be consulted, etc.
This is not true. Trans people don't go to a doctor and ask them if they are trans. Rather trans people generally arrive at the realization of what they are by themselves, usually before seeking any professional help about it. The DSM is not consulted (and if it is, it's done post-facto by someone acting as a gatekeeper and trying to fill boxes).
Many people who called themselves femboys in the past ended up transitioning after becoming more informed about the whole topic and realizing that transitioning their sex and living as their true self is an option rather than something they had to do in secret.
Why is this specific thing completely unquestionable for self diagnosis without any kind of test? It seems to be treated as if no child could possibly feel slightly less than the ideal representation of their sex and end up embracing the trans identity just like someone might embrace ADHD or autism because of some minor common personality trait. The difference being one annoyingly reminds people theyre ADHD every time they do something untoward, and the other could be rendered infertile due to hormones pr castration.
We don't view it as unquestionable, we question it quiet a bit. Like, a lot actually. And people do change course if they want, that happens sometimes.
And on the topic of infertility, it's complicated. Many people have no desire to have children, and many people are infertile anyway. I'm infertile due to cancer, and little did I know this was pre-determined at birth. I didn't even make it to my mid twenties before that chicken came to roost.
But I face a lot less stigma and questioning about that. Everyone is quick to accept I'm infertile and that's that, and there's nothing anyone could have done. If this happened in my 50s this would make more sense. But, I didn't. I became infertile around the same time many people choose to transition. And yet, my infertility isn't a topic of discussion.
There are no tests that can show if someone is trans or not.
> the other could be rendered infertile due to hormones pr castration.
With the alternative of being mutilated forever due to testosterone and being forced to waste decades of your life existing in limbo.
Although I should note that the claim that trans people become permanently infertile due to hormones is questionable.
If we want to reduce the incidence of distress in people and families, we need approach all these issues with compassion and an open mind. The open mind means considering various possibilities, while still being rational.
Yes, one theory is that everything “just happens to be” innate from birth, and unchangeable, and we simply discover it later. This essentialist type of theory may in fact be the best one for extreme cases of any condition. But we have to be very careful applying essentialism across the board — is it true for even mild, increasinly widespread cases? Could we also not investigate the factors upstream of the issue? Not just before birth, but also in the environment, in the socialization, culture, economics, etc. And if we find factors that heavily seem to affect it, should we not consider trying to fix the problems upstream such that the “disorders” downstream become reduced in many cases?
In the case of gender dysphoria, and to a lesser extent of depression being caused by serotonin, is too politically charged to start with. Many extremely creative people we know were born biologically male - the Wachowskis, Justine who made redbean, etc. transitioned their identity. They are adults who make a decision to live in ways they feel are more authentic to themselves amid the current culture and technology and that is their choice, as it should be. But we have to be careful not to therefore say there are no major issues in society upstream of millions of people who are experiencing distressing conditions, and try to embrace and normalize those conditions as opposed to trying to reduce the incidence of them.
Let’s look rationally and scientifically at every other example with similar conditions but without the charged atmosphere, to get a feeling for what the Social Theory of Disability and similar approaches would say. The key is to think systemically, and to accept that an identity is socially constructed and reinforced, that people are nudged all the time by culture around them, while they and the people around them are coerced by economics into stable behaviors and arrangements that may lead to distress (eg both parents working for corporations and neglecting their children and parents, to afford the rent because they have been made to expect and enforce a certain level of decadent spending that their ancestors never afforded).
1. Obesity. Now, to be sure there have also been attempts, with varying degrees of success, to normalize being obese and even celebrating this condition and some encouraging others to embrace the lifestyle. Yet we know that there are real public health issues upstream of the condition, including but not limited to unprecedented processed sugar and starches in everything, high fructose corn syrup, overuse of antibiotics on factory farms etc. the reduction of minerals in our vegetables etc. in short massive changes on an industrial scale that affect millions of Americans.
Imagine we were to ignore this and simply be content with embracing obesity as a “identity” to be accepted and was always around, but finally people were willing to become their true selves, would be scientifically and socially derelict. It would also be defeatist and lazy from the point of view of public health and social reform, would it not? And yet there have been serious attempts to normalize the Big and Beautiful identity as something we should embrace have more of in USA. The thing is, both can be true: “fat shaming” can be bad, while simultaneously it also bad to not have a public health investigation for upstream causes of obesity — yes treating it as a disorder to be reduced.
2. Eating disorders like Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia. On the surface, they share many characteristics with Gender Dysphoria, namely a distressing mismatch between the body you have and the identity of how you wish it to be and how you want to be perceived. In fact there have been entire industries promoting and enforcing body standards for their participants to enter and keep participating, such as fashion models and ballerinas etc. But in these cases when a person comes to the doctor and admits that they are indeed looking to be thinner, the doctor is told by their industry to so the opposite thing than in the case of gender dysphoria. The doctor does NOT tell them to embrace their anorexia as an identity, and modify their body, but instead tries to get them to how much of their identity is actually socially constructed by others around them, and this is true not just for young and impressionable kids but also adults. When it comes to eating disorders, or some issuss of body dysmorphia, the distressing body-rejecting condition is managed in a completely opposite different way, and it is considered correct to point out the social and economic factors.
In fact, human body modification has a rich history going back thousands of years, and using all kinds of technology available to tribes. Some tribes and cultures embrace it as an identity. (As one small example, lip disks in some African cultures.) The people who choose to practice these modifications may be embraced with a special status and identity. But we looking from the outside can clearly see the societal and cultural constructs behind nudging and reinforcing the identity. So what I am saying is, look systemically, when you analyze public health issues.
3. Clinical depression. Many people here on HN have experienced clinical depression and I remember they have insisted for years that people should just “let it go” and it’s “just how things are”, and medications like SSRIs are the only real way to manage it. Over a decade ago people said Tom Cruise was a dangerous idiot, after his interview with Matt Lauer where he warned against overprescribing amphetamines, opiates etc. to treat these conditions. But once again, while the pharma industry and our US society at large has normalized this sort of overdiagnosis, “medicalization and treatment” of conditions, it was not always the case.
In 2022 studies and meta-studies came out in reputable scientific and medical journals questioning the efficacy of SSRIs at all vs placebo, and throwing into question the whole theory of serotonin being the main factor behind depression, and whether or not it is really preventable or manageable through changes in lifestyle, diet, mindfulness. But again, perhaps far and away the biggest questions were not systemically investigated: what is it upstream in culture and economics that systemically causes more Americans to be clinically depressed?.
More to the point, teenage depression and suicidal ideation is extremely high. Almost as high in the wider teen population as it is in the trans community! (I was shocked at the statistics.) So if something distressing rises so much, then it absolutely behooves us to look at what changed in society upstream of them. For example, the rise of tiktok and instgram and other social media as used by teens, for their body image and other things. Surveillance capitalism pushing certain things not just to teens but all of us (outrage, clickbait, echo chambers, even adults are more tribak and angry than ever, thanks to algorithms). Notifications that pop up at any time and distract us.!Instead of having the political will to address these issues and incentives, we accept them as a normal part of life. We are about to accept AI and robots that way, letting the industry “disrupt” anything and everything about culture, and leaving out-of-work men and women to figure it out (wringing our hands about usage of opiates and antidepressants while pharma industries gladly generate steady recurring revenues).
3. ADHD. I would call it the modern “hysteria” except for boys instead of women. We know hysteria was just a lazy catch-all to medicate women downstream of societal issues. In 50-100 years we may say the same about ADHD, as we have done with lobotomies etc. Do you see where I am going with this? I will leave the rest as an exercise for the reader for the sake of space here.
4. Autoimmune disorders on the rise as microplastics build ip in our bodies, while clothing companies put it in our clothes and bottling companies put out metric tons into bottles we drink from, but we throw up our hands and say there’s nothing we can do. While our ancestors reused glass bottles and washed forks, we discard plastic forks shipped from somewhere, into a landfill. Day after day without a thought to the next generation. Species are plummeting. One third of arable land is desertified. Our generation is living on an ecological credit card, that our children would have to pay. But we are told to shut up and work. Embrace and medicalize the conditions. We really have no time to organize against this stuff anymore. (Maybe we will once AI takes out jobs?)
Whether it’s obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, eating disorders, depression, autism, and yes gender dysphoria etc. we can just stop at theories that essentialize new types of identities or we can actually take a public health approach where we look at them as “disorders” (word use by OP) that we want to minimize by gradually changing society. Not just for kids, but especially for them.
Lest you think I am just pontificating without actual solutions, here are some:
1. Gradually phase in a UBI for all US Americans. This will increase their disposable income and let them purchase goods made by startups (good for YC) as well as corporations. Let the money trickle up into the economy and tax the corporations. Our country is untold trillions in debt, it’ll have to print trillions to service that debt. May as well be like Alaska and give the first hop to each citizen equally. Then increasingly tax the corporations and their AI / robots / automation, and use that to pay down the debt over 30 years — after it has helped everyday Americans! PS: Alaska has had among the lowest Gini index of all states since it started this.
2. Reduce the 40 hour workeweek protections to 30 hours, as some countries did, or even 20 hours. Free up people from the hamster wheel so they can spend more quality time with their children and elderly parents, rather than school administrators and nursing home attendants (and their AIs). Stop normalizing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8
3. Gradually phase out factory farm practices, be more like Europe. Go after corporations that pollute. Make the corporations switch to using biodegradeable materials rather than plastics and forever chemicals, rather than trying to forcing individuals dat the end of the production line to do that.
4. Consider implementing public health programs in schools like John F Kennedy did, modeled on the La Sierra high school. Same with math and STEM. Shorten the school day and let kids run around. Let children climb trees like in Finland.
Double blind testing has been done on this so none of what your essay is saying has not been tested or studied.
Putting adhd or depressed people in a paradise situation does not make them not adhd or depressed.
Ive lived in a few different countries. Societies that dont label or believe in psychology just outcast the mentally ill as weirdos and encourage them to drink away their troubles.
I think comparing LGBTQ+ identifications with mental illness is dangerous. Not too long ago we were quick to lump homosexuality in with these, despite the fact homosexuality is more of a state of being evidenced by real-life actions people willingly take. That being, sex with the same sex.
Transgender people often suffer gender dysphoria. You're correct that it's possible that gender dysphoria might be a downstream effect of society. Namely, we are an extremely gender-segregated society. There's truly only one way to be a man, although there are multiple ways to be a woman. People feel forced and confined to a very small subset of behavior and self-expression.
Existing between genders is, unfortunately, untenable. Society is just not built for that. But existing as the opposite gender seems to be perfectly doable. I'm not saying that it's that simple and all transgender people would disappear if we live in a society with no gender roles or expectations, but certainly they heavily feel the pressure of those gender roles and expectations.
> Transgender people often suffer gender dysphoria.
That's the definition of it.
> You're correct that it's possible that gender dysphoria might be a downstream effect of society. Namely, we are an extremely gender-segregated society. I'm not saying that it's that simple and all transgender people would disappear if we live in a society with no gender roles or expectations, but certainly they heavily feel the pressure of those gender roles and expectations.
I don't think this is the case. Strict gender roles might make trans people's dysphoria worse, but it's primarily about a strong desire to be the other sex and not have your current sexual characteristics. Even in a world where everything is unisex, a trans person would still feel that discomfort - for a trans girl/woman, that you wish your voice were higher and not like a man's, that your face seems alien, that your genitals are wrong, literally anything sexed about the human body. It's orthogonal to whether a man can wear a dress or makeup. Not all trans women are even that feminine. And if it were about gender roles, then you'd expect more trans women to exist than trans men, given "there's truly only one way to be a man, although there are multiple ways to be a woman."
There's really two components to gender identity: the socially constructed stuff, which is most of it, and the biological stuff. Usually changing the biological stuff just lends itself to better socially constructed stuff.
Most trans people I know, for example, have no desire to change their genitals. Probably, I'm guessing, because nobody sees that. So their genitals have pretty much no relation to their gender identity. Which makes sense when you think about it. I mean, I gender everyone in my life, including people I see only for a few seconds. But I see very, very little genitals. I'm really just guessing, and everyone is.
It's very complicated. Of course men can wear dressed and makeup and such, but that is a very high-friction activity, borderline dangerous. Women can do that, however. So then I question if there are transwomen out there who would be satisfied in a world where anyone can wear anything. Such a world does not exist, so we don't know.
> So then I question if there are trans women out there who would be satisfied in a world where anyone can wear anything.
So long as they look in the mirror and see a woman. There are trans women already who just wear jeans and t-shirts and other unisex wear in their everyday lives. There are also trans women who will never come close to passing even after a long time on HRT and surgery and wearing the most feminine clothing, and it's just tragic.
> That's the definition of it.
I have seen multiple competing definitions.
- People who are transitioning socially
- People who are transitioning medically (hrt)
- People who have transitioned surgically (depends what surgeries the person that says it considers necessary)
- Using some biological distinguisher (this lets you refer to people who are currently repressing as trans, and makes it an inherent property of a person that was predetermined)
- People who want to transition (socially, hormonally, surgically)
- People who have dysphoria
- People who have an f64 diagnosis
Etc
The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.
I agree, though possibly for different reasons. Those support systems may or may not be weaker than they were in generations past, but they are certainly more likely to say "I can't help you, go get professional help" than in the past.
In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression, the "help" out there is criminal. It is not a disease we have a cure for, in fact it's not clear to me it's even a disease in most sufferers, but a healthy and rational response to societal decay. I do not believe some disorders will ever be satisfactorily explained by individual-centric medicine, in the same way history will never be satisfactorily explained by great man theory.
One thing that makes me nervous about a culture that is so quick to forward people to therapists, is that therapy is not some ironclad medical practice, like you might imagine heart surgery to be.
Therapy, and psychology in general, is one of the weakest areas of science, still based mostly on mysticism, large personalities, and weak statistical correlations. And that is assuming you even can get a "good" therapist, and not some schmuck who just happened to nab the degree.
I would go so far as to say that 90%+ of problems that are served in therapy sessions are better served by the regular participants in an intimate social network, friends and family, than some "expert" who is incentivized, knowingly or not, to send you into the pharmaceutical pipeline or, as this article describes, hand you a bunch of random labels you can forever use to psychologically handicap yourself with.
Yeah, calling depression a "disorder" sometimes misses the point entirely when despair is a logical response to how things are
I know where you're coming from, but despair is never the logical response. Whatever the situation is, it's better to do something about it, even if it's just to rage and call for help, rather than to quietly despair.
Regardless of how bad things are, we still have hope, both as individuals and as a civilization.
> despair is never the logical response
My partner is disabled and her transplanted kidney is failing. She will, in the next year or two, need dialysis and then a kidney transplant. Her Medicaid will be cut. The hospital she goes to will be closed. Both as a result of a bill that just passed. The average kidney transplant out of pocket costs $250,000, and because her first transplant happened before she met me, my insurance will deny her coverage because it's a pre-existing condition. We are in the process of trying to move to a different location, get her a job while she's going through kidney failure (not easy since nobody wants to hire a sick person, and definitely not at a workload that would give them benefits), and I'm in the process of trying to move us out of the country (I'm a dual citizen, she is not, so that's holding things up).
At what point in that is despair not a logical emotion, even when we're doing something about it? What is illogical about being so overwhelmed with circumstances that it makes you question whether waking up tomorrow is a net positive or negative? Please explain.
Despair seems eminently logical in your situation; I felt it, when I put myself in your shoes, reading your comment. That is not to say it need take precedence, or supremacy, to that most human of emotions: hope. I have hope, that you and your partner will prevail, and live a life agreeable to both your terms. I’m sure many who read your story will too. Please, lean on hope, not despair.
> Regardless of how bad things are, we still have hope, both as individuals and as a civilization.
No we don't. Evidence: falling birthrates is the society collectively deciding that live ain't worth it. Personally, I think this is the real reason why we don't see aliens - any advanced civilisation will eventually reach a point where it realizes that life ain't worth it.
Cheer up! For the average HN user, things are better now than they ever have been in human history.
If my finger is broken and someone says "Cheer up! Your neighbor lost his leg and is in an incredible amount of pain", I may feel sympathy for my neighbor but, crucially, my finger still hurts just as much.
Right, it won't change the fact that the finger injury is sending pain signals to your brain. But it just might change what you do in reaction to that signal.
Some of you guys need to cowboy up and quit whining about trivial problems. A broken finger is a minor injury (nothing even remotely like a lost leg), and usually easily managed with basic medical treatment. Get it splinted, pop an ibuprofen, and move on. It seems like a lot of HN users have led such soft, sheltered lives that they fall apart when faced with the slightest adversity.
Why is that a reason to cheer up? When I think about it, I’m miserable most of the time—and knowing that life was even worse for most people throughout history only makes me feel sadder.
Turn that around and ask yourself why that's a reason to be miserable. Your sadness is a choice. Be miserable if you want to but that won't improve the circumstances for yourself or anyone else.
I think he was being sarcastic. But on the internet you can't really tell.
Adopt absurdism. Nothing really matters and it's grotesquely hilarious at the same time. That might cheer you up. Occasionally.
Not sarcastic. Only people who are ignorant about history believe that things are really bad today. If you live in an industrialized country that isn't in the middle of a shooting war then things are objectively pretty awesome compared to the average conditions that humans have endured.
Only ignorant people think individuals can find comfort in averages.
Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
> Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
Whoa now. That may be true within a strict scope of the "arithmetic mean" definition of "average", however, the idea of average as a 'concept' is much older. As an easy example, early references to agrarian yields (crop farming and how much food they produce) talk about average size of crop harvests, etc. Early tablets from Mesopotamia talk about average yield size, and those are dated 700ish BC.
Cheer up, the lake of shit you’re caged in is at its lowest level on record.
Slightly more seriously, things will be on an upward trajectory until they aren’t. There are some decent reasons to think we might be nearing the peak.
That's a meaningless claim, devoid of any evidence. At most points in human history there were decent reasons to think we were near the peak. And yet with some occasional temporary valleys, average human living conditions continued to improve.
At most points in human history, the global economy was not so tightly integrated, and major powers didn't have the ability to devastate the globe in an afternoon.
There is a significant meaning to my claim, which is that it's unconvincing to make exactly the sort of "it has always worked out before" argument that you're making here.
The current time is not special just because it's when you're alive.
Conversely, the current time isn't like the past just because it immediately follows the past.
I don’t see these as opposing ends of a spectrum. I think they’re largely independent variables.
Anecdotally, the people I know who have become most immersed in therapy speak are also the most socially connected. The therapy speak and associated language have become tools for establishing themselves within their social support system, communicating cries for help, and even trying to use therapy terms to shield themselves from accountability for their actions by transforming it into a therapy session.
It was also possible to buy afford a house and a small family on a job that doesn't require much training or special skills. It's easier to deal with (often meaning "ignore") undiagnosed mental issues with your own roof over your head.
> is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely.
I disagree! There was never a good support system at all. We used to just man up and live with it. Now that stress is reaching it's new heights. We can't cope with it.
I'm very curious as to how you come to the conclusion that 'stress' has increased. I don't suppose it's that the world is more stressful, WWII, cold war, a thousand famines throughout history, what makes us so stressed that we can't cope in some way that we used to be able to cope?
I have wondered - but have no evidence either way - if the stress we encounter nowadays differs to stress of the past. At some point very long ago most of us were stressing about things like food, water, surviving the night. Now most of us are stressing about things like work pressure, debt, global disasters. I wonder if the nature of the stressors have changed from immediate and acute to increasingly abstract and chronic? And potentially, if the quality of life profile is different in the two cases due to different coping mechanisms?
Very anecdotal which makes me think this: immediate physical stressors like exercise are uncomfortable but I get through them fine. Chronic stressors like climate change are totally ruining my quality of life.
I’m sure I’ve heard of research along these lines, and indeed searching for something like “modern stress versus…” finds some work, such as https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8832552/
I think you are right with chronic vs immediate stressors.
Economic anxiety could be the big one, and people don’t see the end of the tunnel.
Medieval peasants didn't see the end of the tunnel either. I'm skeptical that the type and quantity of stress is really worse now.
At least they knew that this was temporal but heaven would be eternal. There was a point to things. When you stand for nothing you fall for everything. There's no story left in which we play.
Medieval peasantry times may already be well into the "abstract chronic stress" period. Humans have been around a while.
chronically worrying about climate change is no different than chronically worrying about death. it's simple, stone age, existential fear.
ancient men and women coped with existential fear by either embracing that everything is a cycle, or inventing some semblance of immortality by raising children or believing in life after death.
I guess I have no stress about climate change because it seems very normal to me that society and biosystems occasionally collapse. The stress comes from thinking there's something that can be done to stop it, and feeling that you're unable to achieve it. Maybe that's me throwing my hands up and accepting death instead of trying to stave it off, I just want to throw out there that the stress is self imposed, not environmental.
I have this personal theory that some time after an external stress-related impulse (be that negative - ww2, cold war, becoming paralyzed, etc, or positive - inheriting money, winning the lottery, not having to work for the rest of your life, finding the love of your lufe, etc), the brain adjusts and one comes back to the baseline of their perceived normal stress level. And that’s why we see people who are always happy and seemingly stress free despite having nothing, and ones that always seem stressed to the max despite having everything
When you eliminate problems in people's lives, they do not suddenly feel that they have no problems. Instead they lower the bar for what they consider a problem. If the bar gets lowered too far, suddenly the previously minute things are problematic and there may be many of them.
Stress is caused by our internal perspective of our problems, not by some external unchanging measure of it.
Most of our suffering is in our imagination (Seneca) and our imaginative lives have never been as big as today. The world we think we live in has never been as big. The lives we think we could live have never been as many. The bad things that could happen to us are so much more plentyful and destructive than the bad things that do.
We just suffered at that time and prayed. Today we suffer and work together.
Also people used to smoke and drink a lot of alcohol. So it's possible that stress has objectively decreased, yet subjectively increased, as we are more aware of it.
But yeah it's an interesting question, and with the Internet as well. The 1980s world I grew up in as a kid (in Czechia) was more dangerous than the Internet-focused world of today; yet young people seem to be more stressed by the latter.
That depends on the time frame. Tobacco only spread beyond the Americas in the 16th century. And really poor people have never been able to afford much tobacco or alcohol; those are luxury products.
Your leaving out that people with mental and even physical issues often were outcasts for revealing them to their family, friends, and community in the past.
Some of that supoort wasnt present.
except they weren't really "support systems"
i mean they were, if you got lucky.
If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that they did and just simply passed it forward or didn't talk about it.
i don't know what the ratios are but a LOT of people fell through the cracks.
it's just that the birth rate was high enough to continue the population growth, and there were socially acceptable ways to ignore the inconvenient problems (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)
it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.
now the stigma is gone and we're finding EXPLICIT paths to treatment, tolerance, and embracement of mental health, neuroatypical brains, spectrums, etc. Is there overpathologizing? Maybe? Hard to know! The stigmas still aren't gone. Go read the comments on any video providing tips on how to parent children on the spectrum and see neurotypicals freaking out about how soft the current generation is.
the western world seems to have peaked in tolerance in the 2010s, and is now backsliding into authoritarianism and fascism. that's trying to recreate a lot of those original support systems (by destroying the new ones). It's a bold plan, let's see how it happens.
> it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.
I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.
Heck no. We have “it’s always the quiet ones who go first”, to remind us what it was like from that time.
Most people suffered, and made the ones around them suffer as well. On top of that, you are in no position to move to an “average” position on the behavior spectrum, because it’s fundamentally outside your biological operational parameters.
There are TONS of relations which were kept in place, because of society, keeping people who made each other worse, in permanent proximity.
Survivorship bias is real.
We’re the ones who inherited the world with more knowledge than past generations, it’s up to us to do better with it. This will include getting better at diagnosing.
For self diagnosing, I have no idea what to do.
no i don't think we're saying different things.
what you're describing is survivor's bias.
1) the most talented people with cognitive differences made it out for sure. But not every person on the spectrum is "amazing with technology" in a useful way. But not all are, and the ones that weren't just didn't make it. Today they do.
2) those people still needed luck. Luck that they were able to come up in a society that didn't expect more from them than to perform a "function". Things like meeting a spouse were "easier" because there was a more rigorous social structure. Depending on which society this was in, potentially to the detriment of your grandmother who didn't have a lot of choices.
2b) and luck that the community around them accepted them. That wasn't JUST because he was a farmer, it's also because he hit the other markers of inclusion whether he wanted to or not.
People in that day and age were not cognitively free. Is cognitive freedom preferable? Well that's the question of our age. We weren't supposed to just kill god and stop. We were supposed to replace a new humanist secular philosophy to replace the theology to find purpose to humanity.
We didn't, society is now full of anxiety and malaise, and the right wing is rising promising to fix it by a RVTRN to the old ways regardless of who they harm.
Sounds like the lesson from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer: deviation from the norm will be punished unless it’s exploitable.
Would your grandfather have been so well integrated if his problems had not been offset by such ability?
You're downvoted but you're correct. Disordered people who did not offer some sort of economic gain in a market were simply institutionalized. Autistic people who were not high functioning were pretty much as good as dead. Same thing goes for depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. We had no systems in place for people who cannot work. Physical disabilities were more of the same. If you could work, it was okay-ish. You'll still get treated as a freak and discriminated against daily, but you weren't completely shut out of society. If you couldn't work, however...
Sorry, but are you arguing that autistic folks can’t be part of a community, farm, or build a family?
I saw it as arguing that people with autism, ADHD, etc wouldn't be ignored, beaten, or killed, as seemed to be the argument in the parent comment?
Ah, I see. I think the ‘label’ (ugh – what a terribly awful way to describe a diagnosis) and the beatings are orthogonal, though.
In my parents’ time in a (then) Dutch colony, nobody was diagnosed with anything (that was only for crazies), but all the men knew how being hit with a belt felt (daughters were spared, from what I’ve been told). Self-medicating with alcohol and beating your kids if they ‘misbehaved’ was just the done thing, as far as I’ve been told.
This is to say that anyone who showed (what we would now identify as) neurodivergent behaviour probably would’ve been beaten, but this then wouldn’t have precluded them from going on to start a family and business (and maybe beat their own kids).
Actually, this is probably still how it works in many parts of the world. Even here in the Netherlands, beating your children was only outlawed as recently as 2007.
One anecdotal observation does not fully tell the story.
There is substantially more going on than "tolerance vs intolerance". We have a huge influx not just because of changing diagnosis standards, but also because the financial benefit for getting a diagnosis has also expanded.
The views of people you are trying to label as fascist are more accurately described as individualism vs welfare state.
I can assure you that from my singular anecdotal experience that a diagnosis does not imbue economic and financial benefit.
I can second the assertion. It's absurd that people really believe folks are getting benefits from having a mental disorder. It's literally the "welfare queen" nonsense just directed at a new group.
You don't even get social benefits, no one excuses your behavior just because it has a label. You get told it's your fault for not managing your disorder properly. Have you seen how we treat people with visible, obvious, undeniable disabilities? Like shit.
66% of autistic adults admit having suicidal thoughts. 35% have attempted suicide.
If they're faking it for benefits they are REALLY committed to the bit.
Ahh.. indiviualism, is that the one where you shouldn't have to help anyone else as long as things are going fine for yourself?
You can call it selfish, but you can't call it fascist.
In my perspective, it's less about what you should or shouldn't do; its about making sure that question is down to your individual morality.
Ayn Rand has a lot of friends here. She also described the neurodivergent as "subnormal" and thought that society should do nothing to help them or the handicapped. Additionally, she believed that "normal" children shouldn't have to ever interact with those who were mentally different as it would harm the "normal" children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1HD8KXn-kI
What financial benefit would a diagnosis have?
Depending on the specific services in an area: everything from subsidised legal access to medications, to access to accommodations in schools seen as favorable (private environments to take tests, or extended deadlines). Some areas have specific assistance to parents of children with a diagnosis. Some have easier access to disability support services and payments.
What about diagnoses in countries which do not have any of these support systems?
This is a really great question. I checked.
Turns out that the poorer a nation is, the less reported autism they have. That could be because there is no benefit to the diagnosis or it could be because they have less healthcare in general and a real diagnosis can easily take 4-8 hours of clinical time.
Interesting either way.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9386174/
Or it could be because poorer countries actually have lower rates of autism. I'm not claiming that's the case, just that we don't have any reliable data on it one way or the other.
Isn’t the first half a tautology?
By definition roughly half the population in any society must belong to a below average family and/or below average communities.
And it seems pretty likely that those with below average capacities at handling, processing, reflecting, etc., on these issues would be concentrated there.
> It's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis
I claim the DSM-5 is why. We changed diagnostic criteria then we diagnosed. People who used to be "normal" were suddenly "undiagnosed until late in life." But the people themselves hadn't changed much, just the diagnostic criteria.
DSM-5 took a bunch of distinct disorders and rolled them into one new disorder called Autism Spectrum Disorder. The only problem it solved is to reduce the number of disorders with unknown pathologies.
My classically-autistic son who needs a lot of support apparently has the same disorder as a nerdy guy who comes across as a bit abrasive, doesn't understand the point of small talk, and would rather work on Linux kernel patches on a Saturday night than hit the town.
I agree with everything you said except for the last paragraph.
The people who, according to your theory, want to reverse the tolerance trend and slide towards fascism/authoritarianism didn't pop out today. They existed and lived in society in the 2010s too. So, from a logical standpoint, what changed?
> what changed?
The algorithms are promoting those views?
Nothing changed - mostly it seems the American condition is a side effect of dedicated partisanship and asymmetric political behavior since the 1970s.
The media apparatus in America has split into a center and left, and then a right wing which has different norms and produces its own products.
That in turn has created a durable political coalition that self referentially calls itself when it needs to support its descriptions on reality.
It’s significantly more effective at producing narratives, and moving ideas from the fringes to the main stream news channels.
Since it has little traffic with the left and center media channels, it avoids counter claims and norms on journalistic standards.
So you can now primary Bipartisan politicians, and then the ideas that gain media attention are the ones that reinforces party talking points. Counter views simply do not get air time.
What we are seeing today, is the progression of those forces, as the narratives are never challenged.
The parent comment didn’t even pose a theory as to why. People can change beliefs over time. Weimar Germany had less Nazis in it than Nazi Germany, which would be equally confusing under your framing.
Material conditions degrading further with no end in sight, a massive influx of money towards right-wing populists appealing to a frustrated middle class, etc. Same story as always. How can a country slide into authoritarianism? It seems impossible until it happens, and by then we can hardly tell we're there.
I'm pretty sure current highly interconnected society elicts more spectrum behavior then back when 90% of the populace was just digging soil for grains.
It worked for the large majority. It now no longer works for that large majority, and practically also does not work well for the rest. We have in this sense regressed, thanks to the social liquidation of capitalism.
I'm suspicious of the use of "we" here since I don't feel like I'm a part of this discourse. Also:
>Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful
In the past from, say, 30-40 years ago, if you failed to arrive at appointments and meetings on time you probably weren't labeled "lovably forgetful," and you probably would face punishments for having certain personality traits. We're changing in how we understand those kinds of differences now, and it's not all for the better, but in general the discourse now is better than how things were in the past when neurodiverse folks tended to receive a lot of punishment, invective, bullying, and ostracism.
I've been autistic my whole life, but I'm from the older set where there was no understanding of such things, we used to get bullied a lot, sometimes quite violently, and social ostracism was typical then for folks on the spectrum. I'd be thoughtful about romanticizing the past or get taken in by the false feelings of nostalgia - it's wrong to imagine people used to deal with the neurodiverse in glowing light and thoughtful acceptance, no one ever said I was "lovably forgetful."
Mirroring this, I have ADHD and experienced a lot of harsh judgment as a kid for my behavior at home, and in school. And the resulting shame from that judgement stuck with me for a long time, I was even diagnosed early but didn't accept the label until adulthood, and didn't work through the reality of my differences, and remedy the shame until recently. The label of ADHD helped me immensely, to connect with others and to understand and be sympathetic to myself.
If labels make you uncomfortable maybe that aversion itself is something worth holding and looking at.
As another example, I was treated horribly by a ex-spouce for years, and for some reason I didn't leave, and only covered up for my spouce's bad behavior. Retrospectively it was destructive, but in the moment it felt like the right thing to do (in a very roundabout way). I don't want this to happen again, so I'm trying to understand and catch behaviors that got me there in the first place.
But if we drop the false nostalgia and think of about the overall "we think too much and feel too little" sentiment - i can relate to that.
When I was young, unsure about myself, and frequently derided when I stated my preference for quiet evenings instead of going out and meeting people, I grasped at the notion of "introversion" the moment I found it. It made my feelings and preferences legitimate during a time when I perceived that people were telling me that I was wrong for being that way.
Now, more than two decades later, after a bit more life experience, I cringe when someone labels me as an introvert - they aren't wrong per se, but they also unload a bunch of assumptions attached to that label on to me, 90% of which are inaccurate/unrelated/tangential.
A good friend of mine told me that labels are useful, but warned me to not make them my entire identity. He turned out to be right.
You opened up how you feel about a thing and your parents derided you for it. Did it change you? No, but it surely made you feel like shit. This is a social deficit in your parents, and asserting yourself as "introverted" is the workaround.
It's funny how op was primarily complaining about how annoying it is to have a load of assumptions dumped on them and you read their post, assumed the derision they described came from their parents, and made it about that rather than the point they were trying to express.
Only one assumption: that it came from his parents.
If his parent were supportive, it would not have been a "i am wrong" situation, but "someone is being an ass to me".
“mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”
Because there's now a payoff for those. Those girls proudly display a whole slew of these on their 'bio' because the societal framework they live in 'scores' them on their 'oppression/victim' status.
This is the answer.
Otherwise-comfortable people searching for anything in the “matrix of oppression” to cling to. Because for the past decade and a half that’s been the easiest way to insert yourself into the attention economy.
I knew a gal who grew up in a perfect family with everything she could ever want so she had to invent a victim status and write a book about it magnifying non-problems into protected class level oppression status in order to fit into the woke crowd. Grievance entrepreneurship.
Isn't this almost a requirement for getting into some prestigious American universities via selection based on a personal essay? You can't just be like "I had a great childhood in an upper middle-class family with parents who loved me and supported me".
No, but certain news outlets make it seem that way.
Interesting article. It reminds me of TVTropes. It's the most systematizing (as opposed to holistically) way of looking at media, decompose it into parts (tropes) that are shared with other media. It feels like approaching the ultimate in the Western scientific orderly systematizing thought.
Anyway here's the relevant trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MeasuringTheMari...
This came to mind for me as well, if anything I think “Measuring The Marigolds” is in slight opposition to the article and supplements it.
When the article got to using a pros-cons list for having kids, that’s where I found the "put away your calculator and enjoy the beautiful sunrise" moment. You can systematically think about things and still have a personality especially for something as important as having a child. :)
I think a lot of this boils down to that not everything is black and white in life and it sucks to think that way, like assigning labels and using therapy speak this way. Which I very much agree with the original article on.
The part that seems to be lost in all this is that there's really no purpose to learning/exploring/explaining unless it points to action.
Knowing you have ADHD, childhood trauma, attachment issues, etc. is useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action or if you don't intend to take action.
Unless you just enjoy the learning for the learnings sake, seek to learn so as to plan and execute.
> Knowing you have ADHD, childhood trauma, attachment issues, etc. is useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action or if you don't intend to take action.
That’s not actually true, and misses the point.
Knowing you have ADHD, alone, helps you stop blaming yourself and hating yourself for those things that are caused by the ADHD. It doesn’t excuse it, but understanding that those things aren’t moral failures are a huge deal to those who actually struggle with ADHD.
Moreover, most people with actual undiagnosed ADHD have spent their entire lifetime building coping mechanisms to manage it. Recognizing those does help build others in the future, even if just knowing changes nothing right then.
I understand what you're saying, but experience has taught me that many many many people use whatever the thing is (trauma, ADHD, whatever) as an excuse to act however they want whenever they want. It becomes a crutch, or a security blanket to let them just be okay with wallowing in the negativity and externalizing every problem.
There has to be a happy medium. I have some neuro issues, and yet I understand that while I may not be able to control the issues themselves, only me is responsible for my own actions. That is lacking in many folks who share my diagnoses. We dropped the ball somewhere and I don't know where, to be honest.
Some people find excuses anywhere they look. But we shouldn’t stigmatize those who don’t on behalf of those who do; the vast majority of people are not that way, which is why they stand out when they are, imho.
And it is more important to not stigmatize talking about it at all than it is to optimize for some people not using it as an excuse.
No need to stigmatize people, but it is very important to stigmatize bad behavior
The problem is that there are people who "stigmatize bad behavior" by stigmatizing other people.
Experience has taught me that your assertion is from a privileged position. Congratulations for being closer to the neuro-populous side of the spectrum. Your experiences can only represent your unique case.
Experience has taught me that accusing people of privilege, and being sarcastic does not make one more persuasive.
Your comment made me realize that maybe we're just going through the transition to a collectively better understanding of people. Right now we sort of have to pass through the clinical diagnosis/therapy terms in order to recognize something as not being a moral failure/making someone less valuable as a person. And then the next step we're building to is maybe like acceptance of people's differences without needing to make reference to diagnostic labels. Kind of like what's happened with queerness: past - fluid, undefined, marginalized; present - labels, understanding, less marginalization; future - moving beyond the need for labels in order for people to accept and understand.
If someone is overly aggressive, or rarely fulfills promises, or is very negative about things, or has a very fragile ego — it absolutely makes them less valuable as a person to others. Just look up any definitions of the word “valuable”
Thankfully, a lot of cultures also recognize inherent value in humans that does not derive from their usefulness.
For me, having people consider "moral failures" aspects of their personality is the root of the problem. We should not have that except for the most horrible things (murder, etc.). Still, after living in a couple of different countries, it is definitely not done to the same extent everywhere. We probably should all pay more attention not to impose random sets on "standards" on others.
> useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action
Knowledge almost always results in some for of action.
Fore example if I know I have schizoid personality, I don't need to stress out about getting to know people just in case I might at some point start needing human contact. Because I know I won't.
Fascinating article. It's think the author's experiences are fairly context-dependant, with where you live, the political leanings of your social circle, your online community etc. But I have noticed an increase in the pathologizing of normal human behaviours and traits. Maybe not all character flaws should be fixed.
You mention a resistance to pathologizing normal human behaviors. That could stem from early experiences where you were perhaps judged or misunderstood for simply being yourself by caregivers, teachers, or peers. If, as a child, you were expected to conform tightly to rules or suppress emotions, you might now feel protective of traits that others try to label or correct. Therapy can be a space where that defensiveness is explored gently, not to shame you, but to give voice to the younger parts of yourself that may have gone unheard.
Hahahaha this got me. My sarcasm/satire detectors are clearly malfunctioning today...
I was exactly the child you describe. I was frequently punished for speaking out, did not express my emotions since anything was met with rage and cruelty, and I still suffer from the consequences today.
Therapy is the second worst thing in my life to happen to me. There were the tens of therapists who put me down or told me my life experience didn't constitute "real trauma". By remaining in the therapy system for so long, years and years, and chasing support I could not actually be offered, all I received was a slew of new trauma (of once again having my lived experience denied) and a hole in my savings. Not kidding, I could have set all that money on fire and have turned out better than I did.
But far more damaging than that was how I was pushed into seeking out labels and spurious diagnoses that only covered up the true causes of my shame - my caretakers and the medical system that acted as their apologia. The idea sold to me (indeed sold, with thousands of dollars of uninsured medical practices) was that with an ADD or other diagnosis under my wing, I could start "really" healing, that the "true" causes to my dysfunction were finally in front of me after being lost for so long.
I now disagree. I was goaded into believing I was a product of unfortunate circumstances instead of malicious incompetence or the just plain abuse and neglect I really did suffer. I was bucketed into the same labels everyone else uses to navigate their problems without regard to their appropriatness and was told it was ME and MY condition that was the beginning and end of the problem. Instead of providing a cohesive narrative, that only served to alienate me further.
We need to stop treating symptoms as labels to be celebrated. Therapy-speak needs to be societally ostracized and die out. My label was the consolation prize to the unfairness and abject cruelty I was subjected to in life. Nothing could be more insulting to the fiber of my being. I am now just myself. I refuse to be medicalized any longer.
Having gone through therapy for 10 years, nah. Having someone tell you what you already know isn’t helpful, unless you have a need to feel heard. Most people just know the bottom line.
I still go to therapy. It isn’t helpful.
Why go then?
Because sometimes you just need somewhere to be.
This response sounds kind of effed up in the context of the article. I don't think everyone needs therapy, especially not if they're happy. Leave them be.
It's sarcasm.
I really hope there was a missing /s.
That was hilarious. Perfect, absolutely pitch perfect, therapy brain. You are a gifted satirist. I love how you end on the part that’s most important to the character of the therapy worshipper, the defence of the core of their identity, that therapy is an unalloyed good.
I am leery to discount anyone's mental health struggles because often enough they are very real. But it can be galling to see very functional people blame the smallest imperfection on a condition many people find debilitating. ADHD and Autism are prevalent ones now, but it also is almost a cliche to call yourself OCD for a bit finicky. I think there's also an element of blaming your shortcomings in life on an incurable condition so it's not your own fault.
I think "normal" is the tough part.
I dislike the "you don't have adhd, you live in capitalism" meme in general, but there is a big difficulty in knowing how much you might be overloading yourself, trying to get to an unattainable normal because your actual material conditions are not normal.
If you're working 60 hour weeks for most people there's not much saving you from having a very messy life! But your peers might all also be in that environment, and you will see people who navigate that somewhat successfully.
Of course you could be working much less and simply "be lazy" and suffer downstream of that. You might be two mindset changes away from being a lot less stressed.
Or you might have a medical condition that makes certain things harder! Or you might not.
At the end of the day there are medical conditions that exist and are fairly scientifically proven to exist in some form and have treatment. And plenty of people who spend time saying that stuff doesn't exist, so there's vocal pushback against that which rubs some people the wrong way.
But there's also just human introspection (which is part of how we grow). The new thing is that this introspection often happens more in the open, a lot of times with the whole world watching.
Even 20 years ago you might talk with other people around the world but it would at least be in more closed spaces.
To some extent I think it’s valid though. The inability to want to sit in a chair and reorganise spreadsheets for 8 hours straight isn’t a disability, it’s a natural response of your brain telling you that this activity sucks and you should get up and move.
Combined with the change in society where most active jobs are being replaced with sitting down at a computer.
This isn't really my original point but the reason I dislike the "you don't have ADHD you have capitalism" meme is that ADHD's intentionality symptoms isn't about attention but about self control[0]
So if you "really actually" have ADHD[0], that isn't just manifesting in not getting work done, it's manifesting in saying things before speaking, issues with addiction, issues with self-management leading to hygiene issues etc.
Loads of social effects that go beyond "don't want to work".
Me having a job or not isn't what's causing me to insult a friend by snapping back at them in a way that I _know_ is wrong. It's not causing lasting damage to social relationships because of my behavior. Capitalism isn't causing that.
And hey, meds help my management of those things. Even if I had all the money in the world these are things I would like to continue managing.
Bit of a glib opinion, though.
[0]: Not a doctor, etc.
the idea of "its capitalisms fault" is that capitalism is responsible for placing these "self control" constraints on people.
capitalism is the thing making too much choice, and to many choices over time.
capitalism set the context for you snapping at your friend, where you are doing work you dont want to to avoid being homeless, while they are doing different work and you feel like its unfair that their work is different from yours.
if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them
> if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them
These interactions are not in that sense, they are in the "I say some stupid unvarnished opinion first and immediately realize there was a better way of saying it" variety. It is not downstream of me being stressed out about money or work or whatever. These are things that happen when I am in a perfectly normal mood, not thinking about how to pay rent or whatever.
I have plenty of social failings that are very much unrelated to capitalism. I have also had bad social interactions downstream of money/capitalism/etc too! But that's its own thing
Maybe you subscribe to some grand unifying theory here but I don't. Social structures and norms existed before market capital, and they exist in spaces fairly separate from the economic sphere ("those don't exist!" you might say, but I believe they do exist, at least in a time-and-space limited fashion).
Subsuming all of my issues to capitalism is unsatisfying. Thinking about the texture of it all (and potentially identifying some things that really are linked to that, and become as solvable as gravity[0]) is more valuable to me. I think it's also valuable to others.
[0]: or political action or whatever
> The inability to want to sit in a chair and reorganise spreadsheets for 8 hours straight isn’t a disability
I mean sure, but that's also not what ADHD is. It's how ADHD gets described, by medical professionals too, but in my lived experience the attention deficit part of ADHD is the least bad part.
It's the executive function stuff that's real fucked up. You know how if you gotta do something you don't reaaaally wanna do it's kinda hard to get started? Imagine instead if it was nigh impossible. Imagine if it happened with things you DO want to do. All the time. On the outside you just look lazy, while on the inside you're screaming at yourself to go do the thing for hours. Imagine being unable to attain your goals specifically because they are your goals.
Imagine the only way to keep your house even slightly clean is to wait for the planets to align and give you the power to even start cleaning. Half the time it happens at 1AM, but you can either clean until 3AM and be completely fucked at work the next day or just not clean at all until the next time the planets align, which might be the next day or next month.
Imagine being told your entire life you're a lazy fuckup that's not living up to their potential.
Yeah not being able to do boring shit for 8 hours straight is normal. Not having sufficient executive function is a real handicap and being told that it's a moral failing repeatedly will really fuck up a person for a good long while.
ADD / ADHD denial is a pet peeve of mine because I know people with it who have experienced before and after treatment. It’s absolutely real. It’s not a consequence of “capitalism” or screens or anything else circumstantial.
Why is it everywhere now? Because we diagnose and treat it. In the old days what did we do with ADD kids? Hit them. What did we do with ADD adults? Call them stupid and lazy.
I always feel like these "We do this new horrible thing that's taking over" articles are always blown out of proportion- sure, _some_ people talk that way, maybe it's even trending to talk that way for a significant group of people, but it's not true of everyone, all the time. To me, this trend seems largely confined to youth culture and social media.
I also found it ironic that part of the OP's argument was that nobody has personality anymore, they just have problems to solve, and this article seemed to be doing the same thing, but for culture at large; reducing it to a problem to be solved.
I find it entertaining and view it more as a writing device
The author obviously adds some exaggeration to get the point across
I don’t think they actually think everyone does this
Yeah, this is seriously WTF. OP please read a book or go stare at clouds. "We" are not anything.
In other news "there's a whole new way young people are annoying! more at 11"
> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.
This is the rejection of science applied to a less common target.
psychiatry is at best informed guesswork , mental conditions are merely labelled groupings of symptoms , the negative effects of psych drugs outweigh positives in a significant proportion of cases , people existed for thousands of years with functional coping mechanisms that were thrown in the bin to make someone else rich and the populace was brainwashed to think it was their fault
I think it's a rejection of categorisation and labeling as a form of (self-)determinism, not a rejection of science.
That does not follow
It’s possible to apply systems, frameworks, or categorizations that are actually wrong or overstated
What science is being rejected?
It's the rejection of pseudoscience.
We live in increasingly complex societies with more and more demanding social dynamics. In the past, it was all much simpler, though at certain costs, that the article fails to mention or romanticises. Not all quirks were celebrated or "funny" and not all people survived to tell beautiful stories.
Moreover, a lot of things were simpler in ways that are becoming less and less ok. People now can divorce; marriage is not even need to start a family. Navigating relationship dynamics was simpler in the sense that there were (more or less) specific roles each gender should abide. Many marriages were arranged, especially if "it was taking you time", thus you did not have to figure out dating yourself.
I don't think that therapeutic discourse is a good strategy. Medicalising personhoods and relationships is bad, but going back to a (romanticised) past cannot be a solution at all. Raising to a higher consiousness would be an actual, good solution, but that takes time. It is uncertain if we have that with the speed that things move nowadays.
> Raising to a higher consiousness would be an actual, good solution, but that takes time.
Time as in evolution?
I'd say - everybody has a personality which is not who they really are. The personality is "simply" the response and defence mehanism of the ego of trauma inflicted during the early formatory years during childhood. It's really interesting what an automatic-machine a person is. Unaware that he is acting machanically in most cases. Source - the Enneagram and Gurdjieff.
We all have a personality and it IS who we “really are.” We also all have the ability to construct personalities that misrepresent our inner lives. Doing so creates a certain kind of stress and relieves other kinds of stresses.
Over the course of our childhoods we experiment with personality, and discover the elements that allow us to have stable and satisfying dealings with the world. We may cultivate several different personalities— each of them the real us in some respect.
Of course there are many elements of personality that are autonomic or otherwise habitual. That doesn’t mean personality is somehow not real.
A con artist or an actor can don a fake personality, but all that means is they are telling a kind of systemic lie to the world. This requires a lot of energy to maintain. Your real personality is that which minimizes required energy.
Are you the clothes you wear? No you are not. In a similar manner - your personality is what you show to the world. A construct based as a response to some trauma (or something else very influential, but usually trauma) inflicted on you as a child. i.e. your personality is the clothes your real self wears. It doesn't mean it's not part of you - it is.
I am not the clothes I wear, but personality is not "clothes." If personality were clothing then removing it would be a simple and painless matter, after which you would be interacting with the world "without personality." This is absurd. You can't have no personality. All you can do is replace a personality with a different personality. Your personality is the totality of patterns by which you present yourself to the world.
This is not the same thing as what you show to the world. "What you show to the world" implies that personality is merely a veil that covers stuff. It's not a veil at all. It's an interface. The "real you" that acts through this interface is beyond words, personality is not "showing it" because it can't be shown, but rather mediating it via actions.
Yes. Language, for instance. Why don't you engage with the world honestly and speak in your real language, instead of one you've learned?
Excellent point!
Some of my language patterns come from watching and interacting with my stepfather. He was big man with a loud voice and an iron work ethic. I didn't get along with him when I was a kid-- in fact had to leave home after threatening his life-- but as I became a man I decided that I was going to force the world NOT TO IGNORE ME. So I tried on his tough-talking, Navy veteran persona and found that it fit me. Now I'm 275 pounds and have a loud voice and I know how to use it.
I'm not PRETENDING to be something I'm not. I am using a style of interaction that fits the "real me." I AM a man, and I SPEAK as a man. And my template for manliness is my stepfather. At the same time I'm also an intellectual, and I adopted certain patterns from my biological father. I also borrowed patterns from the writings of C.S. Lewis and Tolkein. Sometimes I channel Gandalf and sometimes Boromir.
Children have become adults in this way since a million years ago. There's nothing false about it.
This makes it sound like our personalities are a function of our own agency. What about genetics? I agree that our personalities are partly a function of our past lives (trauma as you say), but that's only part of the picture surely.
> Are you the clothes you wear?
No but you certainly are your own skin.
We are what we pretend to be — Kurt Vonnegut
So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
i disagree , while most people do exist in a provisional life (to the uninitiated please search this term of mr. jung's) , this does not discount the possibility of evolving further
IIRC a "disorder" is a personality trait that is extremely strong; specifically, strong enough to significantly negatively affect one's life and relationships without medication or therapy (real therapy, not "talk to someone" therapy).
For example, sometimes people talk about lowercase "t" and capital "T" trauma. Lowercase "t" is when something affects you enough that recognizing it elicits an emotion, e.g. some people fell uneasy when smelling saline because they associate it with getting shots when they were young. Uppercase "T" is when the emotion is overpowering, e.g. soldiers who wake up screaming or experience lifelike flashbacks when they see military equipment, or people who can't visit a location without panicking because it reminds them of a negative experience. Only uppercase "T" is diagnosed PTSD, although that doesn't mean lowercase "t" is never a problem, it's just not life-altering and can be worked around without medication or therapy.
We have regular adjectives for the manageable "lowercase" version of disorders. "Obsessive" for OCD, "antsy" or "trouble focusing" for ADHD, "strange" or "peculiar" for Autism. I do think someone can be "manic" or "depressed" without having diagnosed Bipolar or Depression. Unfortunately, language is defined by how it's used in practice, so if most people call themselves "ADHD" when they don't have real diagnosed ADHD, you'll have to use their meaning to understand them, and eventually it'll become the norm; but you can speak and write the non-disorder adjective to help counter it. Worst case, we still have "diagnosed X" to distinguish from "X" (unless people start using it like "literally" to mean figuratively...)
We know more now. We can better tease out causes of symptoms.
For example, generosity is not the same as people pleasing. They can look the same, but one is born of love and one is born of fear.
We generally want to help people experience more love and less suffering. Give, not to please people, but to please yourself.
Believe to know more. As someone who has managed to live comfortably in the margins... I have never been more miserable than recently. What changed? This unsolicited assistance.
I was a perfectly fine and productive remote worker before the pandemic. Now, every bit of energy I have goes towards "no, really, I'm alright" and the leagues of hustlers.
This is a really good article.
There is a lot of this content out there about mental health and there is a lot of it that tries to explain everything people do. Much of the issue I see is that it is taken to extremes and is very much driven by algorithms pushing particular pieces of content. And if it is ambiguous enough it will reach a larger audience, a beneficial sign for the account posting it.
There's no room for nuance that perhaps the person who is generous both has qualities of a people pleaser but is a generous person because once upon a time they did a generous thing and it made their life happier. Where it becomes a mental health issue is when it starts to reduce the quality of your life and your relationships significantly.
The bigger issue is that each of these things seem to be labelled as problems and how they can be solved, not managed nor be normal human behaviors. At the extremes, yes perhaps they need to be managed to a higher degree, but everything else is still what makes up peoples lives.
I myself am swarmed with reels about anxious/avoidant attachment reels with any random man/women and their dog trying to talk ambiguously about human behaviors and providing an explanation for them.
For young people sitting on TikTok and Instagram late at night being bombarded with mental health related reels trying to explain your behavior and other peoples behavior you like or don't like. It's best to give that type of content a break.
> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything.
To explain everything shallowly by looking for direct cause and effect and not a multitudes of causes and effects. That complexity is too much to think through comfortably whilst living within it and having an unreliable experience of the self, especially in the younger years. Labeling causes with an easy broad moniker provides temporary comfort, relieving the individual of the burden of deeper reflection.
They're trying to explain everything but what they're actually doing is labelling everything with dubious labels and then putting social pressure on people to act like their labels. Under the guise of acceptance they're alienating everybody from each other by trying to put everybody into a bucket. It's best to notice this kind of thing but not put too much energy into refuting it because it's just not where conversations or attention should be, this kind of thought should wither in obscurity instead of seeking some kind of victory over it.
Haven't we been doing exactly what you say since like forever? Aren't "asshole" or "creep" or "nice" just labels coined a long time ago that already distort someones actual behavior or some situation between 2 people? Or used for being mocked or commended? I say at least in current times the new generations are expanding that vocabulary in trying to be more precise but the people that are more of a following type keep defaulting to exclusionary behavior.
Yes, but this time it's with the veneer of scientific legitimacy.
It's certainly not uncommon for specialists in any scientific field to roll their eyes when someone outside their discipline discusses their work.
"asshole" isn't an identity or a diagnosis
I often see a generalized notion where refusing to be a person doing a bad thing instead transforms into being a person with doing-bad-thing-syndrome, which then distills to doing-bad-thing-syndrome-sufferer. It removes agency, but also accountability, so it's a good way to coast through life with learned helplessness
1. Weird title
2. Personally, I think the being more knowledgeable about (and conversant in) common psychological issues is great. Much better if we have a label for "depression" rather than just thinking "The world and everything is awful and I'm the only one who feels this way." Same for anxiety, attachment, all of that.
3. If young girls happen to co-opt it in a way you find self-absorbed, get over it, stop trying to police it and make a fake moral panic over it. It's no worse than astrology or whatever other loose avenue of self-exploration would be otherwise happening.
It to me sounds like the author fundamentally misunderstands the whole thing, this just is soaking in boomer energy. That is -- the premise that recognizing these trends is somehow shaming/bad and it's "better" if we all use loosely-defined unscientific terms like "nice-person" rather than looking at and challenging our overly intense and dysfunctional people-pleasing or whatever.
The way gen-z uses these terms, is that they aren't some hardcore disorder, but as a common parlance for real and addressable things to change about oneself (e.g. that talking on the phone can be uncomfortable, or making an appointment is stressful). Like gen-z may say "Oh I have insecure attachment" and they just mean "Sometimes I'm afraid to reach out for fear of rejection" and that's a healthy thing to talk about, even if the term they used is used a different way in the DSM.
Unfortunately (but given the slant of all her other articles, most likely intentionally), the author suffers from one major oversight:
The absence of labels is just as much of a marketing gimmick as their presence. Even anti-identitarianism will be weaponized. Even nothing is something. Eliminate all the labels and concepts and redundancies, and you are yet left with a "natural, unspoken, normal default" state of being.
And as it turns out, there are plenty of forces out there willing to exploit that appeal towards the "the unspoken", for either financial or political gain. The question remains, then: who or what gets to determine this unspoken part of life?
The genius of social media is that they propagated some labels and then they let people do the hard work of adjusting their personalities and belief systems to more closely adhere to those labels. Likely driven by mimetic desire for status and recognition. Adherence to well known labels provides instant recognition and validation.
Then when it came to 'targeted advertising', social media advertisers could just target the labels and reach a huge amount of people because those people had already fine-tuned and optimized themselves to be receptive to that kind of messaging.
Their personalities were homogenized to the point that the focus groups ended up being representative of the real people behind the labels.
I’m reluctant to blame therapy-speak and diagnoses of legitimate mental health disorders for the lack of personality in a lot of folks.
Instead, I lay blame at several altars of the modern world:
* Late stage Capitalism desperately trying to source novelty and products by convincing everyone they’re a “brand” to be marketed and sold to others
* Social media algorithms forcing people into bubbles for the sake of advertising revenue and data harvesting
* An “awakening” of modern mental health awareness (especially post-pandemic) that’s both (likely) engaging in overdiagnosing while also laying groundwork to understand people for who they are, rather than trying to shove them into neat little boxes of compliance
* The internet and free exchange of information enabling a lot of disparate researchers and experts to realize that these issues aren’t unique to a single cohort, but are likely environmental in nature to some significant degree
Add it all together, and you’ve got the current “label” era of personalities - shorthand for how you’d like others to see you and explain your quirks or eccentricities, but of questionable health if not accompanied by actual therapy (pharmaceutical, medical, behavioral, or otherwise).
Could this be an evolution of astrology? Or an evolution of the underlying attraction to astrology? This need to label things (libra vs scorpio vs etc) and the assignment of character traits and behaviors to these labels? This need to push for explanations beyond our control? And perhaps these psychological labels are even _more_ attractive since they have the veneer of science and rationality behind it.
I feel like the author is, funnily enough given the context, lumping in self-understanding and self-reflection of any kind into a single category. A tool (analysis) that is used to grant you agency is equated to an identity kit (a label) that removes your agency and puts you in the box that the author describes.
You can have great self-understanding and self-realization about your childhood, your parents opinions and personality without letting it define your life.
You should not blame the analysis itself, but blame the projection of your personality to the result of it, which it encouraged by platforms that make money of it, like TikTok or BetterHelp. It can be fun to do an MBTI or Big 5 test to see common patterns in oneself, it does not mean that you have to structure your personality around the outcome.
To me, it sounds like the author is vouching for being unthinkingly driven by biology, tradition, and impulse in a society where most of this is also commercialized. Your govt wants you to have children to supply pensions, your impulses are driven by the advertisements that you have been bombarded with during the day, there is extreme prodding towards certain kinds of sexual looks or behaviors that influence what people find attractive. You are as much of a product when you follow the impulses than when you dont, the only thing is that with self-reflection you have a small change to question and think about why you want a certain thing.
I personally think that people living by the authors suggested way of living in a western societal moment of individualism have a maximum chance to regret their life at the end of it, doing everything "default" that society and tradition has taught you is "natural and human" instead of living the journey on your own terms and doing what you actually like.
Someone needs to play Metal Gear Solid 2.
The crowd which is hyper-focused on their "trauma" probably doesn't realize that this is scratching the very same itch as astrology.
> We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent.
While I agree about the over-labeling (which is a way to be sortable by algorithms that need to push or penalize our social media presence) I wouldn’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. There is a difference between being generous and being a people-pleaser, and it’s an important one to know for people with this trait. Years ago you would have never thought of this as a (mild) neurosis, but it can totally be. Being aware of it can help immensely in leading a more fulfilling life. This is true for all the other examples mentioned.
That said, the piece should just be: social media has polluted and ruined mental health awareness in the same exact way it has ruined and polluted so many other aspects of the public discourse.
I agree with this and you hit the nail on the head with the last point.
The big issues is the prevalence of so called therapists and psychologists putting these labels on social media in such an ambiguous way that draws users.
Our kids should have mental health professionals talking to them about their struggles and helping them identify these things. Not 100s of instagram or tiktok reels algorithmically sent to us every night.
Psychology (professional and layman) has helped me immensely, but I also recognized it can be a trap. I had a therapist for a couple months help me through an intense depression, but I could also feel when it was becoming naval gazing, so then I stopped.
Psychology is a means to an end. But some people are attempting to make it an end. I do feel a cathartic release to get a 'diagnosis', but this catharsis is transient. There is infinite sub-categorizations to achieve infinite catharsis, but each further division, brings diminishing returns.
I hope that this trend is going to burn itself out. There is no promised land in medical psychology as popularly experienced. It can be used as a scaffold to leap into a higher self-awareness, but then it must be left aside.
The screwtape letters for 2025: how to completely freeze a generation from having any impact. Oof. This hit hard.
Speak for yourself, It's not impossible to uncaringly live your own life of your own choices, quirks and characteristics without agreeing that you're somehow "disordered", and pigeonhole yourself into idiotically cheap social media and pop culture labels of X or Y. Just refuse to participate in the herd-guiding on something so basic as personal tendencies and flaws.
It's a shame that too many young people do the opposite and have bought so widely into a therapy culture of tagging so much of the complex human world into little boxes of psychological disorder (founded on some very, very shaky evidence and clinical understanding) to cause further internal trauma. This itself has become a bizarre and sickly fad but not an inescapable one.
Eh. There are a loud social-media savvy cohort of mostly young, mostly female, mostly suburban American people and this is the lens they see the world through and they have a disproportionate representation in the available media to consume. The people that don't think this way which is the vast majority of people just don't talk about these things too much and don't accept the premise of the people who do... but don't disagree with them because those people are exhausting.
People who aren't that interested in talking about themselves just have other interests and don't want to engage in the shallow philosophy of psychology of the social media gen-z class.
To those with a bit more age and life experience than myself, I ask if you have noticed a rise in "categorical thinking" over time. To clarify, I mean thought processes that are mostly surface level and focus on attributing qualities or conclusions to things based on observable characteristics. Sort of "they display x so they must be y which means z"
It’s surprising that this article doesn’t mention LGBT or disabilities at all. The same effect extends to those two. And, in the same vein, it’s females “buying” it.
“…between 19% and 22% of women aged 18 to 25 identify as bi.” https://nypost.com/2023/04/18/gen-z-women-identify-as-bisexu...
Only assholes* use "female" as a noun.
"Female" is primarily a scientific or biological term that refers to sex, not gender. When used as a noun for humans, it reduces women to their reproductive capabilities and strips away their individuality and humanity, making them seem less than fully human or equivalent to animals. For example, "female" can refer to any species, while "woman" specifically refers to human beings.
Here it's clearly being used in a derogatory, dismissive sense.
* and Ferengi
Only assholes put words and motives into other peoples mouths to strawman there arguments.
You are clearly the only one who is being derogatory and dismissive
Why would it be unrealistic for 20% of women to like women too at least somewhat? It is not stigmatized anymore. And statistically, males are more more dangerous partly due to strength and partly due to ideologies they sign up for. So, a woman a little attracted to other woman has more motivation to admit it.
The phenomenon of men having sex relationships with other men in male only environments (jail, army) existed before. They reverted to heterosexual relationships when they left the environment and would not call themselves "bi". It is opposite side of it - clearly having something out of same sex relation did not made them bi, because it would be shameful.
What happens in prison and the army is not generally consensual.
In the nonconsensual relationshil, attacking side does it voluntarly.
That being said, studies I read involved both kind - consensual as well. Not all of it is rape.
Oooh, boy. Almost no-one wants to talk about it because it's considered harmful (or even taboo) to blame being gay and especially being trans on social contagion and similar phenomena.
If you point out that a controversial phenomenon is very dependent on social elements, you also invite discussions whether something should be fine-tuned in our society to influence it, which turns into a political issue.
Lol, I don’t think so, at least not outside branding and corporate circles.
It can still be endearing to have quirks, but I think there is still value in awareness of yourself and your patterns.
I somewhat agree that there is a problem but there is a glimmer of hope. As these medical terms are used more in everyday speech they lose their medical connotations and just become new words for personality traits. A lot of people who casually describe things as ADHD are using it more as an adjective than a diagnosis. We have had medical terms make it into this usage before: moron, hysterical, humourous (we're going all the way back to the four humours).
Clicking around, the last the article the author published accuses porn of causing mass trauma. Does she want us to use these labels liberally or not?
Love this article. If you'd like a book that works deeply through the topic of commodified humanity, Minima Moralia by Adorno is painfully pertinent here.
I can think of nothing more likely to damage one's attention span than a variable intermittent reward loop on short form video.
Kind of old news with a new headline.
Some people have made free lecture series on the topic, like this:
https://rickroderick.org/300-guide-the-self-under-siege-1993...
I think what (may have) changed is that we now have "acceptable" labels. ADHD is fine, autism is fine, alcoholism, schizophrenia, not great, pedophilia, very very bad, even if you have never acted on a child.
I don't remember past "acceptable" pathologies, or what was considered a pathology back then, it included being gay. It you have a pathology, then you are mad, and if you are mad, then you lose your rights, at best, you are considered like a child, at worst, you end up in a place worse than prison.
Now, if you are diagnosed with an "acceptable" pathology, you actually get some advantages, people are expected to tolerate your quirks and you get full freedom like normal people, you may even get some welfare benefits as you are considered disabled.
To summarize:
Before: You are diagnosed as autistic, you end up in an asylum and lose your freedoms. No one wants that, so you avoid the label, it is just a personality trait.
Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits and people find it cute on social media. You want the label.
>Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits
I wish I lived in this reality. It sounds like a utopia over there.
It is not utopia, it is my country, France. And while public healthcare looks better than in the US, it is absolutely not a utopia, from understaffing, bureaucracy and fraud, it is not without problems, even putting aside how much it costs in taxes.
But the idea is: in current society, for some pathologies / personality traits, you are better off with the label than without the label, so people will seek the label rather than avoid it, they would be crazy not to...
But it sounds like this is not really meaningfully true outside of France, then?
Here in the Netherlands, there isn’t any such thing as an ‘autism benefit’ or ‘ADHD benefit’. Only if your condition is so debilitating as to make you unfit for work, then there is a benefit that you could apply for, but not in all circumstances, and only if an unemployment doctor is convinced by your case.
The more I disconnect from the internet, the more insane social network dwellers look to me.
> And maybe that isn’t as crazy as we have been led to believe, maybe that isn’t so reckless, maybe there’s something human in that.
I'm quite certain the author is a Starfleet captain. So few things make me as excited to be human.
Is there a diagnosis for the tendency to collect diagnostic labels and use them to absolve oneself of responsibility?
On further thought, not sure if this would solve the problem or exacerbate it...
Or maybe your community sucks.
absolutely , now let us question why community is being actively deprioritized and destroyed by the system
There are no normal people. Only undiagnosed ones.
This is an old observation. The only change was that we started to attempt to diagnose and some people find it useful, some harmful and annoying.
Big pharma approves this message
The overdiagnosis and therapy talk is real, and is causing way too many people (most of them children) to take brain-altering pills on a daily basis.
I find the article to lack nuance, but it is time that this hazardous trend stops, and if it needs to go through social media shaming for some people to realize this sucks, then I am all for it.
My 6-year-old is a pain in the ass (got thrown out of 2 schools already). His psychologist says he has a hard time controlling his emotions. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who suggested he has some form of mental illness (OD, ADHD, ASD, we’ve heard it all). Thankfully, here in France, both his psychologist and his teacher are really wary of the trend, and are very careful not to put a mental health label on a kid who doesn’t have any other problem than being a pain to adults.
See the main problem is the question of suffering. People would say: but your kid suffers from being a pain to adults. Wouldn’t you want to help your kid not suffer?
Well yes sure, but the suffering is society-induced. It’s not that his personality is a medical problem, it’s that he doesn’t fit within the expectations. If he’d been born the son of a monarch, it would be accepted that he talked back to adults and throw tantrums, and he wouldn’t feel like shit. And I am not trying to say my kid should be allowed to yell at his teacher, but all of that setting isn’t natural - as in primates don’t go to kindergarten - so who’s to say what’s normal?
It is the same for what the person describes in the article. We live in a society where people do suffer from not meeting society’s expectations. The suffering is real, and so the diagnostic is often oozing.
But when 10% of children are diagnosed with ADHD and given amphetamines so that they can get through the day, we should probably ask whether it’s not the society that’s sick.
Saying the quiet thing out loud with social media and truthy articles, seems to track with the diminishing publishing industry?
I appreciate the spirit behind this article, and yes, something real has been lost in how we relate to ourselves. But it doesn’t go far enough. The problem isn’t merely that we’ve traded quirky personalities for medical labels. The deeper, subtler tragedy is believing that identity itself is something fixed, stable, and real.
Identity is a seductive illusion. It promises meaning, coherence, and comfort. Yet beneath this comfort lies a quiet tyranny. Once we define ourselves, we imprison ourselves. The fixed “I” we cling to doesn’t stand scrutiny, not scientifically, not philosophically, not psychologically.
Consider neuroscience. The self, the stable “I,” is nowhere to be found in the brain. What scientists find instead are fleeting processes, overlapping patterns, temporary states. Neuroscientist Anil Seth, in his book “Being You,” argues convincingly that the self is a kind of ongoing hallucination—a comforting fiction the mind generates moment by moment. There’s no stable core beneath it, only fragments, constantly rearranging.
Philosophy has long understood this. David Hume, centuries ago, searched for the self within consciousness and found only sensations, perceptions, shifting sands. Nietzsche echoed this idea, mocking the notion of a stable self as merely a trick of language, a grammar-born illusion. Ludwig Wittgenstein, too, dismantled the belief in private inner truths. For him, meaning emerges not from introspection, but from the shared dance of language and action. To think there’s a stable self hidden deep inside is to misunderstand how language, thought, and reality interact.
Freud, despite the distortions of modern therapy, never saw us as coherent beings either. For him, the human psyche was a theater of conflict, desires clashing beneath consciousness, forever hidden from full awareness. Freud’s contribution wasn’t mechanizing the mind, but revealing its profound contradictions. Unlike later theorists such as Lacan, who mistakenly reduced humans to mere patterns of meaning—Freud knew that beneath our carefully narrated lives lay irrationality and mystery, impossible to tame fully by analysis.
Yet today’s therapeutic-industrial complex tries precisely that. Therapy, once an exploration of human depth, now resembles a dating app business model. Platforms like BetterHelp and Talkspace profit not by curing distress, but by prolonging it. You pay, endlessly, to decode yourself. Success for them isn’t resolution, but endless self-inventory, endless labeling.
This is where the concept of “mental health” itself becomes subtly oppressive. It implies an ideal state, a normal range, a standard we should measure ourselves against. Ian Hacking described this phenomenon as the “looping effect”: labels shape behaviors, behaviors reinforce labels, and individuals get trapped in a feedback loop of self-pathology. When identity becomes a medical diagnosis, we surrender our autonomy, our ambiguity, and ultimately our freedom.
Trauma, too, has morphed into social currency. It’s become the dominant metaphor for interpreting every aspect of life: attraction, friendships, career choices. James Davies, author of “Cracked,” highlights how the psychiatric model strips our lives of meaning, reducing complexity to clinical symptoms. But not every strong feeling is a wound; not every quirk a disorder. Of course, painful things do happen—sad things, terrible things—but we speak as if these things always happen to us, placing ourselves at the center of a chain of causality and consequence. In reality, events simply happen. There is no inherent meaning, no cosmic intention. How we weave these accidents into our personal story is entirely our decision. How we let them shape or influence us is our choice alone. It is precisely here, in this decision, that our ultimate freedom lies.
Here’s the core of the matter, the radical truth that’s rarely stated plainly: there is no fixed identity to discover, no true self hidden deep inside. Identity is a myth we invent because life feels safer if we pretend there’s something stable beneath the chaos. But life resists stability. We are never fully known—not even to ourselves. The moment we accept this, the instant we let go of trying to pin ourselves down, we become free to live.
Happiness is not the reward of endless self-exploration. It’s not a puzzle we solve or a mystery we decode. Happiness is a decision, a leap, an act of rebellion against the tyranny of labels, against the logic of suffering. We don’t find happiness by understanding every trauma or categorizing every impulse, but by letting go, by accepting uncertainty, by choosing desire, will, and joy despite everything. This is what Kierkegaard called the leap of faith—not into religious belief necessarily, but into life itself.
Ultimately, identity is not something we have. It is something we do, something we perform, something we constantly recreate. The human condition is not static being but perpetual becoming. Nietzsche said it best: we must become who we are. And in doing so, we reject the cage of identity entirely. We are not diagnoses, symptoms, or personalities. We are simply alive, driven by desire, moved by joy, ever-changing and never fully defined.
Yet this does not mean giving up on growth or self-improvement—quite the opposite. It is precisely because we are not limited by a static identity that we can truly act, improve, evolve. But nobody can do this for us. Nobody can save us from ourselves, not a therapist, not a romantic partner. The responsibility for our existence and happiness lies entirely in our hands.
By letting go of identity, we open ourselves up to genuine change. Free from the suffocating need for recognition, our relationships become richer and more authentic. Most relationships are neurotic precisely because they are driven by demands for validation rather than true acceptance. When we stop begging for recognition, when we let go of the myth of identity, we allow ourselves, and others, to exist in all our beautiful complexity. Relationships cease to be transactions of self-worth and become genuine encounters: open, curious, generous.
In the end, perhaps the bravest act is not endlessly “working on ourselves,” but simply living—boldly, messily, without apology or explanation.
Adding insult to injury, we also have now the "humans are just bad biological AIs" wave of thinking. Hooray.
“The gray race shrivels trapped inside the world it creates it's black and white” -Bad Religion The Gray Race
How fast we went from "you're unique" to "you're a diagnostic checklist."
Sometimes I think about what I've read in a book about Japan.
Something along the lines that Japanese people are analog while Westerners are digital.
We try to explain everything, every emotion, feeling, how things are. But sometimes talking about things strips them of their mystery, of the unknowns. We talk too much and get entangled in meanings and what was formless and fluid before suddenly becomes defined and limited.
I'm a bit dual about this thing. I see it around social media and in people talking. I got diagnosed almost two years ago, and it has been a relief in a way because it finally explained a lot of the struggles I had, helped being less blameful about myself and learn physiological keys around how I am and why. At the same time, I really don't think it would have helped me knowing this much earlier in my childhood, and sometimes the tentation to use this as an "excuse" is strong like described in the article.
I wouldn't wish an earlier diagnostic to my kids, and try to approach things with an empathic approach instead.
This is the same mental mechanism that makes me hate (pseudoscience) personality tests. Many of my friends that use them fall for similar trap of "labeling" themselves.
When those labels aren't informative or accurate at all, it ends up becoming a chain rather than liberation. "Oh Im MBTI-4acronym, according to that personality test, I'm an introvert so I should skip this public event!".
We are inherently complex and multi-label, even with the worst simplifications. That's confusing and frightening to many, so we seek an "oracle", authority, that can tell us who we are. Problem arise when those are false prophecies.
And they are almost always false. (to varying degrees) Social media mental diagnosis is exactly the same. And crucially they're very wrong over time [1]. So it end up as a shackle to stunt their growth. It completely stops the trail&error process, exposure, and creates a self reinforcing cycle so the label becomes deeply rooted as an identity. There's really no substitute for "trying out yourself to see what works for you, and make sure your trials are set up so you can learn something from it" when it comes to self discovery.
I wish psychology was a bit more scrutinized field. The amount of popscience garbage they give out, and how many people use these model to judge and limit themselves in their life is so sad to see. Probably one of the primary reasons I would keep social media far away from kids (if I had any).
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309...
> Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.
There's a lot of boomer men writing in all caps whose special interest is either trains or WW2 who, if were in their 20s today, would easily be categorized as autistic. Older men, for most of their lives, lacked both language and social permission to think of themselves in those terms.
The entire construct of "disorder" is defined by what a given society is willing to accommodate or tolerate at a given moment. Thus, the problem with the article is that it assumes that we live in a homogeneous social landscape. We don't, so things that negatively impact someone life ie: the definition of a disorder, are age dependent. The threshold for "impairment" is not a universal biological constant; it’s a moving, socially negotiated boundary. Diagnostic categories themselves are historical artifacts, trailing behind the societies that create them.
The failure to recognize this is assuming an objective social reality, that frankly, never existed and never will exist. It only serves to reinforce existing, unexamined, contingencies of a specific time and place.
out on the fringe there is lots of personalities as they say, the difference between bieng eccentric and crazy is a million bucks, or comunities with lots of recent imigrants, low density rural areas, people with improbable jobs, pilots and doctors who worked war zones, free divers working on barges for $19.50/hr, smoke jumpers, musicians and movie people, folks working the front lines in not for profits dealing with homeless and people with aids, serial entrepenours, et cetera but then ,I guess, maybe I move around more than most people........but as for the mass of people following "the plan", ya they are a bit extra tweeky and way too easily spooked, way too much into there "feelings", and "comfort zones", "saftey", and "processes".......plus they are stuck in environments where they are subject to people who are outworking and over achiveing the fuck out of everything and bringung out the worst passive agressive shit in people, that they then get to feel guilty about. it's a shit show alright
There are some interested points hidden in a of projection from the author here.
>We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent.
....says who? Who talks like this? I've been fortunate enough to travel a fair bit in the last year and I haven't found any city or country where this is the case.
This advice is cliche at this point but go touch grass. Get off the internet and talk to an actual human, because most actual humans don't talk the way this article says they do.
If everything around you is using therapist talk maybe you're hanging around too many therapists. That certainly happens with people who hang around exclusively with, say, software engineers.
It's good advice. I have met people who talk like the post mentions, but the reality is that they just spend way too much time on Instagram and TikTok.
Not like me, I'm on Hackernews, and would never integrate stupid stuff into an important representation of my personality. Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!
Agreed. And about the HN thing, when I worked for a software startup in SF, it became a joke on our team how often strangers ask "what's your stack" instead of talking about the weather. Python 2 vs 3 was the talk of the town for a while.
> Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!
Only if you have a personal blog in Times New Roman, with an RSS feed, all diagrams in ascii art, no JS, and especially no scroll-jacking, high contrast font (ideally black on white), and keep in mind that we will find out if you’re not self-hosting your email, in which case you’ll have to profusely apologize.
I actually have most of this. The blog defaults to the user's system font, I think, and it has an RSS feed + very little JS (maybe none, depends on how hosted Mataroa works), etc.
Unfortunately I don't self-host my email, so I must apologize profusely.
As an vim and arch user...
Nah never mind I use NixOS too.
I’d fucking love a post about NixOS config over this shit any day of the week. Lay it on us fella.
I was joking but maybe I really should do this. I'm lacking a lot of Linux fundamentals, let alone NixOS fundamentals, but I also love my setup so much. Here's the commit that made my wallpaper an animated hobbit house!
https://github.com/Nikhil-Suresh/nixos-configuration/commit/...
I didn't use Nixvim or any of that cool stuff though. I stole a little Bash project called Tilde from my friend Victor Engmark to keep all my dotfiles in a repository and then symlink them to .config/ on all the machines I use.
I live in Seattle and have two teenaged kids.
Every sentence of this article resonated very strongly with me and accurately describes much of the culture surrounding me and my family.
Seattle is brimming with “new money”. I think the article is describing a sort of quasi intellectualism that is common in circles of people who are more educated than some, and paid more than most.
I don't think money has much to do with it. My kids' social circle covers a wide socioeconomic range and this heavy use of psychology is pervasive across it.
Yes, the author is deciding How People Really Are by looking online, when the distortions of online discourse are also what she is complaining about.
On the other hand, most interactions I have with people are devoid of this kind of involved emotional inquiry. There is neither the non-psychological characterization of people ("he wears his heart on his sleeve") nor the psychological characterization ("he is anxiously attached"). I talk about these things with some of my family, some of my friends. Never with acquaintances. That is: in normal (not online) life people don't generally talk about having ADHD until they've reached a significant level of trust; and ADHD is about the easiest thing to talk about compared to any other issue.
Maybe this an artifact of the more reserved WASPish circles I run in. We're all very polite. We don't give each other nicknames. We don't gossip. We avoid making assumptions about a person's character. I don't think this serves us particularly well... and maybe therapy talk is our way of getting past this, couching these ideas in acceptably academic language. But without that language (and even with that language) we mostly just don't talk about it.
Not to discredit you, but I see it around me. One of my best friends is getting tired of his girlfriend always being “so introspective” and described what she does and journals about as what the author mentioned
As a child, my dad’s brother fell out of a bunk bed and got a traumatic brain injury that would kill him 15 years later.
My dad experienced real trauma but was told to bottle it up. After 30 years, he finally went to counseling and it was transformational for him.
By contrast, I had some mean fifth grade classmates who still live in my head in uncomfortable social situations…
Did my dad have trauma and need to put a “label” on it? Yep. Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...
As a society, we’re responding to the fact that a lot of our family and friends are living with the weight of a past which haunts them or psychological challenges which deeply affects their ability to relate to the world.
I think it’s ok to be overweight on therapy-talk. Kind of like how a little too much inflation is ok after a long period of zero inflation…
But I do think we should let younger people have more time before they get labeled/diagnosed. There’s a lot of 15 year olds who are just kinda weird…
Isn’t the point of labeling something as a “trauma” to be a signifier for the moment or behavior that affected you greatly and not something that meets an arbitrary level of awfulness, especially by way of comparison? Your father lost a brother, which is definitely certainly traumatic, but my grandfather lost a son. Does that equate to a greater trauma, therefore nullifying your father’s loss? I would say no! Comparing traumas means in my mind that nobody can ever heal because someone else will always have experienced something that was in some way worse.
Not all bad things are trauma. According to the APA: “Any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning. Traumatic events include those caused by human behavior (e.g., rape, war, industrial accidents) as well as by nature (e.g., earthquakes) and often challenge an individual’s view of the world as a just, safe, and predictable place. Any serious physical injury, such as a widespread burn or a blow to the head.”
It’s not useful to compare trauma, but not all negative things that happen are trauma.
And perhaps more importantly, not all trauma causes PTSD, which is a defined set of symptoms later in life.
How does a TBI kill someone 15 years later? Do you mean that it caused a suicide or was it a physiological sequela?
It can mean they suffered serious health problems for 15 years until a particularly bad seizure or some such took them. TBI can cause long-term conditions like epilepsy, physical disability, organ dysfunction, sleep problems etc.
I was very struck reading about about a mass-shooting "survivor" dying 20 years later and it being considered a murder. It sounded wrong but when reading the account of the terrible health problems they suffered every day until their death, I was left in no doubt it was not just murder but a far crueler one than those that died on the day.
That makes sense. I naively assumed that if someone had survived ~15 years they would more or less be likely to live as long as anyone else, but on reflection there's no real reason to believe such a positive thing.
> Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...
You might be selling yourself or others short with that notion of trauma that excludes what sounds like bullying.
I personally don't find traumatic impact to be determined by the severity of the event. If anything, it feels like I am built for the "big stuff" like family tragedy and during such events, where others have fallen to pieces, I can step up, I am more focussed and capable than normal. A stoic acceptance of such events comes naturally, it's life, it happens and I know I am needed.
In contrast, small events: rejection, failure, embarrassment, conflict etc. can be paralysing, debilitating, brain-breaking poison that I can't escape with out great suffering and effort.
The cases that cause me effort are expressly where the impact is irrational. Natural grief, sadness at misfortune etc. heal with time but irrational impact is where an inconsequential grit of sand has seized the entire gearbox and only grow without attention.
Something I noticed a few years back. If you click just ONE post/video/reel/advert that is even remotely related to ADHD on any platform with an algorithmic feed, where you have previously never clicked before... It will feed you content implying that that particular neurodivergence both applies to you and is the source of all your problems, for MONTHS, even if you never click another one.
The only other thing I've seen that behaves this way in the algorithm is far right-wing clickbait. Everything else just disappears after a few days if the algorithm detects you've lost interest.
I have a different perspective on this. I've always been interested in reading about the science of left handedness, because I am one. It's interesting to see how my brain is literally wired differently than others. How motivation and language processing are in different hemispheres of my brain compared to righties. But I never thought something was "wrong" with me, I just thought it was interesting.
Those who actually have diagnosed afflictions like autism and ADHD may also be interested in their brain wiring.
I think the trend comes from completely normal people who want to find an excuse to be a victim, which means they can defer responsibility of their lives to their "mental disorders," which of course has the effect of making highly insufferable people.
Its hard to charitably respond to this article. Having more taxonomy doesn't remove anything. You haven't lost anything. You are just angry about change.
when the taxonomy is weaponized then we have lost something. taxonomy that is used in earnest to improve and adapt is fine. when it used to promote victimization that begets the control of other people it's a net negative.
having labels shoved down my throat is not a life i find to be worth living nor one that i find to be in my own best interests , nobody is stopping you from disagreeing which makes me wonder what makes you so angry about it ;)
How are they being shoved down your throat? Language changes. Adapt or dont lmao.
language is a mere symbol that points to meaning , the point attempting to be made is that people are becoming lost in symbol
If 2 people use words, and the intended meaning is properly conveyed between them, they used the correct words. I feel like you might be getting lost in the symbolic.
well that's an ironic point for you to make considering it appears my point was entirely miscommunicated , I'll try again by saying that people are addicted to labels and identification which in my opinion is not in anyone's best interests , if it still seems to you that I am lost then this conversation is itself a bit lost too
Move out of the city, at least 30 minutes past the last bumper-to-bumper traffic area. Wait 2 years. All this will seem not just foreign but very strange, as in how do people possibly subject themselves to this sort of nonsense?
... So we're supposed to see ourselves as static objects, unable to change or without causes of our behavior?
It won't be long before we see our genes as something that happened to us. At some point there will be questions about why our parents didn't change them, or why the government lets some change or select their genes but not others.
I guess this essay rubbed me the wrong way. Where they see — I'm not sure what it is they see, maybe embracing responsibility or self-actualization — I see people wanting to improve themselves, understand.
Personality is labeling, it's just labeling without explanation or goal.
Haha it’s just the quest for uniqueness in a socially acceptable way combined with a desire to be protected by victimhood.
It’s pretty funny to see but it’s just kids being kids. The majority grow out of it and the truly mentally ill develop this Munchausen form.
Hopefully I’ve developed good tools to deal with it by the time my kids are older. The victim form is hard to break out of once you’re in.
The worst is there’s nothing to learn from these people. It’s like trying to learn sprinting from a guy who keeps yelling “As a peg leg, as a peg leg, …”
Useless. But it’s fine, I’ll pay your Medicaid.
For the love of god please touch grass! Nobody outside your chronically online circle lives like this!
Just earlier this evening I had not one but two commenters issue replies to the effect that successful deception in the public sphere, business and politics, is a marker of high intelligence. And that's just a depressingly direct example of what really seems to be a profoundly entrenched worldview "coming out of the closet" in the last decade or so especially.
The thing is, when you can't talk about seriously antisocial behavior with massively bad consequences for large numbers of people, when the real bad guys seem out of reach, all that angst has to go somewhere. And so everything is a disease or toxic behavior in the small, the family member or coworker has is a narcissist or a toxic personality, but like grinding everyone into poverty and pushing the world into avoidable war is just, how the world works.
If you put the small change shit in the swear jar where its always gone, nor you're asking very different questions about why things seem bad for everyone.
> but like grinding everyone into poverty and pushing the world into avoidable war is just, how the world works.
Even the Romans went to war and held slaves, so that seems true enough to me.
It's true that the fortunes of humanity go through better and worse seasons, but the fact that it's been winter before doesn't make me any less eager for spring.
Reminds me of the "How did you take that picture?" Reddit meme. Who is the observer when we conceptualize of ourselves as deconstructed beings? Occasional self-awareness and reflection can be insightful, but when will you get back into the cockpit and fly the plane?
90's culture had so much more emphasis on being legitimate (and its many self-defeating imitations). Being legitimate is something that cannot be attempted. Only self-evidence can ever be cool. Only existing as the actualized output and never its abstracted model inputs can be genuine. Through that lens, one's own dignity demands not deconstructing. You should observe and react to what you learn, but whatever fractures are incurred must come back together and be owned. Otherwise you are pretending not to be the person in the cockpit, not the person flying the plane. It's a lack of responsibility. You will not do or do not. You will "try" because you are not in control. You will never be cool.
The engineer wants to isolate pieces of the system. Play the game again to study the situation, learn the pattern, and overcome the error. This is where it applies that no man crosses the same river twice. When people say, "life has no reset button" it does not simply mean that there are consequences but also that that every moment always remains, flowing incessantly, regardless of how it is scrutinized and analyzed to fit into a maze of dots and figures. We cannot own things by going backward in time to try again. Winning the game after many iterations is never cool. The losses must be owned or the pilot is merely creating a lie that they themselves understand while holding a result out to others as evidence of their coolness. It is trying too hard. It is illegitimacy, and its self-knowledge will seek to pull back the curtains on itself so that the pilot will not betray the plane.
Living intentionally constructed is a thought that must itself be forgotten. The idea is a map. Supposed externalized awareness of the being who rides in the skull cannot exist. It is a construction, and once the construction is used, it must be discarded as a map that was used to achieve some perspective. We can remember things far away. We can catalog and connect patterns over time, but the ALU cannot look at itself as lines in memory. The ALU lacks any self-description from which to feign deconstructed awareness beyond control bits that are necessarily less information than the registers, program, and data under computation. It all must vanish to a fixed-point un-calculation.
It's an aesthetic with some jagged edges. You'll always move forward based on what you believe because there can be nothing else, and if you are wrong, you will be wrong. You must own it. There are no outs besides simply admitting mistakes. But what is the opposite of dissociated? Is it worth it to live in your skin? Is it worth it to forget the distances that do not exist between yourself and the controls?
Labels are incredibly simplistic and reductive. Try to compress the entire written works of Shakespeare into a single word. You can, though it would not do his command of the language justice.
Moreover there is the problem of ensuring that when two parties exchange a single label, that label maps to the same referent or construct in the mind of both parties; otherwise you end up in a situation where two people use the same word to refer to different things, yet still think they are both talking about the same thing. Confusion at this layer leads to Tower of Babel-esque effects.
Language is powerful; in a Sapir-Whorfian kind of way, it determines the primitives out of which we compose larger, more complex ideas, but more importantly it also provides a serialization format that allows us to record thoughts and revisit them at a future time. Such thoughts can also include thoughts on ourselves, who we have been, and where we are going; the collection of such thoughts is one's narrative, and "narratization" [0], the process of creating that story of who we are, is an essential characteristic of human consciousness [0].
Subversion of the language we use to describe the self, and the media through which those languages are recorded, is thus altering the life narratives of large groups of people. "Therapy-speak," or overly medicalized language that originates from a fundamentally materialist worldview, does not treat of the existence of a rich inner psychological (i.e. "metaphysical") life, much less offer the terminology to describe it adequately. This therapy-speak gets recorded in our social media as a hyperreal [1] depiction of ourselves, and as one media scholar put it, "we become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." We create this therapized narrative of ourselves, and thereafter this therapized narrative shapes us. The therapy narrative becomes the totality of our self-concept, and, lacking any language to describe the inner life, dispenses with the inner life entirely. Now there is only the label and the physical matter of fact, qualia be damned.
The inner life, after all, is not scientific; it is not an objective phenomenon, nor can the qualia of everyday conscious experience really be adequately quantified in a way that truly captures its character. Science never intended to treat of such matters of the psyche, or the mind, or the soul, whichever of the three terms you would choose to describe the one subject under discussion. Traditionally, such questions would have fallen to spirituality and mysticism; and, I have a suspicion that the sudden interest in "identities" of all stripes is really a resurrection of the old language of souls and psyche into a more modern, secularized context, as a pushback against overly fundamentalist materialist worldviews that do not admit of the existence of any part of the human outside the biological facts of its genetics and chromosomes.
Modern psychology has lost touch with the rich storehouse of symbolic and mystical language used to describe matters of psyche for aeons: that of gods, and demons, and spirits.
[0] Jaynes 1976
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
If you're getting downvoted you still have a personality.
I feel this is another misplaced conception based on the Golden Age Fallacy.
"dig deep enough and you will disappear"
This has been a common trope since at least the 90s among conservatives.
The author's other post is fanning the "porn addiction" moral panic, and they're subscribed to someone who says that atheism is bad and only Christians can save the world.
None of this really matters to their argument of course, but it does give you a sense of their motivation.
Their argument, of course, is nonsense and is far outside the consensus of research psychologists and medicine.
Strongly agree, this feels very close to gee-shucks-weren't-things-better-in-the-olden-days regressive history-revisionist trad content.
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We've banned this and related accounts. Please don't wast your time with spam like this on HN.
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I see you also have your word-knife handy.
places mine back in its sheath
I'm not sure this one lady having plastic surgery was the point of the blog post.
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"mostly to flex and show some innate superiority of the speaker"
Reminds me of stuff like "Poe's Law" or "Dunning-Kruger effect"
Welcome to Net://Anchor, you fools. There’s no escape.
https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/net-anchor-has-arri...
> Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.
Could this be because modern women have far more social expectations placed on them than boomer men did, and are thus struggling generally speaking more than boomer men had to?
I think the question is notable though — there’s having the challenge, and then there’s considering it as part of your identity. Personally I wouldn’t; my various issues are just things I’ve got going on, but I don’t think of myself in those terms. Maybe a cause for parts of my “identity”, but not actually a part of it
>Could this be because modern women have far more social expectations placed on them than boomer men did, and are thus struggling generally speaking more than boomer men had to?
No. "Mental health" concepts have just become prominent in the mythos of young women. Everybody has their struggles and competing over who has the most is not a productive area of discussion. Contemporary young women really like talking about mental health and have their own culturally shared version of psychology diagnosis and treatment. It's not necessarily any better or worse than any previous as psychology has always had a tough time with rigor.
It's definitely a fashion. I sympathise with those who legitimately have these conditions and are dismissed as attention-seeking.
Given how the Boomer men have turned out, maybe recognizing flaws within yourself is not such a bad idea.
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LOL speak for yourself- if you're American maybe. Rest of the world, not so much. I deeply resent these articles which claim to speak for everyone but irresponsibly push destructive narratives like this. Like a least have a discussion before shilling your depressing viewpoint as the truth.
Well no, I'm Australian and I agree with the post.
Also, on the same coin who are you to say the rest of the world is no different, or is.
Perhaps the better response is simply that people shouldn't draw broad conclusions, as neither I or you can do that for anyone, including on behalf of the rest of the world outside of the US.
the west exhibits these traits moreso than other cultures , the west also has a pervasive influence on other cultures , the topic at hand is an incredibly important issue and focusing on the american god complex instead of the perversion of our souls contributes to the problem by distracting from it