As an adult who struggles with ADHD that can be severely impairing, I’ve learned quite a few tricks from TikTok’s ADHD advocates. It’s definitely a coin with two sides.
Edit: I’ve also learned to accept things about me that I can’t change. For example, I have a better outcome if I plan to be distracted rather than trying to fight my way through distraction.
I'll echo the sentiment. I was unaware that thing I saw as 'normal' were more on the 'adhd' side of the spectrum than the 'normal' side. Learning that I was simultaneously not alone and 'rare' has been quite helpful. The reddit for adhd memes have been fun to go through.
The socks one was a childhood fight in our family constantly. I hated certain socks and my siblings loved them. I can remember my dad berating me in a walmart parking lot about my sock preferences and still associate walmart with parental shame to this day. The way the inner sewn lining on the toes got occasionally stuck on my toenails when walking. They still gives me the creeps and heeby-jeebies, just these little mind grabbing zings with every 'wrong' step.
The sock thing always annoyed me but not to the level you describe.I do have this same thing with bathing in the ocean and getting sea plants stuck around my toes. And the way they'll brush against your skin out of nowhere while swimming. Utter revulsion.
I personally hate seeing all the ADHD stuff, I feel like most of those people are faking/wrong as well. But I don't know, maybe I just have ADHD? I just feel like they are always like "this is life with ADHD" and I'm like "what? that's just life? isn't that how everyone is?"
I think a counter argument that makes a lot of sense to me is that our modern society is so novel, interconnected, and overstimulating, that it makes sense the prevalence of ADHD and depression have increased massively, especially compared to the populations of 50 years ago.
I feel like many disorders are just a reaction to environmental factors. The brain is insanely plastic and can learn useful adaptations to survive very unnatural psychological environments. It's basically just a machine learning model being trained on bad data, the model hardware is typically fine, but the weights are going to be very messed up from only learning on atypical situations. Conditions like anxiety are productive if you're living through a famine or war. IMO therapy is basically just learning to down-weight the shitty data and up-weight the healthy data.
Another counter-argument is that interest in pop-psychology has risen over the years and that rise also aligns with abuses of psychological labels. Maybe some subjects should not have casual interests.
I'm diagnosed with ADHD and I don't like reading about it on the Internet either. People seem to enjoy making their diagnosis part of their personality rather than learning to manage it and get on with their lives. I don't think it is healthy to stare at a light-up screen and dwell on your mental issues.
I didn't get diagnosed until my late 30s. It's always worth checking. I managed to carve out some level of success despite, but it was not without a lot of suffering.
If you think you might have ADHD go see someone who specialises in it and get it checked out. I was certain that I had it when I was 20, but my local doctor told me I was "trying to get out of work". Top bloke. Nearly 20 years later I'm vindicated with a diagnosis. Get it checked out!
Devil's advocate: I'm sure the people learning about their non-existent dissociative identity disorders also feel as though they're learning useful information and tricks.
That being said, I'm in no way implying that the internet can't contain useful information.
Sure, that’s the other side of that coin I was talking about. :-)
Personally, I suspect that people who incorrectly self-diagnose are desperate and grasping at straws. They misdiagnose themselves because proper diagnostics are really hard to get in for.
However, I would be willing to bet that people who misdiagnose themselves with DID still have some other underlying mental health condition that they are misunderstanding.
I think popular cultural conceptions of what a "diagnosis" is are kind of weird. It seems more like people categorizing themselves with immutable labels rather than accepting that it's just a way to refer to/characterize your subjective experience.
I remember talking with one guy who was genuinely sad when his psychiatrist told him she might need to revisit his autism diagnosis and she thinks there might actually be some other class of diagnoses that fit his condition better. You would think she told him he had cancer or something. It helped him a lot to know that there was a box he could fit into and not having a box was distressing for him. It had him feeling unmoored and unstable.
Now after reevaluating she did end up settling back on autism and his relief was palpable.
Having a label gives you context to understand what is happening. It gives you a path forward with your treatment. It gives you access to documentation, support groups, and a community who are dealing with the same things.
Changing a diagnosis means you likely lose all of these and have to start over.
Then there is medication that can significantly change how your mind works. I likely have long-lasting damage to my nervous system from the anti-psychotic I need to function.
Maybe they could at least learn that dissociative identity disorder and schizophrenia are not the same thing. Then something good could come out of it after all.
I've done a lot of thinking about this issue, and there's two topics I notice. First, disability has become a status symbol in certain circles. Second, the huge rise in self-diagnosed disability.
On the latter point, these kids are acting out these disabilities with such sincerity and 24/7 consistency that they effectively are disabled for all practical purposes, it's just that the diagnosis might be different than the one they self-diagnose themselves with. I think the TikTok videos are a symptom, what's the cause?
I think the cause may be wanting a way to opt out of the pressure cooker that modern life is.
I'm disabled (I have MS), and the one benefit to it is that I have a 'get out of social expectations free' button I can push if things get too difficult. If I'm not feeling well, it's acceptable for me to cancel plans, call off work, make sub-optimal decisions (putting my health above my earning capacity, etc.).
In short, disabled people are allowed to be fallible, have needs, and make mistakes. I think that the kids feel under too much pressure and want a release valve for it. An invisible disability gives them a 'this is too hard, I need out' button. Disabled people are also given some empathy, and that is at a major premium right now.
I mean, it's pretty common in general for mental disabilities to get diagnosed after failing to live up to another persons expectations as well. It's not totally unreasonable to think "Man, I/They seem to be unable to do something. Maybe I'm/They're disabled?"
>I think the TikTok videos are a symptom, what's the cause?
Why don't you think TikTok videos specifically (and social media generally) are not a cause? At this point, we know the addictive and viral effects of social media, especially as it pertains to teenagers and kids (and especially teenage girls).
I was listening to a cbc program about autism on adults the other day. One person being interviewed stated she "identified as autistic". She had done some online test that said she had 70 out of 100 autism traits or something.
There's people who are like this for purely practical reasons. It's either hard for them to get diagnosed, or they don't see any benefit to it.
There's people who are more like this for more ideological reasons. Some people feel doctors underdiagnose the poor, women, and minorities, and consequently, don't know why they should be obligated to fight an uphill battle to get diagnosed from a system not treating people like them correctly.
In any case, a fair amount of these "I identify as autistic after taking an online quiz" types actually are autistic. So my policy is to give any such person the benefit of the doubt, at least at first.
Let's be honest, here. Psychologists use preponderance of evidence based on both visible and self-reported traits to form diagnoses also.
Psychology is not engineering. They're not diagnosing based on log files or material stress reports. They're using precisely the same criteria and weighting as these silly online tests do.
>I think the TikTok videos are a symptom, what's the cause?
We celebrate failure and not success. As a simple example no one gets praised for not being an addict, but we keep hearing about the stunningly brave addicts who became barely functioning members of society.
Young people on the internet have been doing this since at least the 90s, though it's definitely become more popular (mainly due to internet culture spreading to normal society). Just think back to the LiveJournal/MySpace era - it was the same exact thing back then. All the kids that I knew who did this have grown up to be completely normal adults.
There is a comment like this any time TikTok comes up, but I find it hard to believe that (to exaggerate) everything has and will always be the same. Doesn't the fact that being on a personal phone that children have access to most of the time distinguish newer social networks (Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok) from it's predecessors. Doesn't the availability of better network connections allow for more easily addictive media have any influence? And let's not forget the ability to optimise the feed to exactly the stimuli that a user picks up on?
TikTok is different, and that has nothing to do with China or whatever other cultural/political topic. It is the amalgamation that results many years of optimising user interaction and dependence on social networks as an advertising platform. While in some aspects it is just a repackaged version of what has been there before, we shouldn't just dismiss the previous attempts as harmless, just because their dosage was less.
I think there's a fallacy underlying this that if the warning is the same, the threat must be the same.
Yes, people have been saying "beware the influence of technology on children" for decades, maybe centuries. That doesn't prove that the warnings are false. And even if the past warnings were false for past technology, that doesn't prove that the current warnings are false for current technology.
"People have been saying that forever" is not a rebuttal of "TikTok is bad for kids". It's not even close. It's basically DH2 on Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
The difference is that hyperpowerful social media algorithms have weaponised it. Kids in the 90s had to actively seek out whatever propaganda or whatnot that they wanted to read about. If you were a pissed-off goth kid wanting to read how to bomb something, you had to genuinely work to find shit like that.
These days, you linger on an auto-playing video too long (that is quite possibly intentionally engineered to bait you in) and suddenly the algorithm gets a lock on you and absolutely rams more of that shit down your throat.
It's not even just propaganda either. The exact same cycle is what's at play here with preying on children's weaknesses. Mental health, body image, etc. etc. can all be weaponised the same way. And kids are espeically susceptable to it given the age they tend to start getting on social media is precisely also the age where they feel most socially awkward and trying to find their identity in the world.
> If you were a pissed-off goth kid wanting to read how to bomb something, you had to genuinely work to find shit like that.
Every pissed off goth kid I knew in the 90s had a copy of the Anarchist cook book on a 1.44mb floppy disk.
We probably burned more than our fair share of holes in our backyards, but it wasn't access to information that was limiting us doing harm to our peers. If anything I think it was having a group of like-minded people to burn holes in your backyard with that ultimately allowed us all to feel less alienated. We may have felt individually ostracized, but found camaraderie in trying to put out the homemade napalm fire in the back yard before someone's parents got back or the neighbors called the fire department.
I get more worried about teens today because I no longer see packs of kids getting in trouble together. The only kids I know that ended up in real trouble where the ones that eventually got alienated from that pack as well.
> I get more worried about teens today because I no longer see packs of kids getting in trouble together. The only kids I know that ended up in real trouble where the ones that eventually got alienated from that pack as well.
Spending time physically around other people fires off a lot of nice neurotransmitters, even for people who are introverted and who would rather not be spending a lot of time around other people.
One figures COVID lock downs would have hammered this point into the global consciousness.
Of course too isolated of a group and things get super weird and everything can quickly go off the rails.
Sure, but my point is that you had to actively go out and find it. You didn't get an in-lined feed of social media 'suggested posts' that gradually took you from being angry at the machine to some radicalised position.
My broader point is that you can replace that scenario with just about any subgroup with an extremist representation and it holds. Incels are a prime example. QAnon too. The list goes on. The people who end up extreme in those viewpoints don't start there, they get taken on a journey to there though lots of very marginal successive influences.
A social media algorithm is purpose-built to achieve that because it turns out that is the exact same pattern as 'you hovered over a cute cat video once, so we guess you like cats, so we're going tto bombard you with cute cat vids to drive up your engagement'.
I think another part of the problem is that that social media feed is ultimately still alienating.
There's a world of difference between bonding with friend over how stupid and mean other kids are, blowing up your back yard together and laughing about it that night and the tiktok world of just getting angry over a constant stream of other alienated people screaming into the void.
Without the companionship you never really get catharsis, just an endless cycle of building up rage and furthering your own sense of alienation.
>Sure, but my point is that you had to actively go out and find it. You didn't get an in-lined feed of social media 'suggested posts' that gradually took you from being angry at the machine to some radicalised position.
That used to be called talking to friends. If anything social media is less dangerous because the _really_ illegal stuff is not something they can show.
Clockwork Orange, the Destructors and Kids were a lot less fiction than people would like to believe today.
Definitely not the same exact thing. There were not nearly as many "influencers" that have a degree in Google pitching mental health seminars. MySpace didn't have an endless addictive feed, it was literally just a modern address book to chat with your group of friends and perhaps follow your favorite band. Their business model relied on traditional desktop display ads (header/sidebar/footer), as mobile web wasn't even around back then.
Tik Tok is the reason I've been told several times I have ADHD. Pretty sure I don't! This phenomenon is so infuriating. The only half-convincing defense I've heard of it is that it could, maybe, theoretically, disseminate information about illnesses to people who don't have the money to see a professional, but the other effects are so much worse it doesn't seem worth it.
Tiktok and pop-culture generally make me very skeptical on "ADHD", the so-called "spectrum" and "neurodivergence" generally.
I'm not saying these things don't exist, but much of it seems very difficult to falsify -- which needs to be the gold standard of determining these sort of things; e.g. "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"
We can't seem to have a discussion about neurological disorders without someone denying the existence - while trying to appear like they are not - of some of the best explored neurological disorders based on some fuzzy skepticism that displays they have read none of the vast swaths of scientific studies that exist on the topic.
> By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?
Easy: is the severity of the ADHD and Autistic traits you exhibit low enough that they do not impair your ability to function on a day-to-day basis in society? If not, you don't have ADHD or Autism.
What does not impaired look like compared to impaired?
- Struggling to focus on something for minutes or hours, vs. being unable to concentrate on a task.
- Occasionally struggling with overcoming mental hurdles to perform a task vs frequently being incapable - yes, literally incapable, no matter the reward or punishment - of performing a task.
- Focusing on a task you enjoy while still being aware of the state of your body - keeping reasonably hydrated, fed, and use of the facilities - vs. not being aware.
- Occasionally forgetting words - like "watch" - or names, vs frequently.
- An occasionally compromised working memory (typically with an outside trigger like alcohol or lack of sleep), compared to a permanently compromised working memory. Compromised being able to store 4 items in your short term memory when the average for the populace is 7.
- Occasionally forgetting that items and people exist if they are not in your direct sight, versus constantly forgetting, where constantly means remembering is the exception instead of the norm.
One final note - ADHD is not some new disorder unique to the TikTok generation. ADHD has been formally recognized and studied as far back as 1902 by Sir George Frederick Still.
>Easy: is the severity of the ADHD and Autistic traits you exhibit low enough that they do not impair your ability to function on a day-to-day basis in society? If not, you don't have ADHD or Autism.
Easy: define "function on a day-to-day basis in society"
They kinda went into that in the rest of the comment after what you quoted but if you need more there's a couple books that contain this information too.
Well the problem with ADHD is the same problem of pretty much all psychological disorders - diagnosis is only ever really fuzzily falsifiable.
You get diagnosed with it if you tick enough of the boxes of behaviours/dysfunctions associated with it - you can fall short of a diagnosis by one behaviour and still be in a very similar condition to a diagnosed person, or tick enough boxes but fall short based on the diagnosing physicians judgement of severity.
The interesting thing is that despite the condition being composed of a wide gamut of seemingly unrelated behaviour, ~90% of people with ADHD respond extremely well to the same treatment - stimulant medication. We also observed notable neurological similarities in aggregate among people with the condition, but not enough to have much utility as a diagnostic tool.
> The interesting thing is that despite the condition being composed of a wide gamut of seemingly unrelated behaviour, ~90% of people with ADHD respond extremely well to the same treatment - stimulant medication.
This is constantly presented as some sort of ultimate validation of these disorders and every time I read it I'm absolutely baffled. Stimulants used in ADHD medication improve focus and productivity for almost everyone, the fact that they also do it for people with chronic focus/attention issues should be surprising to no one... They're literally performance enhancing drugs.
There's a wide spectrum of symptoms that are very effectively treated by stimulants in people with ADHD apart from focus/productivity, including anxiety, insomnia, working memory, and emotional regulation. Outside of treating ADHD stimulants will more typically make all of these things worse, not better.
The most unusual aspect of stimulant treatment for ADHD is for the hyperactive and combined types - stimulants reduce hyperactivity and impulsive behaviour, and people with ADHD on low dose stimulants are less likely to engage in reckless behaviour or develop problems with substance abuse - not things you'd ever say about stimulants and the average person.
You certainly don't get too many neurotypical people finding they can finally nap once they're on low-dose amphetamines.
This is not true at all. LocalPCGuy made a great comment refuting this. Brain scans also show the unique difference between someone with and without ADHD and what medication does to both brains.
You'd think I was on 60mg of amphetamine if I wasn't on my 2x 30mg of amphetamine a day. I'm scatterbrained, chatty, impulsive, annoying, angry and a whole lot more without my meds.
I can credibly claim stimulant treatment for adhd saved my life so I'm not at all skeptical of its value in this context.
But doesn't everyone respond extremely well to stimulants? They're some of the most common recreational drugs and neurotypical people seek them out for performance enhancement on cognitive tasks.
> doesn't everyone respond extremely well to stimulants?
Not really - despite their popularity (as you say, heavily sought after), studies have shown that there really isn't a significant cognitive boost for neurotypical folks that take these stimulants[1]. While they have a significant effect for those with ADHD because their brain is not providing the chemicals properly, and these drugs enable that. They aren't boosting cognitive abilities for those with ADHD, they are fixing a problem so that folks with ADHD can think and focus properly.
Didn't spend a ton of time looking up the sources I've read this in, but here is one:
> Studies support that stimulants enhance attention, memory, self-regulation and executive function in individuals with ADHD. Recent research, however, has found that many college students without ADHD report misusing prescription stimulants, primarily to enhance their cognitive abilities.
> ...
> Overall, the present findings indicate dissociation between the effects of Adderall on activation and neurocognition, and more importantly, contrary to common belief, Adderall had little impact on neurocognitive performance in healthy college students.
Interesting, their use for that is so common I assumed it was a real effect. People who use them that way definitely think it helps. Prescription stimulants are also pretty powerful mood boosters though so I imagine it's very easy to assume you're smarter while on them just because they make you feel great.
Anyway thanks for the info, definitely upends an assumption I'd had for years.
I had the same assumption for a long time, that's why I share the info. Plus, as someone recently diagnosed with ADHD as an adult (and yes, things all clicked, plus family history, and for the doubters - it was a 6 hour long testing process), I feel like it's important to have correct information about medication out there.
I was a biology major several decades ago now, which is a major dominated by extremely competitive pre-med students trying to get into Harvard Medical School. Taking speed during finals week was extremely common. I only tried it once personally, and I can't say it helped me concentrate better, because I could already concentrate perfectly fine to begin with. But I could not concentrate for 16-20 hours a day, every day for an entire week. With speed, you can do that.
Yea stimulants probably don't really offer much of a performance boost to an already healthy brain - but if your brain is already defective from fatigue they can keep you going beyond what's humanly possible.
The Germans didn't ply their soldiers with speed in WWII because it improved their reflexes or their tactics - they did it so a soldier could fight when his brain would otherwise be mush from not sleeping in days. Anyone can benefit from just having more usable hours in a day.
Is it fair to say that stimulants having a significant impact is an indicator for having ADHD? If it wasn't basically impossible to see a psychiatrist where I live, I'd try to get tested, because Armodafinil has completely changed my life.
> Is it fair to say that stimulants having a significant impact is an indicator for having ADHD?
Honestly I'd say it's the opposite. Stimulants barely touch the sides with me, even the non-prescribed types a younger version of me may or may not have dabbled in were pretty ineffective.
This is the same so far for me - even mild stimulants like caffeine (I know, it's a different underlying chemical process) have less effect - I could drink coffee right before bed without much/any issue. And still trying to find a stimulant that helps with ADHD myself (only on my 2nd one (Ritalin, Adderall), and pretty mild doses so far). But that is also pretty common for me - I've always had fairly high drug resistance, as it were (need higher doses to feel any affect), so I don't know if that is at all specific to ADHD and those medications.
I had read about how stimulants don't do much for the average person and that much of it is placebo. I know they do a lot for me -- well, Modafinil/Armodafinil does, I haven't tried any other because I'm so happy with these.
I feel lucky I have something that works, I don't mind not having a diagnosis. It'd make sourcing them easier and free, but at $2 a pill and with the multiplier effect it has on my productivity, that doesn't even register.
I hope you've found other ways to improve your experience.
That sucks, hopefully you'll find some that work better.
It used to be kind of like that for me, though me feeling guilty to let people down usually made me fight to barely make it. It's day and night now, I just sit down in the morning and get to work. It helps that they let me hunt squirrels as long as I make enough progress on the main topics, but even things where the work is super boring you just need to put the hours in is now just "okay, works for me" where it would have been a week of agonizing start, work 30 minutes, pause for 3 hours. I've been more productive in the past two years than I have been in the ten years before that.
I was in the beginning and did it only once or twice a week. At some point I tested taking it daily and found that it didn't lose its effect. I've since switched to Armodafinil and have been taking it daily for the past 30 months or so. I'm getting a check up every year and my doctor says I'm fine (well, as fine as a fat guy can be).
The only side-effect is that I feel like I perceive lights and noises as annoying at a lower threshold. I've had that before as well so I'm pretty used to blacking out any LEDs, but it seems to have been increased. Don't know whether that would lessen if I took a break because I haven't for more than a few days.
I do not. I had a psychiatrist years ago who insisted I was ADHD. I was also on heavy dose of Zoloft. He prescribed Adderall XR. Took it for months. Did nothing. Years later, I've done a ton of transformative work on myself. I realized it (the supposed condition) was mostly about me not wanting to do what was in front of me. I've tried taking both standard Adderall and XR in the recent past and it does absolutely zero.
Possibly related - my PCP gave me a genetic test and it showed that I have some gene configuration that essentially makes me immune to the effects of caffeine. Which makes sense, because I have to drink a boatload to feel anything from it.
I’m on stimulants for idiopathic hypersomnia. While they give me energy and motivation, my mind is significantly more scattered when I’m on them. I take Vyvanse daily but have Adderall as a booster and the latter in particular does that to me. I certainly didn’t have the “oh, this is how my brain is supposed to work” moment that I’ve read a lot of people with ADHD having when first taking them.
I’ve also heard that some people with ADHD sleep better on stimulants, which definitely isn’t the case for everyone else.
> But doesn't everyone respond extremely well to stimulants?
I wish lmao. I'm on meds and while I can see a difference between non-meds and now I could easily go back to bed after they kick in and sleep the entire day away. Still doing the dosage dance with the doc.
Someone who didn't need them would likely be a little hyper if not bouncing off the walls depending on the dosage.
That sounds like maybe an adhd thing? Not trying to diagnose you but from the comment it's not clear whether that's what they're prescribed for.
I definitely get a noticeable feeling of calm/steadiness/"settling" as my stimulants kick in, and yes it would be very easy to go back to bed at that point. My understand is that this is not a typical part of the stimulants experience for people without adhd.
But by "responds well" I meant that they improve focus, energy, motivation, and mood even in non-adhd people, not that they have the same effects. Other comments have addressed that this is at least somewhat a misconception on my part though.
People having these issues is real, it's the severity that's the question. I don't think it's a matter of someone being neurodivergent or not - it's that there is likely a bell curve type distribution on a lot of psychological attributes (how long you can concentrate as an example) and the people at the lowest end of the curve might require some sort of intervention in order to live happy productive lives. There are also going to be a far larger group of people who are merely below average and who find education in particular harder than their peers but who don't qualify for any medical or psychological intervention.
I suspect it's this latter group that social media diagnosis appeals to most - if you're not doing as well as you (or your parents) would like then normally you just have to feel stupid/worthless. These (self) diagnosis provide a level of explanation (and therefore comfort).
I self-diagnosed myself with mild ADD many years ago and even self-medicated (which in terms of productivity worked well). But meeting people with severe ADHD made me reconsider my alleged issues - sure, I can't concentrate for as long as I'd like but these people couldn't sit still for 15 seconds.
There are standard diagnostic tests to falsify whether you have ADHD, that give a binary result as to whether the patient has ADHD/ADD. It is very easy to take one of these tests and determine whether you experience the symptoms
There were rampant rumors in my HS and college of people memorizing a list of answers to get Adderall to help them study better, and this was 10+ years ago.
Part of this is just giving labels to what happens when we are glued to screens and addictive apps and internet media, isn't it? It strikes me as something that is partly happening to me too, I can't really put down the addictive medias available. Of course things in professional or personal life may suffer when you have an addiction. Of course medication could help one control it, etc.
To a certain extent maybe. I have adhd. Was diagnosed as an adult by several professionals. Not self diagnosed. There’s a difference between “this media is addicting and I can’t stop” and “I went into hyper focus for 6 hours and I forgot to pick up my kids”. In fairness I also have a hard time with consuming things online, but I also can completely forget the world around me. It’s not just a time management deficit. I have no concept of time-passed in that state.
It's quite straightforward, albeit involved (as in technically easy, but takes time) to falsify. You have to work with a licensed medical professional who will evaluate traits, strengths, and difficulties, and to what extent they impact functioning as a person in society. Basically, are they "well-adjusted"? If they make it through school, college and adulthood without a ton of struggling, therapy, possibly meds, you can almost certainly rule out neurodivergence (at the very least, it won't be clinically significant )
A common criticism of the diagnostics for ADHD (and Autism, for that matter) is that it ignores the person’s internal experience.
I was formally diagnosed with ADHD in 2017. I’d been visibly quite successful in that time, but at the expense of my own mental health because I was fighting a constant uphill battle. ADHD was a set of shackles I didn’t even know I had.
Agreed. I was finally diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago. I had been self mediating with coffee and adrenaline for several decades. But I was, by all accounts, successful.
Just not happy or healthy or as successful as I could have been.
There are clinicians who believe that if you are not "below average" or "experiencing extreme distress" then, by definition, you don't have a disorder. Because I have a well paying job, some clinicians would not categorize me has having ADHD because I'm operating at an "above average" capacity.
We're just reacting to what appears to be agreement with that approach, even if unintentional.
> We're just reacting to what appears to be agreement with that approach, even if unintentional.
Agreed. I'm addressing precisely the point in GP comment "neurodiversity is not a falsifiable diagnosis", which is something I feel quite strongly about. Other issues in this complex space that I think also are worth being discussed but I am not trying to get into in this thread:
- overdiagnosis of ADHD/ASD
- underdiagnosis of ADHD/ASD in certain subgroups (especially women/NB, minority, and underprivileged groups)
- ADHD/ASD are/are not on the same spectrum
- drug-seeking behavior for access to stimulant meds
- overmedication, undermedication, and incorrect diagnosis leading to iatrogenic harm (eg giving antipsychotics to a "bipolar" individual whose "bipolar" is realdy emotional lability due to ADHD/ASD
Each one of those topics I could talk about at length. They are related, but distinct.
I think we are on the same page. Not being confrontational, but please re-read my comment, specifically:
> If they make it through school, college and adulthood without a ton of struggling
You wrote:
> but at the expense of my own mental health because I was fighting a constant uphill battle.
Gp wrote:
> "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"
I'm using "well-adjusted" here to mean like, naturally well-adjusted - you are able to complete life activities without constantly having to learn strategies and fight the good fight just to do what comes much more freely to neurotypicals.
I.e. being able to socialize well doesn't disqualify you from ASD, because masking is a thing.
A proper licensed professional will ask the right kind of questions to ascertain this. If you are successful but feel like if you stop struggling for a moment, that's a strong indicator.
I reread and I think I pulled the trigger a bit early on that one. I advocate for myself and I recognize that I can premature to the defense at times. :-) I’m sorry!
This is so easy to game. People read the diagnostic criteria online and echo it back to their doctor for a prescription. Their proof of needing adjustment can be little more than pointing to their grades and attributing their less than stellar academic performance to the list of ADHD symptoms they memorized online. EZ way to get yourself a stimulant subscription. This was particularly common during the pandemic when you could do it entirely online without actually meeting a doctor in person. I saw a lot of people explicitly advocating this sort of deception to get stimulant prescriptions; all described it as very easily done.
I tend to think those drugs should be legal OTC, so part of me thinks "so what?" But the problem is that right now it isn't legal OTC, so the system is giving a leg up to anybody willing to lie to a doctor, while honest people have to make do with lesser PEDs like caffeine.
I'm responding to the claim that it's easy for doctors to falsify a false claim of ADHD from somebody who's drug seeking and has been coached online to say the right things to the doctor. This doesn't seem to be the case.
ADHD may be real, but doctors seem to have a hard time distinguishing people who actually have it from people who just want the drugs and know what to tell the doctor because they watched a bunch of instructional videos about this sort of deception on tiktok.
The 'test' for ADHD boils down to "evaluat[ing] traits, strengths, and difficulties, and to what extent they impact functioning as a person in society. Basically, are they "well-adjusted"?" It's not as though the evaluation is some chemical analysis in a lab, anybody so inclined can be coached to pass this evaluation by telling their doctor the right things.
And without any data on drug seeking behavior it’s a moot point, could be such a small percent of people who make it past detection, have no criminal records, pass 6 month urine screen that MUST show negative to a panel of illicit drugs + positive for amphetamine markers. Doctors are afraid of losing their licenses for prescribing controlled substances without covering their ass (e.g. illicit drug panel screen) and err on the side of caution.
It’s hard to make it past these hurdles and aren’t on other controlled substances, you are still rolling the dice of getting blacklisted in their systems if you ever get caught selling or testing positive for weed or opioids, etc.
> "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"
You are talking about the opposite detection criteria, false positive vs true negative. I was speaking to "neurodivergence is not falsifiable". You are speaking to "one can fake neurodivergence, esp. to get prescriptions", which, of course, that is definitely a thing.
Of course, if you fake to the doctor that you don't have symptoms, well duh, of course they won't diagnose you. That also has nothing to do with falsifiability. You won't get a correct diagnosis by lying - doctors aren't psychics.
At its very most reduced form, falsifying neurodivergence as a hypothesis means basically demonstrating a single counter-example exists. Can we find someone who made it through high school, learned good study habits on their own, did average to well in college, held down a job, paid the bills, folded their close, made friends and raised a family, all without counseling, special classes, medication, self-medication, masking, hyper-extending themselves (beyond just "working hard"), or burning themselves out just to make ends meet? I think so. Neurodivergence, ADHD, and ASD are falsifiable diagnoses - a true negative result can be obtained.
I think the whole point of the term neordivergent is imply that many mental disorders aren't impairments in the sense of stop you from living life, but are different ways of perceiving. For example, I know an eye surgeon who was diagnosed with ADHD in his forties. He is incredibly successful and by all external measures well adjusted. This was because he had developed a set of very successful coping strategies to make up for his lack of executive function. I agree that it's pretty easy to falsify, I just think you have to actually ask the patient about how they experience life to do so.
This opens an interesting line of inquiry. Is ADHD simply the lack of adequate coping mechanisms? Is ADHD somehow the "default" state of a human mind, and the effect of maturing into a particular psychosocial niche that some level of coping mechanisms are required to "function" "correctly" per socially constructed standards?
> Is ADHD somehow the "default" state of a human mind, and the effect of maturing into a particular psychosocial niche that some level of coping mechanisms are required to "function" "correctly" per socially constructed standards?
IMHO, yes, but actually, no? ADHD is marked by executive dysregulation. An immature brain (they say the brain does not mature until the 20s) also shows poor executive control. However, ADHD is detectable as certain processing difficulties within an age cohort.
Similarly, I don't think it's a lack of coping mechanisms. It's very heritable, even controlling for upbringing/habits (I'm adopted by very obviously non-ADHD and disciplined parents - I did not pick up basically any of their coping skills naturally and had to develop my own).
I think it's almost entirely congenital - between genes and gestation, your neurodivergency die is cast at birth (unless acquired via brain injury).
> This was because he had developed a set of very successful coping strategies to make up for his lack of executive function.
I think this takes a special set of conditions, and/or a mild case of it. Some people do learn to cope. I would contend even these folks have indicators of stress/mental health problems, even if non-obvious. Or they just drew the best possible ADHD hand in terms of life events.
was a terrible choice of words on my part, but I can't edit now. What I mean here by "well-adjusted" has nothing to do with "appears functional from the outside". I mean "they appear functional and actually are and didn't have to contort themselves to do so".
Does the patient self-medicate with nonmedical stimulants/stimulation? (caffeine, nicotine, other drugs, adrenaline junkie)? Did they have to struggle and claw to overcome executive issues and get some semblance of normalcy? Did they find a particular niche/trade where they can be successful? Do they succeed on the outside but feel burned out constantly inside? Those are not the folks I'm talking about. I'm saying folks who didn't need to go way out of their way to adapt in order to achieve an outward sense of normalcy.
My father is one of the least-ADHD people I know. His life wasn't easy by any means (grew up very poor, had to work his way through high school and college), but also he didn't have any of the kind of turmoil growing up that I see in myself and each and every neurodivergent person I know.
It's probably difficult to demand objectivity in a field where the topic is often by its very definition subjective. Many mental illnesses are defined by how they subjectively affect us, of how we experience the world. You simply can't measure what it's like to be me.
You can't conclusively prove or disprove that I have ADHD. I may describe my experiences in a way that aligns with such a diagnosis, but for all you can tell I may be a P-zombie merely acting as though I experience things. For what you're able to measure, I may not even have an experience.
I've spent a long time in disability communities, falsifiability gets very little respect, and "gatekeeping" is generally expressly or implicitly taboo.
So with Autism, probably the most common disqualifier in practice is that the disorder requires childhood presentation and a lot of people don't know this. So somebody will come in, say "oh I wasn't autistic at all as a child, but I felt very autistic as a teenager, so I asked a doctor, and he said I wasn't autistic". People will respond with "oh, doctors don't know anything about autism, they underdiagnose minorities and women all the time, that proves it" and "oh, women actually don't present as autistic in childhood, they can just be masking, but that doesn't mean they aren't actually autistic". This happens EVERY time, especially if a woman is involved, and means that you can't falsify the idea that somebody was autistic in childhood.
I have been banned once for saying that disabled people should doubt other peoples disabilities (on the grounds of preventing exploitation and misallocation of resources), I got told that I was spreading ableist myths that disabled people are responsible for other disabled people lacking resources, that I was reinforcing the ableist myth that disabled people are just exploiting non-disabled people (of course, disabled people do just as much for the able as the able do for them, and thus there is no advantage to faking disability), that it was inappropriate to talk about doubting disabilities on an autism community, and that they wished I had a number of painful disabilities that I couldn't receive pain medication for because I wasn't believed.
I'm not, I'm in no way saying that explicitly or implicitly. I do not even remotely conflate these two things.
It is possible to show symptoms as a child, not get diagnosed as a child, and get diagnosed as an adult. I have zero issue with that. Here's the exact phrasing of the criteria https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html
>Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period (but may not become fully manifest until social demands exceed limited capacities, or may be masked by learned strategies in later life).
There's nothing in the diagnosis that says you need to be diagnosed as a child. I adamantly do not believe that's required for a diagnosis in any way shape or form.
There might be a difference between medicine as written and medicine as practiced. Suppose a psychiatrist talks to a patient and confirms they have every symptom. Clearly a textbook case, except the patient says "I was symptom free in childhood."
Does the psychiatrist conclude the patient doesn't meet the criteria, or does the psychiatrist conclude the patient wasn't self aware enough in childhood to know if they exhibited symptoms so a diagnosis is warranted?
Well no, the psychiatrist has options here, they could try to interview the parents or the teacher of the child and ask them what they remember. It's always helpful if a psychiatrist goes through the trouble of making a stronger case than "They must just not remember how autistic they were as a kid, so therefore, they had autism symptoms as a child". They're making a diagnosis with legal weight, a diagnosis that entitles you to various forms of government assistance.
Perhaps I misunderstood what you were talking about above. I thought you were talking about a diagnosis for treatment purposes, if you were talking about a formal diagnosis for government assistance, that's a different conversation.
A diagnosis for treatment purposes does not entitle you to government assistance. People are only entitled to government assistance if they meet a "legal" standard about the severity of the illness.
Source: I've been diagnosed with severe ADHD on 4 occasions(mostly retests for due diligence reasons after switching psychiatrist)
Generally by having a full workup with a psychiatrist. They will do various interviews. Possibly might have to interview parents and teachers in pediatric cases or in adult cases where ADHD was not diagnosed in childhood(childhood onset is a diagnostic requirement for adult ADHD).
In more difficult cases a neuropsychologist might be consulted and can perform various neurological tests to more thoroughly rule out other disorder. There's some promising work on blood biomarkers and brain imaging but nothing in clinical use yet afaik.
Theoretically, any type to damage to or dysfunction in the frontal lobe which is affected by ADHD can manifest similar symptoms. There are some nutritional deficiencies that can cause a false positive for ADHD(zinc, possibly omega-3). There's also some curious cases of ADHD manifesting due to an very specific type of potassium imbalance. Though AFAIK the only known cases of this have been genetic.
It's probably also possible that childhood ADHD could have been "hiding" in childhood, if say your childhood environment was very ADHD-compatible it might not have been enough of a problem to be detected then, but become a problem in adulthood as your environment and responsibilites change. Probably you could make an argument for a diagnosis of adult ADHD in a case like that if there's at least a family history of ADHD.
> "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"
Isn't that called differential diagnosis?
For me they were essentially post-diagnosing childhood ADHD. Not much of my present existence was relevant other than the effects it had on my life now (whether I need meds or not). Sure I could have lied but it would have been a hell of a lie to build and keep straight across my appointments.
I was also asked if I'd heard of ADHD from TikTok.. not sure what the result would have been if I had.
I'm skeptical of all of them in their current form. It helps bolster my argument. I acknowledge that I might be wrong, and if it inspires someone to call me out in an effective way, great!
Now, ask yourself -- in a forum that's supposed to be about discussion and answering questions, why do you think it's very important to police how I use punctuation?
It's not policing, I'm suggesting that in a dialogue the use of scare quotes signals a negative interest in actually engaging in discussion. Typically, scare quotes will be interpreted as someone who has already made their mind up and won't be moved.
Compare:
"I'm skeptical about the prevalence of autism in teens."
"I'm skeptical about the prevalence of "autism" in teens."
The first absolutely conveys your skepticism, but doesn't come with an implied sneer.
I don't know, maybe this feedback isn't useful or you reject it, that's fine too. I just figured you may want to know that the way folks might interpret the quotes might be heavier than you intended.
I believe it's intended to be an umbrella term for many specific conditions. The opposite of neurotypical.
It's a way to acknowledge that folks with autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, depression, OCD, or other conditions are not neurotypical - they are neurodivergent.
I've rarely met someone who would say they are neurodiverse without a specific underlying condition.
It's a way of creating a category or set without needing to share one's diagnosis. Think of it like saying, "I'm European" vs "I'm Italian".
Medical diagnosis are man made labels created by committee. If I say having blond hair is a medical condition then I can absolutely do a falsifiable test of whether you have blond hair.
So the issue isn't so much falsifiability per see but instead the whether you trust the judgement of people who decide what is "normal" or "not normal".
Diagnoses are defined through research. The committee part is just about updating diagnostic manuals to reflect current consensus. New diagnoses need to be proven to be distinct entities(i.e not redundant) and clinically meaningful. And they specifically need to have a diagnostic test. Having blond hair has a diagnostic test, sure, but that diagnostic test does not in itself constitute a distinct, clinically useful diagnosis. Of course hair colour can change due to medical conditions, but then the hair colour would obviously be just one symptom of some set of conditions that may have caused it.
I do not agree. You can research how much of the population has blond hair, and how much this diverges from the "typical" hair color. But the decision to define or not define blond hair as a medical condition is a value call because the definition of a medical condition is ultimately that which people call a medical condition.
And whether something is clinically useful isn't the standard for defining a condition, because ability to successfully treat a disease isn't a standard in deciding whether something is a disease and because therapy isn't limited to people who have diseases. (Unless professionals are now calling marital problems a disease?)
You can agree or disagree, but the fact is that diagnoses almost always include a mandatory requirement that the condition has a significant negative impact on the patient's life. It's not merely a value judgment, and it's definitely not an arbitray judgement. The AMA or the CDC can't just decide that blod hair is now a medical disorder for no other reason than it would be helpful to your strawman. Clearly a lot of research and deliberation goes into these decisions. That's why new revisions of the DSM literally take years to complete.
"...a mandatory requirement that the condition has a significant negative impact on the patient's life."
Lot's of things have negative impacts that aren't considered medical conditions, on the other hand Elan Musk says he has Aspergers. Nobody seems to doubt it. This shows that someone can climb to the top of the social world but still be told they have a disease supposedly associated with "significant negative impact" on social skills.
And FDR had polio. JFK had Addison's disease and required regular treatment. Alan Turing revolutionised pretty much all of science and then committed suicide. Clearly someone can be pretty much maximally successful in their endeavours, and yet still have diseases that have a significant negative impact on their life, whether it's their sense of happiness, problems with interpersonal relations, or mobility.
As for doubting Elon Musk's claims: I generally don't raise doubts about someone claiming a diagnosis. I know from personal experience how shitty it feels to have the veracity of your suffering questioned like that. And in Musk's case, I have no issue believing he has some interpersonal issues, and asperger's(autism spectrum disorder in DSM-V) could explain that, so I don't see any reason to doubt him in this case.
I don't doubt a mental health practitioner told Musk he has Aspergers but we've now moved the bar from medical issues being related to a "significant negative impact" on the patient's life to "...some interpersonal issues..." being sufficient to label someone with a medical condition.
I think you're reading too much into the "significant" part of this the word in this context does not mean "large".
And again, it's pretty presumptuous to act like we know the whole story with Musk's Aspergers. I don't acutely pay attention to his personal life, and I don't see any reason to make the assumption that the only symptoms he has are ones that have been visible in the media(like the $420 tweet and the "pedo guy" thing). Aspergers is a very real disorder, I've multiple friends with it. People with aspergers can be highly intelligent and successful at what they do, yet feel completely miserable and become increasingly depressed because they struggle to connect with other people, which gets lonely.
I never claimed aspergers was not real. This discussion started when someone asked if it was disprovable or provable whether someone was neurotypical.
The fact of the matter is it is not possible to prove someone is neurotypical or not neurotypical. There is no scientific study that can tell you whether Musk's personal problems are "significant" enough to justify the diagnosis of Aspergers.
I don't know anything about Musk's personal life, but he's clearly suffering a lot less than individual on the autism spectrum who have trouble with basic day to day activities like keeping a job or navigating a normal work related conversation.
Unless neurotypical people are definitionally free from loneliness, depression and social isolation the last sentence of your comment seems like a red herring.
Social skills you see them at the micro level , not at the macro level. That is after the halo effect of all the paid for publicity (plus all the abomination that is modern day social media) vanishes.
Once the halo effect vanishes everybody nopes the hell out of Musk life, including his confidantes, children and wives. So he has significant negative impact on social skills.
Manipulating the public and business associates in order to become worth 200+ billions of dollars seems to me to require quite a lot of social savvy. So does the regular interactions with people that go with founding a company.
I think someone can be a bad spouse without necessarily suffering from a social skill disorder. And someone suffering from a social skill disorder can be a good spouse, so I don't know that divorce really tells us much.
> Manipulating the public and business associates in order to become worth 200+ billions of dollars
It's not about manipulation and more riding an already existing wave. The tsunami of environmentalism, green everything etc.
Real bona fide manipulation is all about convincing people that YOU are the solution to each and every of their problem.
It entails jokes, touching people, pointing at people, blowing kisses, smiling a lot, playing an instrument. Most of all it has to be speeches, delivered from a stage.
Think Obama, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Reagan, Trump...
I can't take Musk seriously because he cannot speak properly. When you are a leader you cannot hide behind the bird app forever. At some point you have to go out there and hold hold the crowd in your palm like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin used to do. That to me is social skill.
> This shows that someone can climb to the top of the social world but still be told they have a disease supposedly associated with "significant negative impact" on social skills.
Narcissists, sociopaths regularly climb up while being impaired and causing damage everyone around. People with OCD or hypochondriac too. Bipolar people the same. That does not make those non existent either.
I don't see how your mention of OCD, bipolar disorder, narcissisms or sociopathy is relevant to someone with a supposed social skill disorder being really good at navigating and conquering the social world.
To me the claim that Musk has Aspergers is like being told an Olympic marathon runner has a leg disability.
Asperger is by definition mild variant. It is not equivalent leg disability. Plus, lack of empathy can be advantage in business - you care less about impact on others.
Asperger is not something that excludes you from success.
OCD and being bipolar have much graver consequences on your life and success.
> I don't see how your mention of OCD, bipolar disorder, narcissisms or sociopathy is relevant to someone with a supposed social skill disorder being really good at navigating and conquering the social world.
It's not the social world. It's the social media world. Big difference.
Michael Jackson was the greatest in his field too, was on all covers and people would faint when they saw him, but was also a social reclusive.
Big phenomenons like this are more an indication of the amount of money being spent in promotion than the social skills of the person being promoted.
The mental health world is measuring different things from the business world. I mean, Hitler was Chancellor of an advanced European nation, that must make him fine, right?
ADHD person here. When I was diagnosed in high school, I honestly didn't believe it, but I have come to accept that it really is a difference between myself and normal people. Normal, small, repetitive tasks are extremely hard to remember and keep track of. I need to write tasks down or perform them immediately, or I will commit and forget. However, when a novel and interesting task comes along, I can get lost in it for hours, forgetting to eat or sleep or even spend time with my family. "Interesting" is subjective, but I'm sure you could design a study that could begin to identify people.
One problem is that there's a pop culture understanding of ADHD and there's the medical version. Because ADHD is poorly understood and is diagnosed by ticking boxes, I get the feeling that some people just say what they need to say to get the diagnosis/meds/whatever. (I am unmedicated and have been my entire adult life. I felt a bit like a zombie on Adderall, and my heart was constantly racing.)
On the other hand, I do think there's probably a better, deeper explanation that has eluded the professionals. I suspect that ADHD has something to do with a lack of free play for young children. When kids are able to free play, they invent their own games and set their own boundaries and learn to regulate themselves; this does not happen when they are under adults' direction. As a consequence, we see that the US has extremely high ADHD rates in children, whereas in other countries, especially ones where early education consists almost entirely of free play, especially outdoors, is encouraged, the rates are quite low.[0] Further, within the US, we see that children born in August seem to have a higher chance of an ADHD diagnosis than those born in September.[1]
I suspect that the disorder is "real," but with a very strong "nurture" component. In the US over the past 60 years or so, children's lives have become increasingly directed by adults, from time spent in school to time spent in sports or clubs organized by adults to time spent at home doing homework. At the same time, Americans have become increasingly hostile to the idea of children's free play. "Where is that kid's adult?" is something I hear from other parents when I take my kids to the playground.
If I could summarize my own experience, I would say I have trouble self-regulating along the spectrum of being bored or interested in a topic. If I'm bored, or think I will be, I have almost an anxious response; if I'm interested, I may get lost in the task or topic till a phone call from my wife breaks me out of it. For what it's worth, when I'm healthy, I can rarely sleep more than 6 1/2 hours per night.
As an outsider, it seems like medical science would be particularly challenging. Underlying mechanisms for many common conditions aren't known or fully understood, but the collection of symptoms (syndrome) need to be treated now to improve quality of life. It would seem like this would lead to less strict and rigid systems of analysis and methodology out of necessity (working with the best information and analysis at hand, knowing that there are still many unknowns).
tl;dr - everyone's probably just doing the best they can.
> The only half-convincing defense I've heard of it is that it could, maybe, theoretically, disseminate information about illnesses to people who don't have the money to see a professional
Another thing TikTok does is provide a venue for sharing stories - "you're not alone" - and sharing coping mechanisms. Good things.
On the flip side, I asked my psych to take an ADHD test because I found the stuff at /r/ADHDmemes consistently hit far too close to home to be a coincidence.
Do you mind if I ask how that went? I've circled these issues before. For me, I suspect the underlying issue is something else, but I'm curious about your experience.
I just asked to be screened for ADHD. The guy was pretty skeptical, and the test would have been out of pocket with or without insurance.
In the actual test, you had to watch a square flash on the screen at random intervals and click a clicker if it flashed on the bottom. That's it. It took an hour. Afterward, you get your results based on mistakes and reaction time over time. The data and statistics associated with it are really interesting, too.
I've noticed this starting to carry over. I watch some Mr Beast things after listening to an awesome interview with him. But his videos are almost unwatchable. It's like 20 tick toks strung together. They just edit it that way to get the tik tock crowd. Very infuriating. How do you learn or digest good information if you get blasted with 99% shit every 15 seconds?
Heck, my sister was diagnosed (and I wish I had been diagnosed) in the 80's.
Plus, before it got the name ADD (and after, ADHD), it was studied by the names "Hyperactive child syndrome", "Hyperkinetic reaction of childhood", and a few others.
This has been recognized and studied for over a century.
People are going to be blaming TikTok, social media, or whatever else for this, but it's important to note that this is not a new phenomenon at all. Tuberculosis was fashionable during the Victorian era and shaped a lot of our modern beauty standards today[0]. Is social media really to blame, or is a desire to be different just a part of being human?
Exactly. Here is a story from 2010 where a storyline about a character's bi polar on a popular UK soap saw a doubling in the number of young people seeking help.
Growing up, my teenage friend group would frequently dive into mental diagnosis and personality assessments. This feels like a very common teenage thing to do and TikTok didn't invent it. At that age, you don't know who you are or why you do things you do and there's comfort in learning about this stuff. For that matter, it's a joke among psych students that you begin to diagnose yourself and your friends as you take abnormal psych.
Or maybe it wasn't a common thing for friend groups to do and mine was strange. We didn't have the WSJ to tell us.
I participated in this with friend groups, prior to the era of TikTok. I think it's actually an interesting exercise, since doing things like MTBI tests in a group—even if the results/outcomes are tenuous at best—it helps you start to understand and breakdown how different people tick.
"Personality tests" have been a thing for a long time. The difference here seems to be that we're talking about diseases and not just differences between people.
I recently discovered "systems" people via Reddit (r/SystemsCringe) will searching for systems engineering. The core belief seems to be that the individual has "multiple people" living in the same body. They've devised a whole language for talking about it as well[0].
This reminds me of the "otherkin" fad that occurred primarily on Tumblr about a decade ago[1]. It was where teenagers believed themselves to not be humans but rather other creatures like dragons, bears, and so on. I remember reading about one girl who argued with her mother over whether or not she needed to eat diamonds because she was a dragon.
There are also online communities where people (the posts read as children/teens but that may be my own bias) actively discuss and strategize about how to essentially 'summon' / 'create' / manifest a second internal person in their mind. Like, they essentially actively _try_ to create an 'imaginary friend' that is more than just imaginary but is almost a split personality like entity. The goal is for the 'thoughts' / internal monologue of that second entity to feel like they are thoughts that are not generated by the host, but instead truly feel to be generated by an external entity.
That community is called tulpas and the subreddit bears the same name.
By one token you could seemingly accurately describe the discussion there as unchaperoned children and teens actively trying to become mentally ill through meditation and self-talk.
On the other hand, I remember when I was a kid we used to talk about how maybe if we wished hard enough we could become more powerful like the characters in Dragonball Z. And I remember a web forum where kids talked about how maybe Digimon was real and there was a parallel universe where Digimon existed and how the forumbase could merge that world with our own if they wished hard enough.
So maybe kids have always been quite out there and it just looks more alarming when you are an adult.
Schema therapy has fairly similar underpinnings, your mind operates in various "modes" which can communicate internally. Some modes are helpful, some are maladaptive.
Kinda wonder if Marvin Minsky had something useful to say on this? I recall he wrote a book on how the mind is socially organized
I think there are more charitable ways to look at this. Even if you doubt that some of these people don’t have the disorder they’ve self-diagnosed themselves with (thinking you’re a dragon is an extreme one), it’s clear that something about the situation requires professional evaluation.
That, in turn, is made more difficult by clinical perceptions of MPD: many psychiatrists are openly skeptical that it’s a “real” disorder, meaning that they’re less likely in turn to be empathetic towards a prospective patient who claims (perhaps incorrectly, but perhaps not!) that they have MPD.
The vast majority of those claiming to have Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) on TikTok do not need professional evaluation. They're teenagers behaving like teenagers. They're experimenting with different identities to see which one fits. They'll move on.
"Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a <i>rare condition</i> in which two or more distinct identities, or personality states, are present in—and alternately take control of—an individual."[0]
> it’s clear that something about the situation requires professional evaluation.
One of the problems is that the kids themselves are so awash in information and misinformation about this stuff, including awareness of how things are defined in the DSM-V, that they can muddy up your attempts at evaluating them.
It's kind of like if you take enough personality tests, like the MBTI, you eventually just sort of know how each question is being evaluated and you can, consciously or unconsciously, start optimizing your responses around the result that lines up with your narrative about yourself but isn't necessarily the most honest set of answers.
It's not too hard to pick up on multiple identities, tho I'm sure it can get out of hand when you pick out the people who are reinforcing each other as a trend
My view of it, for my own personal reflection, is to first define identity. I opt to have two prongs to it, rooted in game theory: executive identity & motivational identity. Given a decision matrix executive identity is the actor being able to choose. Motivational identity is what determines the pay off values of the outcomes
It's possible to have conflicting motivation, which ends up debating itself until it's decided by your executive identity. In various contexts these motivations will overtake each other on executive identity, causing one to behave rather differently
There's a range on how cohesive these behave for people, for some it can be distinct enough to feel like a different person
> you wear one mask with one group, another with a different group. Wouldnt say multiple identities though
You're just establishing that for a given persona there is a spectrum from 'Mask' to 'Identity' and insisting that there is an arbitrary threshold.
For a moment, embrace a worldview that there is no singular, core Identity -- in fact all personas are masks to some degree. An Identity may be a mask you're particularly dedicated to wearing, but it's still a mask. The rest of these "systems" people's perspective follows from this point and emphasizes certain experiences -- that you may suppress -- over others that you may hold on a pedestal.
You have a salient point in regards to mask vs identtiy being an abitrary distinction and I agree it's definitely a spectrum to an extent, but thaat's nothing to do with the majority of the people on those subreddits and tiktok circles. They will literally fake seizures or passing out to indicate when they change between alters, or insist that they have literal fictional(often anime) characters as part of their "systems", and do these delusional showcase videos where they will rapidly shift between all of their "alters" on video, changing their facial expressions and posture to signify that they're a different one.
It doesn't follow. A system is a collection of distinct, separate, entities in a single body. They are not equivalent to the personas of most people. They are, to a greater or lesser extent, siloed off from one another, as distinct as you and I. That is the description given by a significant part of the systems community, and is not compatible with your view of identity. A system would likely take offence at your suggestion that each member is just a persona.
Obviously I don't know how other people feel, but even when I have to project different "identities" in different social situations, I'm still the same person within and just tailoring the output to be appropriate to the settings. I act differently when I'm playing with my son, when I'm at work, when I'm with my wife, etc... But I'm always the same person in all those situations with the same thoughts, the same desires, and can be thinking about those other situations while actively expressing a different "identity" for a different one.
I think the mask analogy is a good one, it feels to me that regardless of what "mask" I'm wearing, I'm still the same, singular person underneath it in all situations. I am only one person, even if I only choose to show selective parts of my personality at different times.
If you like this topic, what you’re describing is the essentialist worldview, and in my opinion a major part of societal debates today touch on the rejection of this worldview (classically by existentialists).
Is there stability to who you are? This question can also be asked of nations, of language… And this debate dates back to Plato.
> But I'm always the same person in all those situations with the same thoughts, the same desires
I think that's debatable, and further, a lot of that coherence is a personal/cultural choice and not something inherent to consciousness. At a minimum, you might admit the existence of biases like anchoring -- maybe you'll more heavily weight your child's desires while playing with them versus when your in the middle of work a day later (maybe vice versa!) -- but such things might be a hint of how these other perspectives work.
Absolutely. Identity is best defined as "genuine pretending". This framing makes it obvious that there's a potential for behaviors to differentiate into a few modes (personas) in various contexts (both internally and externally derived!) based on predilections of the base organism.
The idea that there are multiple people in the mind is likely a reflection of its malleability just as is the (typical) conception that there's a single person with a single concrete, tangible identity in there. The fact that different groups of humans plausibly claim to experience one or the other state of being likely tells us something about the flexibility of the substrate we're running on. Moreover plural self-conceptions seem pretty compatible with some well-regarded (while very speculative) theories of mind, e.g. Dennett's multiple drafts model.
Try reading up on plural systems before you make such judgements. And don't hang around /r/SystemsCringe; it's a hate sub.
Otherkin is not a fad, and it's not confined to Tumblr; it's been around for decades, all over the net and real-life society. There's considerable overlap between otherkin and furry; otherkin is basically furry for fictional species.
Anyway, furry/otherkin and plural people read and post here to Hackernews all the time -- often as experts in their professional field. One of the most consistent producers of high-quality content featured here, Xe Iaso, appears to be both. Mind your manners.
Xe Iaso here, thank you for your kind words. It really means a lot. A lot of the time we just fire things on the blog out into the darkness and it can feel like we get nothing back. ^^
Reactions like the GP are why we prefer to be more tactical about plurality in public. We've found it's better to be seen as an expert in your field AND THEN be more safe with talking about plurality topics than it is to be a vocal example of being plural and then having to fight uphill to be seen as an expert in things. Stigma is a bitch and a half to deal with.
We'd like to think that our writing and advocacy helps destignatize our form of existence in some way, but we have no way to track that other than the occasional kind comment. Maybe this job will be the one where we are more honest and open about plurality, but we've also found that it's an ultimate relationship strength test like coming out as transgender to people (I'm pretty sure it's why my brother refuses to talk to me). We don't want to lose more people, so we have defaulted to this quietly, but accurately describing how we experience reality thing and not emphasizing it too much. The blog is a team effort ;)
Interestingly enough, I've found that plural people tend to understand distributed systems problems at a much more intuitive level than others. It's to the point that if I was ever building out an SRE team to handle distributed systems problems, I'd probably try and hire as many plural people as I can and make them accommodated to the best of my ability so that we can leverage that innate talent in ways that were previously undoable. Maybe some day I'll get my wish, but not any time soon it seems.
Personally I'd say that otherkin and furry have overlaps but are not fundamentally the same thing. Think of it as the difference between being a fan of baseball games and aspiring to be a baseball player. They are in similar veins (both baseball related), but they are wholly separate things. Being furry and being otherkin are similarly different. I can ask around for a resource if you want, if you want to reach out privately please email me at xeiaso dot net.
I'd second the suggestion to avoid hate groups like /r/systemscringe, nothing good can come of it but continuing the cycle of needless hate. I'd like to think that people on this website are rational and can overcome the innate tribalistic feelings that those hate groups capitalize on, but I can wish in one hand and spit in the other then see which one fills up faster.
"Furries run the internets", and as a result the tech side of the furry fandom gives you a vast professional networking opportunity that you could never really get anywhere else. It makes fiscal sense to be a furry if you value having a large professional reach.
>Try reading up on plural systems before you make such judgements
Unfortunately we have.
>And don't hang around /r/SystemsCringe; it's a hate sub.
Stop. Stop right there. Laughing at the deranged lunacy of this stupid subculture is NOT HATE. Stop diluting the word "hate" to mean "any slight that goes against my narrative or the narratives of those I ally with." There are real hate groups out there spreading their filth and getting people killed. By diluting the seriousness of hatred, you're inadvertently giving them power. STOP. IT.
>Otherkin is not a fad
Yes it is. It's a fad like emo and goth, with tons of overlap.
>and it's not confined to Tumblr
Unfortunately.
> been around for decades, all over the net and real-life society.
So has emo and goth at this rate. You're proving my point.
>There's considerable overlap between otherkin and furry; otherkin is basically furry for fictional species.
>Anyway, furry/otherkin and plural people read and post here to Hackernews all the time
Chronically online people are online. Shocked I tell you!
>often as experts in their professional field. One of the most consistent producers of...
And often experts in our field are like me: tired of the attention seeking shenanigans like the "system" losers that we have to deal with and manage day to day. Every day chronically online socially awkward people will find some community of invented nonsense to differentiate themselves and play the victim. Nothing like a persecution fetish mixed with fantasy.
> There are real hate groups out there spreading their filth and getting people killed.
If you think that fora dedicated to laughing at what you call deranged subcultures are not spreading hate and getting people killed, you haven't been paying attention. One of the greatest contributors to the emulation community is dead because of Kiwi Farms, and they're not the only one.
It's hate. Get it out of your system. Or you may well find yourself quite unwelcome. Remember, furries run the internet.
>If you think that fora dedicated to laughing at what you call deranged subcultures are not spreading hate and getting people killed
I don't think, I know it's not. Using this illogic, subreddits and forums dedicated to cringing over Qanon, Trumpers, white people, antivaxxers, etc. are hate.
>One of the greatest contributors to the emulation community is dead because of Kiwi Farms, and they're not the only one.
Oh, you mean the deranged asshole that tried to extort the mods of KiwiFarms with their suicide and then proceeded to fake their suicide after the emu world got tired of his shit? This is the worst example you could cook up, and it's the one you cooked up LOL!
>It's hate.
It's not, it's simply pointing out the deranged nonsense, just like all those forums and subreddits dedicated to Qanon Trumpets are simply pointing put deranged nonsense.
>Or you may well find yourself quite unwelcome.
If leftists find me unwelcoming then that means I'm doing the right things.
>Remember, furries run the internet.
Remember, furries crap JavaShit into containers. The Internet is ran by white and Asian techbros.
I also suspect that systems cringe might not be the best source for understanding plural folks... It might be worth trying to understand before casting aspersions.
I encountered variants of the 'otherkin' community in the mid/late 90s as a teenager. It was an interesting time. It existed in forums and chatrooms online at least that early. It wouldn't surprise me to find out there were BBSs for these communities even earlier than that.
Adolescents tend to engage in community-seeking behavior to a great extent, and if they're not finding it in their schools or local community, they'll almost certainly look to find it online.
Cringe forums inevitably select for the worst examples. You find the worst in any subset of humanity.
I know plenty of plural systems. They're just people who happen to also be people. Nothing exceptional one way or another. They're rocket scientists, sysops, janitors, baristas, etc. Just like anyone else.
A few people have drawn parallels to religion in this thread, but I'm not sure if you're trying to use the example of religion to refute the idea of socially transmissible mental illness, or to prove it. To me, it seems to prove it. It's perhaps easiest to see in the more extreme and wacky manifestations, like "speaking in tongues", although it's hard to gauge how earnest those people are and how much is an "emperor's new clothes" situation. Do they really believe that speaking in tongues is real, or do they fake it to fit in? Maybe it's a distinction without a difference.
My point is simply, "people believing they have distinct individual personalities inside themselves isn't remotely new, isn't terribly unusual, and maybe isn't inherently bad at all?", and I tried to wrap it in a joke people would click with (many people are closer to it than they'd think, they're just used to it in different language/contexts)
Maybe it's ok if people are different -- even a little "weird" sometimes? Just because someone is different, doesn't mean they have a "mental illness".
I'm not plural, plurality is not my lived experience -- so I can't speak to it -- I'm just pointing out that it doesn't seem like any kind of "socially transmissible mental illness". Knowing about something, doesn't make you that thing. Under the logic being used here, you could frame 'friends having a party' as a form of "socially transmissible alcoholism".
And as someone who isn't plural but is LGBTQ+, I'm very used to seeing people pathologizing or criminalizing folks different from themselves, as a veneer of social cover for delivery of their hate. 50 years ago, someone would have called me "insane" or "crazy" or "having a mental disorder" just for existing too -- even the greatest folks can't always escape this hate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_ind...). So it sets off a lot of alarm bells, when folks label someone as having a "mental illness" without a lot of due diligence.
According to the first Google result on the topic, "In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque", which means that your
"average American" is not actually reflective of the average American.
I was looking for a comment like this before adding my own.
I went through the first two years of a psychology degree alternately diagnosing myself with every mental illness under the sun, despite me knowing deep down that it wasn't really the case. The thing that stopped it dead was watching clinical videos of people who really did have serious mental illness. I wonder if the same would work for some of these people, presuming they're being suggestible.
I remember in particular one video of a man with bipolar disorder in a manic phase, who was in his mid-20s when the video was filmed during the late 80s, and who was convinced that he'd been the Rolling Stones tour manager in the 1960s. There was nothing anyone could say to convince him otherwise, and he had all sorts of explanations for the mismatch in dates. We were laughing a bit because it was so clearly delusional, when the lecturer pause the video and said something like "yeah, it's kinda funny, but I remember getting a call from a friend who asked my clinical opinion about the fact he thought that the adverts for a bank on TV were telling everyone he was gay." We got pretty quiet after that.
It chimes with the trivialisation of terms like OCD, which are use very filppantly, but anyone who's seen a clinical video of someone with full-blown OCD, which can be completely crippling, wouldn't use it so lightly.
I experienced the same bug today, with several bibliographical entries displaying the same error message. The article in question was the one on deus ex machina.
I can't stop seeing the heavy gender skew in online communities centred around these topics. Both the sexual orientation as well as mental disorder communities like this seem to be most popular among teenager or young adult women. As a man I don't know how teenage hormones affect girls different than boys at that age, so I can't even give an uneducated guess as to what could be the source of this attraction towards quirky sexual orientations and pronouns or mental disorders.
Us boys certainly had our fair share of weird and destructive online communities, but not like this I am sure.
Johnathan Haidt speculates (and I'm inclined to agree), that young boys tend to do a lot more of their online socializing through video-games and less time on the algorithmically curated feeds so they're less subject to the weird effects of radicalizing "peer" pressure that the feeds impose on girls and gay kids. The boys who do get into that stuff do seem to be at special risk of pickling themselves into weird communities around stuff like inceldom or other sorts of violent political extremism, but that seems to be more rare (though more extreme) than what happens with groups of girls.
I think LGBTQ curious kids probably tend to be especially vulnerable since the internet is such an important gateway for so many of them to seek out answers to the questions they're starting to have about their own identity and self-conception. But the logic of the curation model isn't a "natural" or "organic" friend group so they're really being jerked around by these things at a very impressionable and vulnerable age.
This is because women are under-diagnosed for most mental health disorders except for Bipolar and BPD, for which they are over-diagnosed. They build communities because their doctors aren’t helping them.
> in teenage years they are much more prone to infectious ideas
This is true in the broadest possible sense. It's why teenagers rebel against all social norms. The teenage mind mind is particularly geared toward identity discovery and without it, young adult minds would be simple inputs of their parents.
Besides that, nearly all big ideas are infectious. Language, gender, religion, politics, economics, &c are all incredibly infection ideas. You can look here and see any number of idea transmission vectors eager to transmit and propagate their strain of mental virus.
I'd encourage you to do some reading on childhood identity development (Marcia 1980). It seems as though you're advocating for identity foreclosure, by way of inoculating the teenage mind. But, you have to keep in mind that there are no anti-bodies here. It's virii all the way down.
Idea differ in the degree of virality however. They also differ in the degree of parasitism; some are designed to spread as much as possible with no regard for the longevity of the host. Cults, as an extreme example, seize upon vulnerable adolescents using relatable & poisonous ideas. Ideas designed to foreclose the identities of their hosts as fast as possible in order to add new members to the cult. Kind of like a "ponzi scheme" but for insecure and fashionable group identities.
One antibody could be questions about "time" that adults ask and teens do not. Teens haven't lived long enough to know that a dark feeling that feels like forever could just be one moment in their lives. I think my parents helped me avoid parasitic beliefs in my adolescence by asking me good questions.
I think what you're describing at the end is the most insidious and parasitic idea of them all. Teen angst stems from finally learning enough about how the world works and wanting to change it, but what I'm reading is the desire to redirect that want into a foreclosed acceptance of the status quo. It's the mental castration of a burgeoning will to power that leads to life long economic-social-political impotence. To reframe it as whims and folly of youth denies us of a billion possible futures. No wonder the kids today feel hopeless about the future, they've been infected with it on purpose.
People usually only think about sexual predators preying on young people, but there are lots of "ideological predators" doing the same thing. Libertarians, communists, religious folks (yes, I know that this post upsets the whole political spectrum).
Spreading a predatory ideology of “let everyone be free unless they hurt others” is a lot less damaging to society than spreading: “X group is oppressing you and you should be resentful and take revenge on them”
Shared a good article about this below. You can see the bias crop up in the comments here unfortunately. I would say there are as many uninformed opinions on here as there are with people on TikTok self-diagnosing themselves with a mental illness.
It is quite sad. I personally know that being diagnosed with depression when you have ADHD instead is debilitating. It feels like nothing will fix you. But then with an ADHD diagnosis it was much easier to be present in the world.
I've heard too many women share stories about predominately male doctors being completely dismissive of symptoms as a generality.
It really boils down to the basic cultural tendency for men to simply not trust what women are saying on nearly any subject. There's no way you could know what's wrong with you, there's no way you could understand math, there's no way you can tell me how to patch drywall, etc.
Ha I know so many completely feminine cisgender women that are “nonbinary” now and using the additional “they” pronoun alongside she/her
and that community has left zero ability to criticize or question that, since its a unilateral choice
does that make me Queer or Pansexual for dating/hooking up with a completely feminine cisgender woman who calls herself nonbinary or using they pronouns alongside she/her
I would definitely consider this a fad, even as “allyship” to actually nonbinary or even trans people its borderline offensive to pretend to relate if there are no consequences for doing so for the cisgender person compared to the persons being attacked and invalidated and fearing for their lives
The fad reminds me of high school girls being into “yaoi” which is just manga with gay guys
As someone who has experience in both hormonal regimes, it's a mix of biological substrate and social license. Neither outweigh the other - they're self-reinforcing.
i always thought the same for a while but apparently its not as much any more. my guess is kinda like ig theyre more likely to make content and post vs guys so we see them more. they do seem to be more active users by a huge margin tho.
Keep in mind it's going be very hard to get a "general" read on the kind of content TikTok has as a whole since it is extremely personalized for every user.
idk i always got the idea that at that age women can be more emotionally vulnerable to some stuff. same reason their bullying goes for social attacks, shaming, talking shit behind ppls backs instead of physical violence mostly.
Male on male bullying also moved away from pure physical violence. Men beat each other up much less often. The physical violence is mostly realm of very low socioeconomic status.
Having been on the receiving end of some physical and social/psychological bullying, I think maybe we've gone astray by suppressing the former in favor of the latter. The times I got into fights I was left bruised and humbled, but in all but one case I was able to bury the hatchet with those people. The rumor spreading is different. With social bullying there's no sense of finality after a fight, no reconciliation or resolution. I've gotten and made apologies after fights, but never after social bullying.
Formalize it into combat sports, with rules, referees, and medical personnel on staff. Or just competitive sports in general. But don't permit physical bullying. Your experiences elide over cases where there was serious harm done to the victim, physical or otherwise, or led to disproportionate retaliation.
Heh, most of the fights I ever got in were in the context of a competitive sports team. There was always informal refereeing; other people on the team pulling the fight apart when they decided it was over. And there is an unspoken code of conduct; putting somebody in a headlock ended the fight, and you would never try to do something insane like gouging somebody's eyes out.
Of course sometimes a small minority of people are insane and decide to maim and murder people. But I don't think "zero tolerance" environments are good at suppressing that. These policies are ineffectual against psychological/social bullying; how do you prove anything about a maliciously planted word-of-mouth rumor? That stuff goes unpunished, and that sort of bullying does more long-term damage than a typical schoolyard fight. Those festering social wounds probably drive more people to homicidal insanity than anything else.
You're also overlooking that physical bullying usually goes hand-in-hand with psychological/social bullying. A bully is not going to be choosy about tactics. But this whole tangent is orthogonal to the original discussion, anyway: schoolyard fights aren't necessarily about bullying, as they may involve combatants who are on equal footing. The ones you're describing certainly sound like disputes between parties of parity, more than a situation when one party is being dominated by another. A fight where a bully pummels the victim and is free to continue the torment doesn't really solve anything.
most times i see people get into fights there's their friends around so nobody pulls a weapon and to break it up if somebody goes down so people don't start kicking the other guy or whatever. it's a controlled way to resolve differences and tbh i don't get why people don't like it. like if it's 1 person jumping another that's different but i've got friends i fought with first and friends i fought with so we stayed friends after.
Downvoted with no replies... does that mean "it's true but I don't like to read it", or does it mean "it creates a cognitive dissonance that I can't deal with, and I don't know how to respond... so I downvote and hope it goes away"?
This is HN. Step up and disagree with words, assuming your brain has not turned completely to 4th grade mush.
Teens do exhibit lots of mental disorder symptoms at various times--their brains are still developing rapidly, and on top of that they're thrust into one unfamiliar environment after another. The "normal, well-adjusted" state ought to be pretty tumultuous at that age.
I wonder sometimes how many adults experience slight auditory hallucinations, especially at night, and don't bother recording them. I live in a pretty busy area with lots of trains and emergency vehicles outside, and when I'm close to sleep but get jolted back awake, I sometimes remember things that don't make any sense.
There's no social capital to be gained by actually having the illness. Pretending you have it garners sympathy, elevates your voice, and ingratiates yourself into a community of like-minded people (most of whom also don't have the illness).
It reminds me of the flat earthers movement documentary "Behind the curve". Where the main actor in the documentary joined the movement and wrose through the ranks to the leader. This person was a bit of a social recluse before but now he met his wife, gained friends around the world and brought in an income.
He was asked if he was shown proof that would change his mind could he and he said he couldn't, because his entire identity was built around this belief. If he changed his mind he would lose everything.
This is one of the dangerous things about echo chambers and micro communities produced by social media, it gives people a global identity even if their identity is based on nonsense.
I don't see it mentioned very often, but the whole "record yourself doing this funny dance" aspect of TikTok is, I think, a huge portion of why this is happening and is what makes it more powerful than other forms of social media. Getting people used to imitating what they see on the app could also be programming their minds to consciously/subconsciously imitate other things they see on there as well.
There are varying types of content on TikTok, not all just "record yourself doing this funny dance". Perhaps that's where it all started, but it's grown significantly since then.
The problem with TikTok is that you have little control over what you see. All it takes is for you to stumble across an ADHD related post, engage with it and you're more likely to then see those types of posts again and again.
Anyone can have a voice on TikTok like other social media apps and ADHD in many social media circles seems to be an attention seeking type of content that makes people think "oh maybe I have it too". It's very similar to the classic scenario of people self diagnosing themselves with cancer, because they've googled it and believe they have some of the signs/symptoms.
I'm not saying that ADHD isn't real, but it is a type of diagnosis that is open to ambiguity unless appropriately diagnosed.
Isn’t the “record yourself” aspect relatively irrelevant? The majority of users don’t record themselves dancing (or even don’t create content on a regular basis).
I'm not so sure. Even if they don't record themselves, they see "everybody else" is doing it. You get the same thing happening in other forms and other social phenomenon but I'd wager the effect is stronger on TikTok.
That’s different to what you said earlier, now it’s not about imitating but observing others that imitate.
As you say, same thing happens in other forms. A viral tiktok dance format seems similar to a viral image board macro or a viral twitter text format. How is tiktok different and why the effect would be stronger on tiktok?
I downvoted you because this is completely unsubstantiated nonsensical speculation that boils down to "Kids these days!!". You sound like you would have protested against AD&D in the 80s and Harry Potter in the 90s for turning kids into Satanists, or violent video games in the early 00s for turning kids into school shooters. Same bullshit, different decade.
I fail to see the connection. The things you listed were all moral panics. I am not making an argument about the morality of TikTok. I'm commenting about the social and behavioural effects of TikTok and of Social Media in general.
I suspect it is worse now than when some of us were kids. Some of us had less exposure to stuff that could mess us up because there was less stuff available. After all, in my early youth we had only three TV stations.
I also see a parallel with HN and developers with impostor syndrome. Before HN, and even before Slashdot, I was a good developer. I wrote some impressive C, C++, and Java code that went into some serious projects. But now, thanks to HN, I know that I'm a below-average developer. Perhaps I'm not, but it sure feels that way because of what I see presented and discussed here.
If I had grown up with HN, I might not have done some of the things I did; rather I might have given up and chosen a career which I didn't feel inadequate at. This is how I imagine kids today feel with all the stuff they have access to. I mean heck, you can even go to youtube and see 10 year olds making amazing creations out of just about any material you can think of. How does that feel when you're still trying to cut straight lines on paper?
I think the worst effects of social media are exactly the same as the worst effects of traditional media like TV: unrealistic body images, the veneration of consumption, and "aspirational" content that makes people feel like they're not good enough. Basically the stuff that fuels capitalism.
I think Capitalism is too simple or broad a term. It really encompasses a lot of ideas into a single word, and some of those ideas are natural and admirable while others are generally counterproductive.
You could say that someone who performs a dance well and gains positive attention from an audience is expressing capitalism. The idea that putting work plus talent to get appreciation (in monetary or other forms) is not necessarily bad.
I think what we currently experience as capitalism is a skewed, min/max version which loses sight of the main value and focuses too much on simple financial return.
It certainly matters: Many kids watching TikTok also start imagining wrong things about their sexuality. Apparently up to 25% of the upcoming zoomers identify as LGBTQ. Obviously, biological, empirical nonsense. Turns out most of it is absolute imagination yet many start to undergo hormone therapy etc immediately. There's a whole detrans movement of such folks who regret doing such, often irreversible, massive damage to their body.
> Apparently up to 25% of the upcoming zoomers identify as LGBTQ. Obviously, biological, empirical nonsense.
Much lower than it probably is. Most people, by my estimate, aren't perfect 0 or 6 on the Kinsey scale [0]. The majority of people are somewhere between 1 and 5. It's still a bimodal distribution but I'd estimate most people aren't purely gay or straight.
Sexuality is similar to mental illness in my opinion (STAY WITH ME!), most people have sub-clinical cases of lots of mental illnesses, maybe a facet or two due to maladaption because of being a human (sexually wise: having a fetish, having a 'thing' for secondary sex characteristics of their sex, etc) but it doesn't cross a threshold where it becomes behaviourly significant.
Ask someone "If you had to sleep with someone of the same sex, who would it be?" If they have an honest answer of a specific person, they aren't _technically_ straight.
> Sexuality is similar to mental illness in my opinion ..., there are sub-clinical cases where someone can have a degree of it but it doesn't cross a threshold where it becomes behaviourly significant.
Honestly seems like a perfect comparison in my experience as well.
> start imagining ... things about their sexuality
So they're exploring their sexuality, and you think this is wrong? I remember questioning my sexuality as a teenager... in the 90's, long before the internet functionally existed for me.
> imagining wrong things ... biological, empirical nonsense
Oh. Nevermind. You've already decided to cast normal behavior and questions as immoral, so I'll never change your mind.
> You've already decided to cast normal behavior and questions as immoral
I may or may not have, but that aside "wrong" as I used it here clearly means "factually wrong", not "morally wrong".
I'm not disputing that there are legitimate cases.
Simply saying the sheer spike in it from one generation to the next should make any rational person smell the rotten tuna.
I even have 1st hand experience with it: My teenie brother who thought for about 1-2 years he was trans and even considered biological sex change but as he matured a little realized that nah he's just gay.
Fact is kids and teens are actually dumb and don't know a lot about human psychology and physiology. They don't understand for example that simply being a little on the feminine side as a man or vice versa doesn't make you trans. And it ruins lives - primarily their own!
We should not act, as adults and parents, like we don't know better than them at least in 99% of the cases.
Is it really nonsense, or are people from our generation and older just stifled to fit themselves into very narrow boxes that the younger folks are refusing to comply with?
> There's a whole detrans movement of such folks who regret doing such, often irreversible, massive damage to their body.
I looked into this a while back and found that the vast majority of this "movement" was british transphobes making up stories about their friend who this definitely happened to. Didn't seem to have a whole lot of legitimacy to it.
Why British specifically? Beats me but they were definitely over-represented amongst these stories.
I think we can take a look at things like anorexia to see some example of what the effects might be. Some young adult women only had a short phase that they "grew out of" and some struggle with it to this day.
I see a lot of affirming opinions to this post, but I'm worried that it's just a very direct read without assuming greater societal context.
Could it be the case that there is now less social stigma to address and speak about mental health publicly?
Speaking from anecdotal experience (which is, yes, the worst), I struggled in school on mathematic topics, and just about never did my homework. My high school pushed me for a study, which was performed. My parents and I were invited to a meeting to review the results, but they did not allow me to come along, and I was not allowed to view the results of the study, but my school did grant me extended time on tests but was not allowed by my parents to elucidate why. (I did not need the extended time.)
These days, I went to a psychiatrist and had more studies, done, it turns out I have a rather textbook case of ADHD which was not disclosed to me and was left untreated. I also casually think that a small slice of my family, possibly including myself, is on the autism spectrum (on the DSM-5 style definition).
So, while I partially agree with some of the perspectives here, I also firmly believe a non-zero amount of the change is that we're getting better at understanding and speaking about mental health—where definitions and processes from a psychiatric perspective are evolving, and that socially it's no longer something that must be bottled up and kept hidden (as much).
Is anyone else just not worried about this at all? I started using IRC at the age of 7 and I turned out okay. My brother who ran with the local hoodlums is still a mess to this day. As as far as my children, I would be more concerned with them going to a nationalist political rally than I would be about them being online. Back in my parents time there were roving religious cults that indoctrinated youth, these days at least my kids can look these up online and realize what they're getting into.
There is a big, seeming North American sentiment that children are incapable of functioning without an adult and need to be protected at all times, rather than fostering their capability for independence. This is not to say you don't watch over them, but they have the capacity to learn from the world just as you do.
For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers.
With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences, etc.
It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around.
From the opening chapter of 'Three Men in a Boat', published 1889:
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
I think there's an interesting phenomenon where the lower bound of "bad influences" has gotten much lower in a lot of places that used to be safe.
Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving.
Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more.
So I suspect there's not necessarily a decrease in parents keeping their kids from bad influences, and more that there's an increase in access to (and severity of) bad influences.
Edit:
I should be clear, I want to minimize banning stuff as a solution as much as possible. I think the goal should be to move kids back into supervision and teaching by their parents, and just real people in their life. Parents, friends, educators, etc.
The problem is much of America (and much of the world) is completely boned on this front by living in places that just don't form a community, like suburbs, or just low-density non-walkable areas in general. Complicated by the fact that the vast majority of parents are getting non-work time squeezed out of them by increases in cost of living without any increase in pay.
Banning more stuff is the single-line-item solution, the simple way, the just-get-biden-to-do-an-executive-order way. But I would be horrified if that's all we could manage. I hope we can do the real solutions, not the deeply flawed patch that banning stuff is.
Well, other bad influences were reading Bukowski or Ginsberg too young but I mostly agree.
This is the change that has never occurred in human history. Every thread brings up that all complaints about this new media were applied to past forms of media.
I started reading Bukowski when I was around 13 or so. Many of the titles were available at the local library. I don’t think it was bad though. If anything, it was a cautionary tale of what substance abuse can lead too. And his poems were great.
> Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more.
This may be new-ish but I’m not sure it’s that new. I grew up with the early web in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it’s always been pretty unfiltered. It wasn’t centralized in the way TikTok is, but plenty of us grew up on the web with little supervision, and web circles were/are much wider than the neighborhood.
difference is tiktok and short video algos exploit ppls worse natures. like i know a few ppl whose feeds became e-thots doing dances in bikinis bc they wouldnt go seek it out but tiktok showed them that and their watch metrics or whatever were better. or ppl whose feed became far right shit bc it showed them some of that.
there's a lot of stuff we know isn't good and won't consciously choose to go watch. but short video shows us some of that and we subconsciously engage with it more instead of consciously choosing so we watch more and more.
this is hard for adults to deal with but way worse for kids with shitty impulse control.
Early internet was populated mostly by educated people and there were very little (if at all) monetary influence to drive engagement. So i guess these two factors are sufficient for internet to be much safer place.
It may be the case that algorithmic feeds and social networks that have one giant global context tend to expose stuff like this in ways that would have been less likely on the early web. 4chan has always been pretty awful but you wouldn’t have seen it unless you were on 4chan, which for most people was “never”. The norm at the time was to be in multiple different communities, and there typically wasn’t much overlap.
By contrast, TikTok is all one big space, and if the algorithm wants you to see something you’ll see it. That part is new.
Maybe that falls under “monetary influence to drive engagement” in which case I suppose I agree.
Banning "undesirable topics" isn't the solution, but only a band-aid. We need to teach children critical thinking skills and allow them to make their own decisions. The former might be easier, but the latter is the most beneficial in the long run.
Children literally don't have the developed cognitive capabilities to critically think, nor should they be making their own decisions every time. This is an absolutely inane suggestion.
I don't know when it started happening, but why do we continue to let these companies off the hook for their absolutely terrible externalities? Banning these topics if your platform allows children, preteens, etc is absolutely an effective solution if said companies refuse to rectify the problem.
Why should society bare the costs because a company wants to make money at the costs of a child's mental health? How is that just or even fair? Have we truly devolved into a new feudal age where no company can do wrong and we simply have to blame ourselves for their faults? These apps are designed to be psychologically addictive and fuel outrage/fear to drive advertising revenues... why is this acceptable? Why are we blaming parents and not the executives who signed off on these decisions?
> Children literally don't have the developed cognitive capabilities to critically think, nor should they be making their own decisions every time
[citation needed]
Also, since children don't have the cognitive abilities to critically think, maybe some responsibility should fall onto the parent? You can deflect blame all you want and call for TikTok to go around swinging their banhammer, but your "think of the children" alarmism is short sighted. It's impossible for TikTok to blanket ban an entire topic without causing major damage in the process.
I won't move into "mind reading" territory, but I suspect people who are so trigger happy to ban things online to "protect children" have a guilty conscience due to the lack of effort they put into their own child's development.
The internet boogeyman can only influence your child so much... Raise your kids, people!
Phone is literally only way how they can organize social life. Houses don't have landlines anymore. Teenager without phone means no socialization outside organized activities.
That assumes there kids of the same age in neighborhood with similar lifestyle. Which is quite a lot to ask these days.
There are less kids overall.
Kids today have more activities, so you won't meet them just by randomly going outside.
They do a lot more activities at home on computer, again you won't meet them randomly outside.
Parents are not even allowed to let their 6-7 years old outside alone, meaning they would had to be with them. Meaning kids won't get habit to he outside nor will find friends outside, even if some kids are around.
And if those other teenagers have phones, they expect you to organize it all by phone. They have own friends they socialize with and coordinate via phones. It is rude to just show up without calling first and you need phone to be reachable by other in the first place.
And other kids will not call on parents home. They are shy or scared.
When kids went to Timmy, pwople assumed landlines. Before landlines, it was accepted to just show up. Today, expectation is phone.
"Critical thinking" as thought is kinda "trust CNN and not random rager's blog". You need judgement and wisdom for actual critical thinking, which children do not have.
I would say it is a really hard problem, because it boils down to trust the trustworthy -- and who to trust is left as an exercise to the reader.
> We need to teach children critical thinking skills and allow them to make their own decisions
The timescale of this process is ~15-20 years. "Critical thinking", "common sense" and "being an adult" all refer someone that has cultivated the ability to filter information independently.
I would argue that many 18+ people don't fully develop this skill. See cults, propaganda, conformity for datapoints.
I agree that we SHOULD teach children critical thinking.
But MAYBE if you give them a smartphone and social media you should expect this type of result.
In general, I think that the move from TV (where CNN had "authority") to the internet (influencers have the power) can explain some social trends that are going on. Ex. conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen these days with youtube videos slowly hypnotizing you.
Yes, it won't happen overnight. This requires a culture shift. But banning things to coddle children's mind even further will hinder the process.
> I would argue that many 18+ people don't fully develop this skill. See cults, propaganda, conformity for datapoints.
I agree. Which is why I initially said we should teach children critical thinking skills.
> But MAYBE if you give them a smartphone and social media you should expect this type of result.
This is a parental issue. And if a child has incompetent parents, then no proposed solution matters at the end of the day.
> In general, I think that the move from TV (where CNN had "authority") to the internet (influencers have the power) can explain some social trends that are going on.
> Yes, it won't happen overnight. This requires a culture shift.
I meant that it takes 15-20 years for critical thinking to develop. I don't think you can teach a kid critical thinking (at least anything that is useful against internet content). The best mechanism is teach them dogma/fear mongering "don't talk to strangers".
> But banning things to coddle children's mind even further will hinder the process
I agree with banning content. The technology needs to be eliminated. I realize this is an extreme view, but little value comes from giving kids tech. Tell them to go play outside and explore the world.
> And if a child has incompetent parents, then no proposed solution matters at the end of the day.
Yup, the best you can do is TRY to be a good parent and maybe help out with friends that are struggling.
> ?
You notice how everyone is politically divided? People are anxious about the future? It's never not been the case that "things are bad" and "life is unpredictable", what is different is the hysteria around "it's the end of days".
All that is social media. Prior to internet, TV told us what to think. It was a unified message - communism bad, nazis bad, etc. Even opposition media was mostly investigative and finding really messed up stuff to "correct" the system. Because these were professional journalists creating an elegant narrative of the world around us. Obviously, 24hr news was the downfall of that. But even there, it was left and right.
Enter the internet, which democratized free speech (GOOD). But ANYONE can say ANYTHING (BAD). Which is how you get ridiculously outlandish conspiracies, niche political movements and just general hate towards everything.
So this social trend of desperation and hopelessness, that's social media.
the problem is that social media is like Heroin and not even the parents are immune.
There is a difference in reading an article in a newspaper with critical thinking and lumping through a social media page where the whole purpose is not the content but to keep you glued to the screen.
Very true, I picked this example as a thing that kids could theoretically be doing right now. You don't have to go very far back at all to get into the really heinous stuff.
There's a big complicating factor in what parents would have actually prevented as a bad influence too, children cheering on at lynchings were accompanied by everyone else in the town cheering at lynchings.
If there was a disconnect between parents tolerance of lynchings and child exposure to lynchings it didn't last very long.
> Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving.
It also worth noting that in the past there were more supervisory resources: homemakers. Now both parents tend to work and have far less capacity to manage those bad influences.
> The problem is much of America (and much of the world) is completely boned on this front by living in places that just don't form a community, like suburbs, or just low-density non-walkable areas in general
Why do you think you’re less likely to form a community in suburbs? I live in SF in an apt with a walk score of 98 and I don’t think there is much of a “community” here at all.
More likely bad influences were excessive alcohol, drugs, teenage pregnancies, minor crime, violence. Those are all less frequent then they used to be.
> It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around.
Every older generation has said this about the incoming generation - without fail.
I'll take the flip side.
There are so many great social medias about loving yourself, loving your kids, crying is okay for dudes, and men don't have to be a certain way (i'm a dude). It's okay not to know how to change your oil or shoot a gun, better to hug someone, allowed/proud to be gay, black, etc etc.
I sympathize with everyone who looks at tiktok and starts to cry. That said I think this "you are allowed to show feelings" is extremely out of place and out of time. And not good general advice at all.
You should not show your feelings to just anyone. You should have self worth and share with those you trust. There is a reason why PR exists for people in the public sphere. Most people will treat you kindly and it is important to remember that, but a good lesson for the internet would be to be keenly aware of the pitfalls of sharing too much and that includes your feelings very often.
> That said I think this "you are allowed to show feelings" is extremely out of place and out of time. And not good general advice at all. You should not show your feelings to just anyone.
The alternate that "you are allowed to show your feelings" is trying to combat, is the idea that you can't show your feelings to anyone, at any time.
So your advice is correct, but nowhere near the issue yet. You're telling people when to shift into fourth gear, when they're struggling to get out of first.
That implies that the inverse, bottling up your feelings, demonstrates self-control, and that self-control is always a desirable trait.
I disagree with both. Expressing your feelings is a part of good communication, and feeling free to express sadness or frustration as needed is how you stave off the kinds of arguments and blowups that have much more severe consequences.
Self control is assimilating those emotions in a healthy way to understand the root cause rather than letting them overflow from mental->physical in inappropriate settings.
This is a cornerstone of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is, in short, "I am free to notice that when this happens, I feel this certain way, and that usually relates to these outcomes. How can my behavior influence this in my favor?"
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is not trying to teach you to hide all emotions the way comment I reacted to suggested. You being visibly sad is fine result. There is big gap between overflow and notion that "you are allowed to show feelings" is something bad.
Changing oil and car tires, shooting a gun, fishing and performing basic repairs critical life skills that everyone should learn. If you are an adult male and can't complete some of the most basic tasks without help, you will have a difficult time living on your own.
Loving yourself, being "proud" of homosexuality (I find this rather odd; why make your "sexuality" your core identity?) and knowing how to navigate the world are not mutually exclusive.
I for one will be giving my child unfettered and unmonitored access to the internet as I had growing up. I will be suplementing that experience with plenty of education on how to avoid some of the pitfalls, but I find the best way to learn that stuff is to experience it yourself.
I grew up with unfettered internet access, and of course I also came across the occasional horrific liveleak video, but everything required at least some sort of conscious input. Nowadays you have one app with an endless stream of garbage^Wcontent and the mysterious algorithm runs berserk feeding it to you.
That's not the same. In your analogy this would be just giving your kid access to eat what they want, and making sure that they understand different kinds of food and nutrients and how eating different things will affect their growth/energy level/body size and so on. Not the same as taking them to a fast food chain for every meal.
I think that the biggest difference with the current situation is the 24/7 reach. You were forced to unplug from the internet for much of the day during your generation simply because there was no way to reach the internet, but nowadays you are on the internet for everything and you can't even unplug to study, work or contact anyone. Anyone who is on TikTok uses it all their waking time.
Not true. I had a laptop starting at age 12 and unfettered 24/7 access, which I'd often use to play around with PHP and things until 3 AM :D
If I didn't have that formative experience of learning to time-manage and manage my own little technology addictions before going to college, college would have been really rough.
A lesson that needs to be learned in my opinion. I learned it the hard way, why provide guardrails I didn't have and expect my kids to come out better? I'd rather just re-create as best I can what I had access to and provide advice where I had none. Any attempt I make to restrict thigns further than what I had is just going to back-fire.
What you are describing is called "negligence" and is probably child abuse. You don't give kids unfettered access to anything, especially something as potentially extreme as the internet.
> For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”.
Not to be pedantic, but is this actually true? Parents used to send their kids to work in the factory at 10. Was that "keeping them away from bad influences"?
If you're saying something is "across every culture", I think some citation is required.
That's an improvement from working at the farm starting age 5!
Fairy tails is essentially teaching kids to stay away from bad influences. Telling to not go into the forest alone because X/Y/Z might happen is not far from telling to not go into a bad neighbourhood or visit a certain kid. And fairy tales did happen in pretty much any culture for thousands of years.
It was keeping them away from starvation and the lucky were given the rudiments of a christian education (which otherwise was unheard of) as part of their 'employment'.
Pretty much always when people say things like this, they are talking about few % of ruling class (whether they were bureaucratic, capitalist, feudal lords or whatever), and imagine themselves as part of this class.
The ruling class did _not_ shy away from debauchery. King Edward VII of England was so fat he had a special sex chair made so his stomach wouldn't get in the way.
I've joked that Tik Tok is a Chinese psyop meant to weaken the next generation of the west (it's banned in China itself), but it looks less like a joke all the time.
In some sense, it's no accessible just like Google and Facebook in China. Or you can say Tiktok does not operate inside China because there's another China specific version Douyin (from the same company).
Indeed. From what I've read, Chinese Tik Tok looks nothing at all like what gets served up in the West.
I'd imagine that for China, US/Western Tik Tok is a literal treasure trove of useful information on the state of practically every facet of US/Western life and culture. Oh the subtle and untraceable mischief you could get up to by just turning a few knobs.
This is what a variety of outlets like Reddit and Wikipedia have descended into though. The people on the establishment side will say its "open" but the people being discriminated against will say it's biased.
> With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences
Some parents. Elite schools in Manhattan and Palo Alto send home fliers that parents (or at least those I know) read.
Screen time of all types is monitored. And the children have a somewhat hilarious self-protecting pride in their control over digital intake. (Most of them. Thinking of two brothers, one who eats his veggies because he, and I quote, doesn’t like his poop going soft, and self moderates cartoon watching and phone fucking around. The other who steals my phone to watch loud videos.)
You don't have to be elite to be an involved parent. You just have to be involved. I have 2 so I know how easy it is to break out the digital babysitter, but even with the small amount I give mine I can see the influence it has, and I don't like it. I grew up with unfettered access to the internet before social media and now see how much it damaged me, I can only imagine what it is doing to kids today.
100% agree. Just pointing out there are parts of society where this is being messaged and socially enforced. So it isn’t a situation where we don’t know what to do. It’s one where we’re being selective about where we give a shit.
This reminded me of one particularly loathsome casino owner who boasted how his children never come near gambling. So naturally, the "elite" in Palo Alto are smart enough to shelter their children from their own toxic products. Somewhat (mildly) related is how you can visit a ghetto and be certain to find a liquor store in close proximity.
General desensitivity to most terrible things that I once used to have empathy towards. I think it's the cause of a lot of our problems today actually. We can so easily just shrug off the plight of others and keep going on our own way.
A lot of very young people often try to be as cool and detached as possible. How foolish really. I think it is important to save some empathy for later but I believe part of it is just growing up and realizing you cannot change everything and not feeling empathy towards everything is a form of self defense. I believe it is difficult to attribute this to media consumption but there very well could be a part to that. It is intuitive at least.
On the other hand I try to compare it to the empathy of people that were not exposed to anything like the free media on the internet. And often they don't show increased levels of empathy either, often quite to the contrary.
I am essentially still recovering from feeling completely numb to most of the terrible things that happen in the world, or feeling joy when I should be feeling joy when good things happen. Also growing up in an environment where I can get my dopamine rush on demand isn't good for being able to make long term sustained progress towards things. It felt like I was on SSRIs, but without actually being on them.
> You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers.
This is also a good recipe to plant prejudice. I'm glad parents no longer have such a strong influence.
You have to consider how things are on underdeveloped countries: people live their whole life without ever laving their city, cities have small populations and many are relatives, people develop wrong concepts that they just don't want to question because "everybody they know has been do it that way forever". Populations develop bad habits and keep them, the lack of contact with other cultures makes them think everything different from what they are used to is wrong. That is how you get a significant population of a country to be unashamedly homophobic, atheophobic, xenophobic and develop religion-related prejudices.
Is it though? If anything, education is precisely this, cultivating a baseline of cultural understanding. It can be weaker or better than the education in the family, but it sets a bar for at least yee good.
Of course, TikTok is not vetted and you can have a lot of bad stuff there (I think, I didn't use it a whole lot) but surely this whole thing is moral panic.
As an example of “bad influences” being an ancient topic, in the 1st century CE, the orator and educator Quintilian gave advice to parents in the Roman Empire wondering whether public schools would be a bad influence on their kids.
Although Quintilian agreed that public schools can be a bad influence, he argued that parents were the worst influence on their own kids.
“If only we did not ourselves damage our children’s characters! We ruin their infancy by spoiling them from the start. That soft upbringing which we call indulgence destroys the sinews of mind and body. If a toddler crawls around in purple, what will he not want when he grows up? […] No wonder [why children have bad character]: it was we who taught them, they heard it all from us. They see our mistresses, our male lovers; every dinner party echoes with obscene songs; things are to be seen which it is shameful to name. […] The wretched children learn these things before they know they are wrong. This is what makes them dissolute and spineless: they do not get these vices from the schools, they import them [vices] into them [the schools].”
A community that does not control the narrative its members hear, will cease to be a community. A massively dystopian reality I feel we are only beginning to understand.
As an aside, a TikTok employee told me TikTok is known to trigger old maladies like anorexia etc. I was told this after mentioning that trying TikTok gave me my first nicotine cravings in several years.
I think the society is still adapting to the new available media. People point at problems teenagers have with social network but it must be considered that they much more immune to problems that affect adults related to social networks: biases and beliefs in fake news. So, we'll suffer a bit but I think we'll be fine in the time-span of one generation; that is 20 years, I think.
That sounds worse than all the other social networks put together as TikTok needs more addictive content and users to continue the addiction and profit from bad habits and cravings mentioned in other comments. It is no different and is in fact worse.
A dystopia that the many have chosen to believe in who's goal is to only worsen the digital crack cocaine addiction which that is already just as bad and present in society.
We do not need society to regress any further with platforms like TikTok.
Anecdotally my teen brother, the youngest (born over a decade after the rest of us), is remarkably even-tempered and not prone to fall for bad influences. He does spend a lot of time on IG, mostly looking at cars and making informative posts on automobiles. He watches a lot of documentary-like material on YouTube about engineering, physics, and sociology. He isn't likely to get these wild ideas his peers seem to fall for. My parents though, will fall for all manners of internet misinformation- the phenomena of believing nonsense online isn't exclusive to children and young adults.
With my brother I've found that if you treat younger adults and children with seriousness and listen to them as though their POV is valid, you build a trust there where they have a sense of where to discuss their doubts and insecurities so they don't fall prey to hypes and misinformation.
I mention this because I had a huge amount of influence on him growing up, almost the opposite of my experience with my parents dismissing and ridiculing my concerns. Although when I was a teen social media was mostly all chat rooms, forums, myspace, and then facebook (YouTube barely existed until the end of my adolescence) where I found people who listened- and there was the potential for them to have an influence which may have led to something very similar to this article.
Although social media now is vastly more powerful and common, it is not the sole variable. For many of these children it is filling a gap where a solid foundation of reality and context should be- with family members and social support structures who can be trusted to provide a reality check. I can see why many young ones listen to online personalities (many adults do, too) and although the medium through which they're getting these concepts (tiktok) plays a large part, it is not the root nor is avoiding tiktok the solution.
I would add, my parents moved us far from the town with the intent to take us away from bad influences of kids who hung out downtown- what this actually did is prevent me from being able to walk to the library, while my sister still found a way to get in trouble because lo and behold, her friends had cars or knew older kids with cars. The isolation they thought might be a solution proved ineffective, but I think if their parenting had been more nutruring and less abuse/neglect she might have avoided a lot of the trouble she got into.
So yeah, I struggle with that too. Here's the difference with it as compared to all of history: scale.
We live in a different world as it is radically connected like never before. Taleb refers to our current age as "Extremeistan" and the previous world history as "Mediocrastan". It's about power lawn distributions and this happens overnight now across vast swaths of the population. [1]
What is statistically normal? In the General Social Study between 1990 and 2014, the amount of men reporting same sex sexual encounters more than doubled. Why wouldn't they decide to get pounded (and/or admit to it) with less stigma and all the good looking guys out there?
We're measuring gender in the same way we measure same sex sexual behaviour, which is self-report data, and it seems unsurprising to me more people would report being a different gender as the stigma goes down and more people are even aware that it's an "option"
It's very alluring to escape the difficulties and expectations of being a man in society. I don't feel any gender dysphoria, merely ambivalence towards it, but if the process was faster and I wouldn't have to deal with social backlash I'd do it myself. I'd certainly choose to have been born a woman if I could since my main difficulties in life have been in sex and romance, and the difficulty would drop to 0. The extra scholarship opportunities etc. would just be icing.
Gender dysphoria is a real thing that's treated by transitioning. In people suffering from it it demonstratedly improves quality of life and reduces suicides.
> that is what you truly are and all you’ll ever be
Only if you choose to see it this way. The majority of western society accepts transgender people today and it's not an issue.
Is gender real? No, gender is a societal construct that describes the presentation of males and females.
Therefore, if gender isn’t real, gender dysphoria isn’t real.
If society had no concept of gender, it is highly likely that far less people would report feeling they should have the sex organs of their opposite sex instead of what they have now, especially if they had no previous exposure or experience with such organs. Personally, of all the things that appeal to me about being a woman, the vagina is probably very low on the list.
Just because people are affected by this, does not mean they are being affected by something real.
Yeah, well, it does, and that's the world we live in right now. We're affected by a lot of things that aren't "real" like laws, social status, and fiat money.
I think there is a kernel of truth here in that I feel there is a lack of healthy male role models and there is a lack of support for mental health for men. Women also have their difficulties, but society is, in my perception, overall, much more supportive for female problems than male problems. In this aspect, I get where the manosfere is coming from. But I think _a lot_ of these communities come at this from a wrong direction.
I will agree that "Jumping on the LGBTQ train gives them some protection and upward social-political trajectory." is kiiiind of hilarious. Just the kind of talking points that unhealthy communities make you believe.
Very evidently exposing children to toxicity like 4chan/racist gaming chatrooms is harmful to development, why would it be any different when letting them watch anything on their phones
Normalize keeping children away from the obscene and stop letting grown adults normalize exposing weird shit to children, should be obvious innit
It used to be frowned upon to let them watch violent movies, hence the rating system for media, as it was common sense that more exposure to violence has a bad influence and normalizes it.. but now we live in clown world
rite! normalize everything abnormal and awful, celebrate it as cultural progress. normalize letting the algorithms and bad actors manipulate and radicalize the youth. yup this is progress
Recasting this as "Social media is bad for mental health" would be more truthful. But it would not villainize just one new social media platform at a time when legacy platforms struggle with growth.
Psychology is not a hard science, it's not a computer where you can prove what will happen. Therefore when applied by clinics the only way to diagnose is based off of the patients own words. If you say the right things to mark off DSM5 symptoms, then you get that diagnosis.
I don't blame social media for this, while it is true that it has heavily increased knowledge of various real illnesses, and therefore increased the case of false positives - clinics should be able to differentiate between this. That's the point. The professional should be able to properly diagnose, because the patient themselves doesn't know what the problem is or how to treat it.
But there in comes the "do no harm" idea. Where we have to do something because if we get it wrong and didn't prescribe pills then the patient may kill themselves or harm others. And conveniently we can point and say "we did it by the book, no liability.". It should be recoined "do harm to everyone equally" for correctness.
> "Despite how great the newfound mental-health awareness is among teens, there seems to be a trend of using mental-health diagnoses as a social currency,” he said.
Is it healthy to be so acutely aware of mental health when you're a teen, though?
Why is disability valid social currency? Is it because we also see adults tap into victimhood as currency?
I work with younger people in a tech-centric mentoring program. Most of them shun TikTok just as they shun other mainstream social media sites like Facebook.
However, there is another huge offender in the psychiatry misinformation space: Reddit.
The amount of incorrect, oversimplified, and downright weird psychiatry and psychology information they pick up from Reddit is astounding. The most common self-diagnosis is ADHD. Do some of them actually have ADHD? Sure, statistically speaking some of them will actually have ADHD. However, there’s something about Reddit’s hive mind that has convinced these people that the bar for ADHD is very low, such that they see everything as ADHD. It’s so bad that entire cohorts will come through and convince each other that they all have self-diagnosed ADHD, despite most of them functioning just fine in their personal, academic, and work lives.
They say things like “My brain doesn’t produce dopamine” (ADHD has dopaminergic involvement but it is not a disorder of decreased dopamine production, thats Parkinson’s) and other such statements that would be easily disproven with even cursory research on the topic. This is one of the most confusing aspects to me, as these are the same people who will spend hours researching the intricate details about front-end frameworks or other topics. There’s something about Reddit psychiatry that short-circuits past their normal logic and leads to blind acceptance.
I suspect the root problem is that they’re not actually going to Reddit for psychiatry advice or self-diagnosing with the goal of learning how to work with a mental health condition. It seems to be more about identity and adopting an explanation that makes them different and unique. ADHD has become especially attractive as a self-diagnosis because it’s trendy right now and it gives people a sense that their accomplishments are that much greater due to starting from a disadvantaged point.
Meanwhile, I have worked privately with several mentees who admit struggles with doctor-diagnosed ADHD and they behave completely differently. They usually don’t want to public announce their condition and go to lengths to avoid letting it be obvious to their peers or employers. The trivialization of genuine ADHD is massively frustrating to these people.
>The most common self-diagnosis is ADHD. Do some of them actually have ADHD? Sure, statistically speaking some of them will actually have ADHD.
Self-diagnosis aside, I had this exact thought after a conversation with a teacher. The number of kids on medication for ADHD in their school was just too much. Sure, the school could just be lucky but I doubt it. More likely pressure from educators and parents for a "quick fix" for what should be correctable (sans drugs) behavioural issues.
I think social media like TikTok can be a force for good in helping people gain awareness of previously not commonly discussed phenomena like mental illness or sexual orientation, both in "oh wow I might have this" for those who are afflicted but not aware and just the general populace as a whole. This is probably thanks to the exposure of popular influences who discuss these things as their main platform or make content those who do have it can relate to. This can also lead to incorrect diagnosises though, whether through malic by trying to imitate what made someone popular or simple confusion (I think thinking in terms of binary classification helps here). I think this worries many people, but so long as it doesn't lead to physical harm or actual mental illness, it's something kids will learn to grown out of with time.
If so, I can only imagine what Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook does to teenagers and their fragile minds.
The best way I can describe my use of TikTok is, it makes me happy. There are fun people doing fun things, and it makes me happy to watch. Even if I'm older than most of them.
Whenever I go on the platforms I mention in my first paragraph I instead get insulted, provoced, accused, questioned, and depressed.
I'm sure there's some bad stuff happening on TikTok, but on the whole it's a happy, friendly place. That simply cannot be said about the others.
As usual, the real "problem" with TikTok is that it's not owned and controlled by a western tech giant. That's why it gets attacked in western media.
Or how a tonne of kids (including my friends as I was a kid too) used to diagnose everyone and ourselves with “depression” back in the forums and MySpace days. Sure some of us ended up with real diagnoses, like myself (after some pretty severe impact from it), but a non zero amount of it seemed to be about being trendy and fitting in with the group and zeitgeist. This appears similar. Humans like pattern matching, and young people have enough knowledge about mental health topics to be “dangerous” in this case.
This is a long winded way of me saying I agree, and this doesn’t seem like a particularly new phenomenon.
Most people using TitTok already have a mental disorder called "narcissism". Not so long from now, companies like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok would be banned for the impossible to measure but huge damage made to the society. Facebook is also evil, but for many other types of damages. And it's not like these companies don't know what they actually are causing - they perfect know to conditions they put youngster into, make he acute, and profit from it! This is not moral and soon should be illegal!
> Most people using TitTok already have a mental disorder called "narcissism"
I think you have to break apart those 'using' TikTok by anonymously consuming content, and those who are 'using' TikTok by producing content with the aspiration of hitting it big. Narcissism seems connected to the second, but not so much the first.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
“Well, what’s the matter with you?”
I said:
“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I have got.”
And I told him how I came to discover it all.
Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it—a cowardly thing to do, I call it—and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.
I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.
He said he didn’t keep it.
I said:
“You are a chemist?”
He said:
“I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.”
I read the prescription. It ran:
“1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”
Note for the hacker news comments: you'll see a lot of people not putting sarcasm markers next to what they say and then a whole bunch of replies thinking that person was serious and there's a whole lot of misunderstanding going on in a lot of these comments and that's a problem. Tone indicators are important.
The psychological resources is always limited even in the best development country. There are fair amount of people out there that are actually undiagnosed. I think there may be some people overreacting, but the real number is definitely higher than the statistics we have.
It’s this kind of content that reminds me that if social media censors were actually interested in keeping safe people with mental problems, they wouldn’t police content so much as they would prevent such people from using their poisonous systems.
There's a whole other side of this equation that I don't hear much about - the parents of the kids who are producing a lot of the content.
I wouldn't want my kid spending hours each day scrolling through various social media, but likewise I wouldn't want them making pointless garbage videos just because... well because I guess that's what some people feel they should do?
My son watched gaming streamers for several years in his early teens, and that drove me nuts. I understand watching people who are good at something do their thing, but most of the gamer stuff I saw was just obnoxious punks who really needed a life. I'm still baffled at how successful (followers, income) many of these garbage can kids are. If they tried to talk to people, or even just talk out loud, in public the way they talk on their videos, they would be getting broken noses weekly.
Tics are socially contagious, more so if you have a close social connection to the person. It's actually really fascinating. A loved one of mine has tics and I occasionally pick up their vocal tics unknowingly.
There's an actual term for it but I can't find it for the life of me. I don't believe it is echolalia but it is a precise word for people 'catching' tics from loved ones.
Google search and TikTok differ on important dimensions. Google search makes you input the search criteria. TikTok learns what draws your attention and feeds you more of that information without you explicitly asking for it. On TikTok, all you have to do is flick up to see the next video, which for some, is going to feed them more information about mental illness if the algorithm says it will keep them engaged. Google search forces people to be more intentional about the terms they search for and the search results they view.
Yes. Taking digital crack cocaine for breakfast, lunch and dinner uninterrupted and everyday does get you these mental disorders which are not good for the brain.
TikTok knows this and they thrive in knowingly damaging the mental health of their users of this addiction.
Simple. One is right wing and the other one is left-wing. The same reason 'fat is healthy' is not misinformation even though ~80% of people in US died with COVID were obese.
It feels as though our society has collectively forgotten that mental illness can be socially transmissible. I remember in 00s there seemed to be mainstream acknowledgement and concern that anorexia and distorted perception of one's body can be socially transmissible, ripping through teen social cliches particularly, and could be spread through the internet by "pro-ana" websites and chat groups. I don't hear much about it these days though. Instead, internet media promoting mental illness seems more common than ever and with few exceptions (threads like this) I rarely see anybody express concern about it. What happened?
There's still a lot of discussion of this in the political discourse here in Norway, in fact I'd argue it's become increasingly more discussed as social media have taken over. Just recently, a law was passed requiring advertising that is edited to significantly change the physical appearance of people, to marked as such. One of the most common practices is editing to make a model's boobs look bigger, or her figure more hourglass-like. Removing skin blemishes is another. Details in the requirements are being ironed out right now, but I think this is a good example of a fairly simple regulation that should help improve things. It will become too expensive to try to do this kind of editing within the limits due to red tape, and the practice should go away almost completely in time. There's a lot more to be done in the ad, modelling, cosmetics, fashion, entertainment and tech(social media) industries to combat this though. But this kind of photoshopping practice is very harmful because it serves to amplify all of the other harmful signalling.
No, that would be a a clear violation of freedom of speech.
Advertising is an act of speech, but it is also an act of trying to get someone to buy something, and that act can be constrained by law.
If you wanted to regulate the iPhone camera issue, I suppose regulating Apple would be the only way to go about it, though I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not.
> It feels as though our society has collectively forgotten that mental illness can be socially transmissible
I mean, that's what religion is. It's a shared delusion that functions as a mind virus, where the conceptualization of deities that are on your side (but not the other side's) is mistaken for there actually being such a thing. The fact that it's normalized doesn't change the fact that it's a delusion.
What happened is that as we have understood eating disorders better focus on anorexia specifically has been replaced by a much broader class of eating disorders.
In addition what people have learnt is that focusing on illness prevention isn’t the best approach. Focusing instead on more positive alternatives works better. Hence the rise of the body positivity movement.
Finally, anorexia and other eating disorders are much better known so parents and children receive information and education about them through normal channels. Their doctors and school teachers. So discussing it through news media isn’t as important.
Fashion has moved on, so the anorexic has been largely replaced with bikini fitness. This is not a joke. You will also find that among bikini fitness athletes, you will find a lot who have been previously anorexic.
>It feels as though our society has collectively forgotten that mental illness can be socially transmissible. I remember in 00s there seemed to be mainstream acknowledgement and concern that anorexia and distorted perception of one's body can be socially transmissible
In the 90s, there was a study done on "sensitivity to environmental toxins," where people would complain about sickness and headaches and similar things from new carpet or new paint in offices.
IIRC, the study found that the reported cases were in a kind of "line of sight," i.e. one person would complain about it to another person, and before long it had passed all the way through the weird social groupings in cube farms, passed from person to person.
It's odd, but important to remember, that humans are still just smarter than average herd animals.
because the mental illnesses being promoted today are deemed socially acceptable by the few percent of the Western population with disproportionate amount of power over our mass and social media.
I don't want what they're selling. I don't feel exhausted, hopeless, and anxious. And I don't want dry mouth, insomnia, sexual side effects, diarrhea, nausea, and sleepiness.
You jump over the gaps in the tiles on the road? You must have OCD. You broke up with your bf/gf.. you must have depression. You're happy a bit? Bipolar disorder. You're a guy and play with a barbie... trans. Less horny, asexual. And let's not forget a bunch of adhd/autism and other disorders, when a kid gets bored in school.
On the other hand, we have professionals (doctors, etc.) reinforcing this, by (eg.) giving pills to kids who can't sit still for 8 hours in school without any physical excercise during that time, and parents give their kids pills,because it's easier than actually parenting that kid.
Depression and anxiety are medical diagnoses. The other are normal emotions everyone can, should, and does experience.
If you don’t ever worry or get sad about anything there’s probably something else wrong with you.
In terms of diagnoses, the DSM-4 included a “bereavement exclusion” from the depression diagnostic criteria. Thinking being if someone close to you dies a normal person almost should feel the symptoms of depression for some period of time. You don’t have depression, you’re mourning.
It made us feel so insulted and betrayed that when my wife would cry in the NICU for any reason the nurses would tattle on her and she’d get a call from the pill pushers trying to prescribe her psych meds.
It’s like look, my kid has literally been in the NICU for 6 months now (it ended up being 9 months total) and you’re strongly pressuring us to get her a tracheostomy (let’s not use medical euphemism here though, they wanted to put a tube into our babies throat which would make her unable to cry and necessitate round the clock nursing care) as the “standard of care” (bullshit, it would have made her quality of life worse). But she’s a little upset, better prescribe her happy pills!
For anyone wondering, this was 2019 and my daughter is right this moment peacefully sleeping in her bed with no external breathing aids necessary aside from a wedge pillow to help with her sleep apnea. My blood boils when I think of what we were forced through (especially my wife) dealing with the medical establishment after our daughter was born, but the psych meds being dangled in front of us is a particularly sore spot.
I’m sorry for this entire experience that you’ve had. It sounds like a waking nightmare.
I’m curious, did any doctor bring up therapy?
I have major depressive disorder and I take antidepressants to help manage it. There was a landmark study a few years ago indicating that, while SSRIs/SNRIs are beneficial for people like me, they are no more effective than the placebo for people experiencing transient depression.
Therapy, however, would’ve been a sound recommendation for her. In this case it would have given her a place to vent and taught her some tools to cope.
Finally, you should consider whether you and your wife experience any post-traumatic stress from this experience. Your experience meets the qualifications for one that can lead to PTSD in DSM V. There are extremely effective therapy approaches that can put PTSD in complete remission.
Crying when sad has been helpful for a very long time. I’m not saying therapy is never helpful, but as a parent I’m also annoyed by the medical folks in wincy’s story for pushing pills when they faced a tougher situation than any I have ever experienced and crying was certainly a very normal response. And venting to friends and receiving hugs probably helped even though the expected ache might remain while the baby was struggling. There are too many pills in the USA where people need a lot more compassionate friends and acknowledgment that feeling bad is actually not so bad.
Are you an able bodied person? Because when someone says people in America take “too many pills” it sounds like a very able bodied mindset.
I take 8 daily prescription medications to cope with chronic pain and chronic mental health issues. Removing any of them would diminish my quality of life in some way.
How are compassionate friends going to help me manage depression which is endemic to my brain and has no cause in my perceived reality?
Life comes in many perspectives. Before you prescribe how the disabled should live, please at least imagine walking a mile in our shoes.
Trust me, I'm not saying I've walked any miles in your shoes. I have relatives who have been disabled. I also have relatives who have taken many pills, and I have no doubt that many are necessary. As an American who grew up partly abroad, I have a desire to see increased relational commitment and support and believe that for many people, so many pills would not be necessary. I don't know you, I mean you no offense, and I don't believe I'm talking about someone in your situation. Based on news reports for the past several years, it's no secret that there are too many pills in the USA that are often being given to people who probably don't need them, and instead need something else. Medicate first and actually deal with it later (or never deal with the underlying problem) is not always the best course of action for many people.
That’s wildly wrong. The medical community adopted depression and anxiety from general use dating back to the 1500’s rather than the other way around.
“The meaning "dejection, state of sadness, a sinking of the spirits" is from early 15c. (as a clinical term in psychology, from 1905);” https://www.etymonline.com/word/depression
“anxiety (n.)
1520s, "apprehension caused by danger, misfortune, or error, uneasiness of mind respecting some uncertainty, a restless dread of some evil," from Latin anxietatem (nominative anxietas) "anguish, anxiety, solicitude," noun of quality from anxius "uneasy, troubled in mind” https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=anxiety
The medical diagnoses are generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder (with a variety of variations). Both of which, in common usage, have meaning.
The average person with their arm in a cast doesn’t say they “have a compound fracture of the radius and ulna”. They say they broke their arm or MAYBE fractured their arm. In this case the simple language and medical diagnosis is fracture.
Just like people with SERIOUS, life ruining disabling and debilitating depression don’t say they “have non-psychotic major depressive disorder”. They say they have depression. I’m not gatekeeping, just being extreme for the purposes of discussion.
To me, you can be depressed about something and not have depression. You can be anxious about something and not have anxiety. Those are slightly more sophisticated uses of sad and worry.
To me (again) the issue comes in when you apply a diagnosis to a feeling. When you bump your funny bone you don’t tell people your arm is fractured.
> To me, you can be depressed about something and not have depression. You can be anxious about something and not have anxiety. Those are slightly more sophisticated uses of sad and worry.
You are contradicting your own examples:
> You’re not sad, you’re depressed.
You don’t worry, you have anxiety.
It's possible the people are expressing they are feeling depressed or having anxiety in a colloquial way without confusing the emotion for the diagnosis. Your prior examples indicated that to use those words is problematic, yet you now say that "you can be depressed about something" and that "you can be anxious about something."
I really don’t believe people are casually using self-diagnosing language over using the variation that simply indicates their mood. Perhaps feeling depressed or anxious are more intense versions of feeling sad or worried, as they indicate persistence of negative feeling. But given all that has happened over the last couple of years, it is arguable that society as a whole is more susceptible to intense feelings.
French is the same: j’ai faim, and Italian is too: ho fame. Both mean “I have hunger”. I wonder if English is in the minority of languages that use “I am” instead of “I have”?
Interestingly, German doesn’t use the same construction for thirst. Ich bin durstig.
I think you have been reading to much into this. Less formal language get’s odd when you take it literally.
People casually describe emotions in a silly number of ways. Sometimes it’s possessive like “I got (hungry, depressed)” Other times it’s a state like “I am (hungry, depressed).” Sometimes it’s a transformation “That makes me so (hungry, depressed, happy, angry).” etc
Most people aren’t suggesting a medical diagnosis any more than “I have a crush” suggests you physically caught someone.
Also, “I broke my arm” doesn’t always imply someone broke a bone. Ex-pitchers for example sometimes use the phase to refer to a lack of functionality, though busted is more general.
Just because it is a "normal" thing doesn't mean it isn't something that medicine can address. Many of the unpleasant things our bodies go through are "normal" reactions to events.
The fact that bereavement may be different than other causes of depression may be a reason to treat it differently, but not a reason to ignore it.
But should we be treating those kinds of things with a medication or should we be treating it with education? Should we be more forgiving to people and allowing them the space they need to process life events instead of worrying about money or their jobs or all this crap.
The difference is handing someone a bottle and saying "here this will go away quick!" Vs just generally having a better more emotionally aware society.
Some processes that are brains go through should be allowed and it should be accepted that they run their full natural course given that the human that has the brain is also being cared for and guided in some sort of way during this process and not just isolated and shunned away.
I strongly disagree. I think most people I know are careful to not throw around the word "depression" when they talk about being sad. They are keenly aware of the difference. And they know the difference between "being anxious" or "having anxiety" and having an actual anxiety disorder. Of course, a lot of times the lines are blurred. Whole most medical professionals are forced to draw a stark line in order to make an actionable diagnosis, actual people realize that these are all on a spectrum. Some of us may have occasional OCD tendencies or mild body dysmorphia without needing medical intervention. Though self-awareness and discussing the issue with friends and a therapist always seem to help, even if meds or more involved therapy aren't needed.
No offense but if most people around you are throwing around the word "depression," I would personally consider that a red flag (unless you're in the medical profession). Either your friend circle are unusually showing symptoms of depression or they're misusing the term/self-diagnosing themselves.
I clearly stated that "most people I know are careful to not throw around the word "depression". The rest of what I wrote syncs with this perspective. Not sure what you read.
I think the main point of removing this exclusion is that you can be depressed and bereaved at the same time. Or you could be so depressed due to bereavement that you still need treatment. In DSM-V it's left to the clinician to distinguish between clinically significant depression and a healthy, transitory reaction to bereavement. The reason for this is to avoid cases where people who need treatment are dismissed too easily because they happen to be bereaved. There is still a distinction drawn, it's just that it's not currently easy to make that distinction in a standardised way, and so it was decided to remove it from the DSM, which is meant to be as rigorous and statistically grounded as possible.
As the other comment with his wife and the NICU situation noted, the point here is people should be left to deal with life if they’re going through some shit.
IIRC the bereavement exclusion was six months? This made sense to me, if you had some terrible event in your life and you’re not back to something resembling your baseline mood and function after roughly that time period there’s probably something going on that needs to be looked at.
To me this is the mental health equivalent of “Sorry you sprained your ankle and it hurts a little, here’s a month of OxyContin and what could very well be a lifelong addiction”. We don’t do that anymore - today you’ll get ibuprofen and ice.
Even with more serious injuries you’re more likely to get lifestyle suggestions, physical therapy, etc than opioids.
In many cases we’re throwing pills that change mood and brain chemistry at people suffering from what is basically “life”. I’m not saying people shouldn’t be treated, I’m saying general practitioners throwing SSRIs at someone and diagnosing them with depression after talking to them for literally five minutes doesn’t seem right to me.
But it is easier and faster than hours and hours of therapy.
What comes first? An irresponsibly written anti-depressant prescription because someone said they have depression, or someone says they have depression because someone irresponsibly wrote them a prescription for an anti-depressant?
The point is that it's non-trivial to determine whether someone is simply bereaved. Or depressed, and bereaved. If someone is already depressed, bereavement is one of those things that can push them over the edge into attempting suicide. The exclusion criterion was too simplistic to cover the nuance of the differential diagnosis, so it was removed. It is a non-sequitur to say that the removal from the DSM is an endorsement of diagnosing MDD in all bereaved people. Some doctors might be doing that, but then the problem is that those doctors are doing the wrong thing, and whatever societal pressures might have affected them to do so. There is still disagreement about it in the field, and if the consensus shifts again it could very well end up being added back in, but probably I think it will evolve into a more specific diagnostic procedure to tell the cases apart.
The creators of the DSM have become extremely wary of creating diagnoses on people who don't think they have a problem, and who function in their everyday lives. I don't think there's anything particular about religion that can be classed as a distinct disorder. There's psychosis(schizophrenia, type 1 bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder), etc and delusional disorder for cases where people lose their grip on reality completely, and become a danger to themselves and others. The criteria for a belief to be a delusion are pretty strict. For it to be a delusion the person would have to hold on to their belief despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Religious belief is in most cases something completely different, namely a strongly held conviction that's been drilled in since birth. And religious beliefs are designed to be hard to disprove. So it's like trying to remove the bottom piece of a jenga tower. But it's not usually a sign of some profound defect in cognition, which a delusion is.
Of course psychotic delusions often can take on religious content, but that's perfectly within the existing criteria for the various psychotic/delusional disorders. It's just that the bar for describing a religious belief as a delusion is quite high, because perfectly healthy, functional people regularly believe some pretty "out there" stuff.
> Depression and anxiety are medical diagnoses. The other are normal emotions everyone can, should, and does experience.
Why? In what sense are they "normal"? They're unpleasant and they leave you worse off than you were before you experienced them. It's also becoming clearer that frequently experiencing them has harmful physical effects from stress responses. Over-diagnosis with depression and anxiety is bad because the treatments have such a wide array of potential side effects and limited evidence for efficacy, but it makes no sense to not categorize something as a disease just because we can't treat it.
I think most doctors aren't eager to prescribe the pills, but they have to treat the parents like any other drug-seeking population. It's impossible to get medication to people who need it while denying it to people who don't need it but are determined to get it and know all the right things to say, so you accept there will be some abuse.
> You're a guy and play with a barbie... trans. Less horny, asexual.
Setting aside, for now, the fact that these are things that people realize about themselves and not things people are diagnosed with by others... Why are you bringing them up in response to a comment about mental illness?
What you actually implied is trans skepticism, which is a form of transphobia, questioning its legitimacy, implying that a lot of trans kids aren't actually trans, that they're being labeled that because they "play with dolls" - and this shouldn't be the case.
No kid is diagnosed with gender dysphoria for playing with dolls.
They are both things that people realize about themselves and things that they are diagnosed with by others. E.g. in order to receive hormones, one must be diagnosed as having gender dysphoria by a professional.
I've realised I was wrong in my response. The comment you were reacting to did not mention the word diagnose. And I shouldn't have used it in my response.
You seemed to have jumped to a conclusion, used the word diagnose, and you are now trying to argue about the use of that word.
I use "diagnose" in the casual sense of "tell someone something about themself", not the strict sense of a doctor identifying a condition. The specific word is irrelevant.
The myth is that people realize they are trans because other people told them they are trans, instead of that person realizing it themself. This lets bigots choose between casting trans people as insidious recruiter, seeking out innocent children for conversion, and casting them as helpless victim, too indoctrinated to know what's best for them. Either way, it allows them options for disregarding the views of trans people that that just aren't available when you accept that being transgender is a genuine and considered view of one's self.
No it isn't, there are plenty of people including me who believe that those things are mostly mental illnesses and\or trivial categories invented for novelty's sake. "Objectionable" implies that it's a mainstream opinion that those things are normal and healthy and the fringe opinion is that they're not, if anything, it's the reverse.
Imagine if all the people who write millions of words on the internet about issues channelled their energy into just helping others in their community.
(I am aware of the judgemental hypocrisy in the statement above.)
Another weird trend of this is that these self-diagnoses are brought up as if they're personality traits. From what I've seen, Gen Z is much more likely to introduce themselves to others by saying things like "My name is [xyz] and I'm bipolar transfluid asexual with depression" or similar
> parents give their kids pills,because it's easier than actually parenting that kid.
And then you have threads like this, where people call for mass censorship because some believe it's easier to ban "bad" topics than to actively parent their kids.
Your generalization OCD is very, very wrong. I can sadly speak from all-too-close experience that OCD is an absolutely crippling mental illness our society still does not take seriously enough. It’s still largely used as a punchline in popular culture and in social interactions.
Edit: I’m being told I misunderstood the parent comment but it appears to be claiming the bar is much lower now than in the past. Certainly skipping over sidewalk cracks isn’t OCD. The point of my comment is that when someone is diagnosed with OCD in 2022 by a professional, it’s generally for very serious reasons.
I think you may have misread the comment you replied to.
The claim being made, is that in times past, the bar for being diagnosed with something like OCD was much lower than today, causing people to consider mundane things as symptoms.
It appears GP is saying the bar for being diagnosed with a mental illness is lower today (“got a lot lower”). I am pushing back, at least where OCD is concerned.
I'm not talking about official diagnosis by trained professionals, i'm talking about tiktok and self diagnosis.
Kids today think they have OCD because they jump over the gaps in tiles, and promote that on social networks. Other kids claim they have it too, because they jump over the gaps too. And in the end... social vmedia (tiktok videos) leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (like 'real' OCD)... as the title of this post says.
I heard that Obamacare changed the way insurers are paid to more of a cost plus model. So they actually have an incentive to not push back against anything.
Don't know if that's true. But if it is, who is pushing back against treatments? Doctors? Insurance companies? Government? Parents?
Simple objective reality. Nobody is diagnosing boys as trans or having gender dysphoria simply because they play with Barbies. People in a certain bubble may believe it's happening, but in the real world it takes a lot more than "plays with barbies" to get that diagnosis.
What makes you think anyone can have access to objective reality? What makes you think a first assertion holds more weight than a second? What makes you think bubbles are not a thing? What makes you think certain phrases don't immediately betray how little someone knows about people outside of their bubble?
I know enough people outside of the heteronormative experience to know that nothing about playing with Barbies pushes people toward being trans. It's reminiscent of the classic "violent games make kids violent" line. That's not the case at all -- rather violent kids are attracted more to violent games. The causality is completely incorrect and displays an obvious naivete paired with a pre-existing ideological bias.
>What makes you think anyone can have access to objective reality?
Because independent people agree, when independent sources of data agree on something, that means the thing they are agreeing on is (plausibly) larger than them, and that's what we call 'reality'.
>What makes you think a first assertion holds more weight than a second?
I don't.
>What makes you think bubbles are not a thing?
That's literally the opposite of what I said.
>I know enough people outside of the heteronormative experience to know that nothing about playing with Barbies pushes people toward being trans.
Cool, but you're missing the point that nobody claims that playing with Barbies, by itself, makes people trans. But rather what's being claimed is that certain people push the people who play Barbies into being trans, which is an entirely different thing.
>obvious naivete paired with a pre-existing ideological bias
You say this as if you don't have an obviously ample supply of those yourself.
Your right. Obviously we can't be sure birds are real, because some people say (without evidence) bird's aren't real and how can we say we have a better grasp of objective reality than them? Obviously, based on their absurd and evidence-less claims, we should forever question if birds are actually flying creatures and not government drones, regardless of our own experiences with birds and information provided by people who study birds for a living.
But by all means, provide me one documented case of a biological male being diagnosed with gender dysphoria by an actual medical professional based on nothing but the fact he plays with Barbies and burst my "bubble".
The comparison to birds is bizarre because they are a public phenomena that anyone can see and study, gender transitions aren't.
>our own experiences with birds
Which is none in the case of gender transitions, or very little for some people. But certainly nowhere near the experience of an average person with birds.
>information provided by people who study birds for a living
Which is not reliable in the case of gender transitions, because those who "study them for a living" have proven themselves to be unreliable and value-laden communicators who either has an ideology to push or are too timid to challenge those who do have an ideology to push. Don't forget the substantial material incentive for diagnosing people with gender dysphoria (months and possibly years of consultation and medical appointments, services and products), if ornithologists were similarly ideological and have reasons to benefit from denying that birds are drones, I would be skeptical of their claims too, until I see lots of birds and study them myself at any rate.
>provide me one documented case of a biological male being diagnosed with gender dysphoria
Diagnosis is medical data that is mostly non-public, so this is an impossible demand for rigor. And yet, here's[1] the next best thing, a celebrated psychologist with a long career in sex and gender research, editor for several journals, slandered and fired because activists are outraged he tries to encourage gender-non-conforming kids to be comfortable in their assigned gender instead of transitioning them immediately. So anybody who doesn't diagnose a barbie-playing boy with dysphoria and transition them is at risk of being slandered and fired no matter what their contribution or position is. I consider this pretty solid evidence for the original claim.
It's hilarious that the first "answer" to the Quora question "How do you stop a boy from playing with dolls?" is a targeted ad saying "Ad by Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS is how. AWS removes the complexity of building, training, and deploying machine learning models at any scale." ;)
Americans don’t receive enough HEALTH care. Period. When they do it’s a yearly 10 minute appointment with a primary care physician.
The physician breezes in, looks at some lab work, asks a few questions, writes a prescription or two (hey they have to “treat” something), and heads to the next patient because they do not have time.
80% of anti-depressants are prescribed by general practitioners, not psychiatrists:
I know many, many people who were going through something in their life and mentioned being “a little down” to their primary care doctor. They were handed a prescription for an SSRI on the spot. So now they have depression.
General practitioners do not have the time or the training to be diagnosing and treating mental health disorders. This isn’t a case of “look at a rash for 2 seconds and prescribe a topical steroid”. Psychiatrists schedule hour long appointments and many of them will want to see you a few times before they attempt to diagnose or treat anything.
You can receive not enough health care and too much at the same time. It’s a matter of the right quality and appropriate type of health care.
Healthcare costs are equal to the amount of healthcare used multiplied by the cost per use.
Big picture, Americans use a bit less healthcare and an other parts of the world, but they tend to spend about five times as much which is where the costs come in.
You can have mental health care without over prescribing pills. Some people can really benefit from being asked "how does that make you feel" in a place where they can be honest and not have to provide an answer they think is being sought.
I've spoken to a mother whose school-aged daughters' circle of friends, five biological girls, all identify somewhere between trans and nonbinary. The teachers encourage and reward it. So do most of the parents. Among these girls it's uncool to accept the body and sex you were born with. I've read stories of similar clusters in other deep-blue cities and school districts.
I believe we're seeing a massive Clever Hans effect among children whose mentors have deep moral anxiety. They grew up during the final battles and ultimate victory of the LGB rights movement, and desperately wish to avoid being seen "on the wrong side of history." Driven by this anxiety, they aggressively pursue gender-affirming care for their children. They do this even in cases where the child's discomfort may more likely result from depression, autism spectrum disorders, the normal effects of puberty, or other conditions unrelated to gender dysphoria. Their children will bear this moral panic's lasting fallout. The effects of puberty blockers are lifelong and largely unknown. The effects of mastectomies and testosterone injections are irreversible.
The real shame will be felt by those who knew, but said nothing, because they didn't want to lose their personal comfort or social networks. The evidence of most trans children desisting in adulthood is clear. "For decades, follow-up studies of transgender kids have shown that a substantial majority-- anywhere from 65 to 94 percent-- eventually ceased to identify as transgender":
The detransitioner phenomenon has been covered since 2017 (this article got Katie Herzog harassed and fired from The Stranger; she now runs a successful podcast with writer Jesse Singal):
Small correction: while the 2017 Stranger article did lead to Herzog receiving harassment, death threats, and social ostracization, she did not leave The Stranger as a direct result of the article. She was furloughed in 2020 and then laid off during COVID.
The edit timer on my original comment expired, but I didn't want to leave that error hanging out there.
> Now, those sites are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Can't afford to do the right thing.
Which sites?
Tumblr was started in 2007 - it wasn't very big until 2009. I'm not sure why it's even in your comparison.
The only company worth hundreds of billions of dollars remotely relevant is Facebook and - possibly - TikTok. Are you implying that the majority of their business is promoting teen mental illness and eating disorders? Because it's not - especially Facebook. Most of the tweens have moved to TikTok.
Facebook's audience is like ~3% teens & tweens. And of that a small percentage is getting sucked into this strange & toxic echo chamber.
The reason this is mostly a TikTok problem is because Facebook can easily and did do things to prevent this. They could do more, and TikTok can certainly afford to do something about it. The impacts on the top and bottom line would be irrelevant.
I'll end by saying I find it odd we seem to be talking about this being a children only problem. Every time there's a new allergy in the buzz or a new condition - I have at least 100 contacts talking about how they're convinced they have it. This is just typical human behavior - trying to always be the center of attention. Should we be surprised kids want to special? No.
Facebook was one of the websites being criticized for hosting pro-ana content in the late 00s and early 2010s. Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr, Xanga, Livejournal all caught criticism for this; of those only Facebook remains and has arguably lost the demographic of users most susceptible to pro-ana propaganda.
The new 2010s-present wave of social media seems to have largely avoided this sort of controversy. All the focus is now on the way these websites/apps can indoctrinate people into political extremism, but little attention seems to be given to [other sorts of] socially transmissible mental illness.
> Are you implying that the majority of their business is promoting teen mental illness and eating disorders?
These websites will do anything to prevent teens from migrating to a new platform. The majority of content, even teen content, isn't the unhealthy trends, but they will do nothing to curb it if it risks nudging that cohort to a competitor.
Didn't facebook / instagram have to testify before congress only a couple of years ago about what they were doing to fight the body image issues that their platforms were causing in underage users?
It's taboo to criticise such movements because by extension you criticise those that actually have the illness. And some movements have grown quite powerful politically. If you allude that it's problematic to let children change sex, you are painted as anti lgbtixxxx. Activism has won against science.
Being lgbt isn’t a mental illness. Not medically speaking, anyway. Maybe they were considered such in the past. Go far enough back and we used bloodletting as a common treatment, our understanding generally improves with time. I have no desire to go back to an era where lgbt people were persecuted.
With respect to your other point. “Children” is a broad category. Pre-pubescents are not “changing sex”. Instead we are being encouraged to respect their gender identity, and not reject gender-non conforming behaviors [1]. Teens may take puberty blockers to buy time, this also isn’t “changing sex”. Perhaps HRT is what you mean by changing sex, and yes some teenagers are able to access the HRT of their preferred gender. The science on this is pretty clear, that suicide rates of trans people is drastically lowered when in a gender-supportive environment, and their mental well-being is infinitely better.
Edit: despite what a child comment I cannot reply to is saying, while over-medicalization and misdiagnosis is definitely something to watch out for (being gender-nonconforming is not the same as being trans and this is why education about lgbt issues is important), the vast majority of transgender youth do not suffer from an overabundance of societal and medical acceptance for their issues.
Puberty blockers are indeed not a drug to prescribe lightly. Same with SRS, it should not be handed out like candy. People who have only had gender dysphoria for a short time may indeed be better served by a “wait and see” approach. All of these things I can agree with.
If you are under the impression that being trans isn’t stigmatized enough and all the kids might turn trans if we aren’t careful, I’m simply going to disagree with you. There’s no evidence of this.
> Being lgbt isn’t a mental illness. Not medically speaking, anyway.
Medically defining what an "illness" is can get into a lot of squirrely philosophical questions that aren't really scientifically or objectively answerable. We basically just define a mental illness as something that significantly impairs your ability to function happily in life. If society, in general, is intolerant and hostile to you due to that orientation it's not far off to think maybe that's something people might want to take a pill to fix if that was actually possible.
We do recognize, now, that pathologizing being LGBT didn't really do the people with those orientations much good and attempts to reverse or suppress the impulses tended to just lead to worse mental and emotional outcomes. It turned out that simply carving out space in society to accommodate it worked a lot better than turning it into an individual problem to be "solved." And, it turns out, it wasn't that big of a deal to let people live like that after all.
But I'm not sure to what extent a lot of stuff we think of as mental "illnesses" aren't like that as well. Like perhaps a lot of ADHD or anxiety disorders are actually fairly reasonable responses to sociological stressors, but we just treat them as individual problems to fix rather than wide-scale issues to address at a higher level.
ADHD I have some experience with and can agree with you. I think it is mostly just a different mode of thinking that simply isn’t very compatible with sitting in a chair for hours listening to boring lectures. OCD is similar. The mental line between crippling OCD and a highly successful professional career with a reputation of being a “perfectionist” is a thin one. I’ve seen this line crossed, with tragic results…
All that said, I think awareness of mental illness and self-mis-diagnosis largely isn’t the primary problem. The successful person who became a crippling OCD shut-in was convinced OCD was a myth until it was far too late. If only they took it seriously while they still had enough functioning to follow therapy instructions, they might be in a much healthier state right now.
As someone with ADHD, I couldn't disagree more if it's being suggested that ADHD is merely an issue of "not being compatible with sitting in a chair for hours". That's totally not the case and an awful misrepresentation that supports the stigma and encourages those seeking attention for a mental health label they can flaunt.
Sure, there are those that use that as a reason for why they think they have ADHD or an excuse for drug seeking, but it's not the sole symptom, and in some cases not a symptom, for those who legitimately struggle with it. Those who have it, know how crippling it is dealing with the rumination, confusion, irritability, insecurity, regulating emotion, depression that can and often does result from these aspects, among a list of other issues. Not everyone deals with every aspect as it's more of a spectrum than anything, but personally I deal with the ones listed among other things and daily life's been far from an issue of "not being able to sit in a seat/getting bored easily".
I know that severe ADHD is crippling. I've friends with it. It's no joke. I am talking about mild cases only, and would've edited by post but I couldn't. Hopefully this isn't the case anymore, but back in the 90s there was a push to give ADHD drugs to any kid who couldn't sit still for the school lectures.
ADHD here at a higher level of disability. It's way more than a different mode of thinking. It's crippling and the reason I can barely function in any work setting. Medication and therapy throughout my life, since I was 2, only got me to this level. Without it I'd of probably been dead years ago from just following every impulse and getting myself in situations where I'm way over my head and way too stressed to deal with anything.
I agree with you 100%. Sorry for being unclear. I just meant at low levels ADHD can be a different mode of thinking. Much like OCD can simply be a more cautious personality… until it becomes so cautious that it’s disabling and no longer just a “cautious personality” but a completely pathological OCD mode of thinking. It’s important to be aware of both ADHD and OCD and other mental illnesses so that we can seek treatment before the issues become intractable.
That’s interesting. What you said actually reminded me of when I took my dog through obedience training and the trainer told me that a lot of working dog behaviors are basically normal wolf or wild dog impulses tuned to be way way stronger through artificial selection.
So, for instance, shepherd breeds’ herding instincts come from a combination of a sort of compulsive desire to keep things together and a deep suspicious of aberrant. Consequently, these breeds are prone to neuroticism and anxiety when those traits present too strongly.
>Instead we are being encouraged to respect their gender identity,
I, too, can rephrase bad things in superficially-positive language to make them seem like good things.
>The science on this is pretty clear
Ah, off course. THE SCIENCE^TM. The single, monolithic, Science; which by very happy coincidence happens to hold the opinions you deem acceptable.
>[1] I implore you to watch this video
I implore you to understand how bias and cherry picking works, for every heart-wrenching sob story about brave and stunning joe or jane finding their "true self" there are 10 heart-wrenching stories about kids being misled into mutilating their bodies irreversibly by their peers, teachers and caregivers as they chase their mythical true self, and the overwhelming power of state and mass media are on 1 side and not the other, namely that of trans activists.
>If you are under the impression that being trans isn’t stigmatized enough
I'm always amazed by the ability to live in parallel realities that human minds have, it's like sensory data is just an abstract high-level description that isn't enough to determine reality, and each person constructs their own reality by filling in the blank. Like, judging from my experience online, being trans is really really privileged. Is there any other groups (besides the usuals, which are also privileged) that can make public discourse salty against a comedian for 6 or 7 months straight because they made fun of the group ? Is there any case of people being outraged that comedians make fun of men ? Men literally had one of the corporations marketing products for them to shit on them in an ad in 2019, and the whole incident was forgotten in days. Yet, here you are, apparently the group that is coddled and put on a pedestal seemingly everywhere is oppressed and stigmatized.
No one in this thread was claiming that. With the possible exception of aspects of trans, but don’t conflate that with the larger LGB community. Separate issues, and not being discussed here.
Divide and conquer is the latest tactic of anti-LGBT folks. They realized it’s futile to attack the gays (for now) so they are focused on separating the T from LGBT, because trans issues are currently less understood by the broader public (who remains largely ignorant of the issue beyond culture war flashpoints). I’ve seen a lot of people making claims about gender in this thread, imagining themselves to be in opposition to trans “ideology,” while actually being perfectly aligned with it (such as that gender-non-conformity doesn’t make a person trans).
No, it’s the other way around, certain groups have been aligning themselves with other interests through which they attempt to broaden their base of support.
I'm supportive of what you're trying to say and thankful for the video you shared.
Just to add some context the parent author is might be trying to refer to "rapid onset gender dysphoria" ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... ) which, while far out of my understanding, is a rather new topic that's still being studied.
The daily signal is not a reputable source for anything, and most definitely not for trans related topics.
Keira Bell purposefully lied and ignored all guidance and gatekeeping she was given; as she has openly admitted. She proceeded with transitioning, and then decided she was wrong.
Kiera Bell won her initial court case against tavistock and got puberty blockers banned. This ruling has been overruled. The ruling was in direct contradiction Gillick competency, and made zero sense in light of all case law in the UK.
Re tavistock:
> In March, a review of gender identity services for young people led by the paediatrician Hilary Cass confirmed what everyone knew: that the service was under “unsustainable pressure” as demand outstripped capacity, resulting in overwhelmed staff and waiting lists of up to two years that left young people at considerable risk of distress and deteriorating mental health.
> Cass recommended the creation of a network of regional hubs to provide care and support, a recommendation accepted by the NHS.
What are you trying to say here? Problematic isn't a scientific quantity but maybe you're throwing this in from some other context? Personally, these days I see people of all walks invoking science when they just mean "my own common sense."
It’s more that the word science has been redefined.
People confuse their own preference with science. Also, because preference is political, what to research and what science is focused on is a political question.
It's intellectually dishonest to criticize such movements because the vast majority of criticism is coming from people who have never done a lick of study in the fields attempting to diagnose these conditions. Also, apparently it never occurred to people that Google is one of the reasons that more people are getting diagnosed now. Before, people just treated you as weird and allowed you to languish in your own personal little hell. Seeking help at all was seen as a sign of moral weakness. At least now people can go to a doctor and actually get tested for a condition that you recognize having.
By extension it calls into question the whole surge of gender identity issues. Or at least there is a fear that it will. Better to give a wide berth to these issues.
I don't know if it's "impolite" but I do know that you can't troll HN like this. We've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Men cry in the office too, but they're better at hiding it because the social expectations are different. A few times during crunches I've heard men sobbing in the restroom instead of at their desk. Men get told to 'man up', so they bottle it up or hide it.
counterpoint: no. i been in some pretty stressful environments and never reacted like that. same for most guys i know. maybe it's different where you are but i never seen it even in private like that or with close friends.
Men commit suicide 3.8x more than women[1] due to cavalier attitudes such as yours about the mental struggles men face. I'm not saying you're a "part of the problem", I'm just saying you could really benefit from admitting to yourself that yes, men do cry. Yes, men do feel the same emotions as women. Yes, men do have to hold it in for fear of being labeled a "pussy" or be seen as "crying like a little bitch".
This is a little misleading. Men attempt suicide with more reliably lethal methods like firearms, whereas women attempt suicide using more unreliably lethal methods like overdosing on medication [1]. In fact, according to your link, women attempt suicide at a rate of 1.8x that of men [2].
The claim was that the number was due to cavalier attitudes, which is unsupported. I think the added context is important. Maybe you don’t, but others might. The drastic 3.8x number is more a function of the mode of suicide rather than cavalier attitudes, as far as I see it.
Unless you were raised in a forest, you’re also a product of the same environment, that tells boys and men since they are little that they shouldn’t cry.
lots of men do the opposite of crying by reacting with some sort of anger/rage in whatever public outbursts (verbal or physical). I present my younger self as exhibit A to verbal stupidity and admit guilt to all charges in this manner. It wasn't until maybe 10ish years ago that I got tired of just being angry at everything. Maybe I could have gotten there sooner with professional counseling, but that wasn't the manly thing to do.
The stigma of men seeking therapy is something that can only improve. Just don't know how to do it other than speaking positively about it at appropriate times
This. Patriarchy sort of collectively defines the "emotion" out of the ways that men act out. When women cry, they're being emotional, when men get angry, it's a rational response to people acting the wrong way. (Not to mention the fact that the idea of being "emotional" is itself, considered bad somehow!) When you start to notice the ways that men act out emotionally for what they are, it becomes apparent that men are easily as emotional as women (I'd argue much more so), it just manifests in ways that society has deemed manly.
This is the most insightful comment I've read in weeks and I've never thought of things this way before. This changes the way I look at people.
Men and women are just as emotional: The main difference is that men are shamed for being sad/crying, so our emotions end up manifesting as anger instead. Men get angry because they aren't allowed to cry.
I don't know if "They're better at hiding it" is sufficiently negated by responding with "I've never seen it."
Also crying isn't the only form of emotional breakdown. It can also get sublimated into rage which manifests as screaming at subordinates, punching walls, road rage incidents, and domestic violence.
And it also sublimates into depression, which can manifest as substance abuse disorders and self-harm.
I think the OP claim that women are incapable of handling the same workplace pressures as men are is eliding a lot of information.
If women yelled and threw their weight around in the office as much as men they’d be fired immediately. Being emotional isn’t a woman thing, we just react differently to string emotion from men than women.
This is an uninformed and sexist viewpoint of differences between men and women. Women cry more.. men bottle it up and let it out as a form of aggression usually to people who are no the source of stress.
Ask yourself why are men the ones committing mass shootings and not women? There is probably a large mental health gap that needs to be addressed, and the resistance to getting therapy or being in touch with feelings has to do with this “men don’t cry” BS.
> Ask yourself why are men the ones committing mass shootings and not women?
1 reason: testosterone
it promotes aggressive and risky behavior
I agree that sexism is a problem and should be addressed properly, but the untold truth is that mass shootings are the cultural product of a violent society.
while the real issue, IMO, is that Globally, death by suicide occur about 1.8 times more often among males than among females
The bottom line is most men (especially young men, suicide is one of the primary - if not the most common - cause of death for teenagers all around the World) prefer to kill themselves than kill someone else.
Also men make up almost 80 per cent of all homicide victims recorded worldwide.
They are also globally much more involved in protecting other people from life threatening situations.
That's something we should actually focus on, IMO, instead of the derogatory "boys being boys".
Most people who are against sex change operations for children are not transphobic, they just know that children don’t understand lifelong consequences and are trying to muddle through.
I generally agree, but it is a problematic question because even short of operations there are things like hormone treatments that, during development, can have lifelong impacts. Children lack experience and context that may help them make the best possible decision but on the other hand if they forgo treatment until they are a little older & post-pubescent then they may have lost forever a significant opportunity to develop their body in accordance with their wishes. But the same problem can occur if obtaining hormone treatment during critical developmental periods does not ultimately coincide with their identify.
I don't have an answer, but perhaps we'll gradually better understand these things as time goes on, though doing so will require taking a step back from political or ideological thinking on the topic.
>What’s the problem with just leaving it for families and healthcare providers to decide for themselves?
The problem is that self-identifying transgender children are being removed from families when the family has doubts about transition. Writer Lisa Selin Davis covers this extensively:
You're moving the goalposts to a separate issue: The post you're reply to was specifically talking about children receiving medical treatment to address gender dysphoria, not the possibility of a child experiencing gender dysphoria in general. If a teacher feels a child could be unsafe if they expressed they were trans to their family, they might encourage them not to tell them. But the teacher would not have input on any medical decision, that's up to families and healthcare providers.
The issue is what causes a child to experience gender dysphoria (or more accurately what causes a child to believe that their distress at their own body is genuine gender dysphoria rather than a symptom conversion from another psychological issue)?
And then there’s the issue that holding that objective gender exists and is innate in the same way biological sex does is a philosophical / ideological position - other positions exist. My generation (late X) were taught to see people as unique individuals differentiated by sex only for the purposes of reproductive role - that people are born ‘gendered’ is a complete anathema - society should not be in the business of assigning acceptable appearances, behaviours and attitudes to individuals based on their sex, or worse, surgically modifying people such that their apparent sex matches their gender.
(Clarification - surgery is of-course fine as the cure for untreatable gender dysphoria, and in adults as a free choice. My objection is to the belief in appropriate gender norms and appearances as being the correct ordering of individuals in society - I’d rather see a girl with masculine interests remaining comfortable with her female body, rather than asked to question her ‘gender identity’).
That's honestly a difference of opinion as to who should have the "say".
Many trans people that I've talked to have told me that they knew pretty early on. One school of thought says that the actual individual in question should be empowered for themselves. Another school of thought says that the parent has the right to restrict that if it goes against their beliefs.
Very tricky issue. I tend to lean towards personal autonomy. In my own way, I've been denied personal autonomy (even into my early 40s) and I tend to respect that for others. The cost of getting this wrong, regardless of which way the truth lies, can be extremely detrimental to a person's well being. My understanding is that the science points towards transition being appropriate for a person's well being.
In general I support that attitude, as someone who faced worse treatment for who I at home than at school, I wish I had a teacher or two to stick up for me.
Why do you have to be well meaning to criticize? Criticism is criticism. It seems like a no true scottsman fallacy where you can deflect any criticism as not well meaning.
That's another way of doing what we just asked you not to do. Not cool.
You can call moderation 'censorship' if you like - people use that word based on how they feel - but turning what was already a flamewar about other social issues into a generic religious flamewar is obviously against the HN guidelines and therefore obviously off topic here. That's the kind of thing we ban accounts for, and trying to start the same thing up again under a different guise is not ok.
The only reason I ever downloaded TikTok was to watch cringe videos of people cosplaying having multiple personality disorder. I deleted it the same day.
Flamewars are against the site guidelines. Especially generic flamewars, and even more especially generic flamewars on classic flamewar topics.
A generic "religion is superstition" flamewar is the most textbook case in the genre, and also easily avoidable. We don't want that here, so please don't post like that.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Maybe not all religions are created equal; even if it's all made-up, the idea of a benevolent-if-aloof God who wants us to act in each other's best interest seems a little less toxic than losing 50 pounds in all the right places in order to gain approval for having the perfect bikini body.
I love stories. Some of my most transformative experiences were gifted to me by good novels. Metaphors and parables are powerful tools for conveying hard-won lessons.
Fiction can deliver truth. But presenting fiction as fact ruins the whole game.
The concept of (religious fanatics + nuclear weapons) has greatly undermined the old 'utilitarian' argument about the social benefits of religion. For those who haven't heard it, that argument is something like 'yes, religious texts are just fairy tales, but religious belief leads to social cohesion and confers survival advantages on a society, so we should promote it, even though we don't believe in it ourselves.'
Another somewhat more cynical take on the utilitarian argument is that religious believers are conditioned to accept rule by a small elite (aka the feudal aristocracy) and can be more easily manipulated by propaganda.
I buy that argument. I am a 44 year old atheist and even in my life I've seen the difference in society from when being a Christian in the US was just something most people did, to now where we're all much more secular.
Religion's negatives get a lot more press than it's positives.
Promoting cults is all well and good until your neighbor is in the wrong cult and then suddenly it's a disaster. My experience has been that "is religious" is not at all a good predictor of whether someone is going to be a "good citizen." Instead it's "lives in a community with low socioeconomic diversity," where that last one is not "pakistani vs british" but way more specific, like "center-right environmentalist in the middle third of income."
It's probably hard to measure, because there are many reasons to act like you have the delusion, even if you don't.
For example, to avoid physical danger, to avoid social ostracization, to benefit from the social network, to gain power and influence, etc. The delusion (or at least it's theatrics) is part of a bigger social package. It's a bit like product bundling, or subprime mortgage securitization, or suspiciously large wooden gifts.
The good parts are good, and the bad parts benefit from the aggregate value function.
Tangentially related. I think capitalism increases self-reported rates of mental illness because individuals who are not achieving the highest goals they set for themselves are looking for an easy excuse as to why they can't achieve them.
I think levels of anxiety are also on the rise, which causes many symptoms which are similar to more severe mental illnesses. Which also reinforces my first point.
> individuals who are not achieving the highest goals they set for themselves are looking for an easy excuse as to why they can't achieve them.
Other than becoming a social media influencer, what goals are young people actually striving towards? I'm not sure what you're seeing, but I'm not seeing hordes of young people crying because they're trying to become a medical researcher or engineer or achieve some other tangible goal and can't make it for some reason.
No, surely a system in which duties and resources are distributed along the lines of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" will absolutely not encourage people to maximize needs while minimizing abilities.
This is somehow more likely than the possibility that capitalism encourages people to self-diagnose because it's profitable? I think Occam's Razor would suggest that the much simpler explanation is that a nation of supposedly sick people is a great audience to market your panacea to (see: Adderall, opioids, amphetamines, etc.)
If you're going that way you can reasonably say that capitalism is the context that makes some of these things disorders in the first place.
For example it's still not clear to me whether I consider my adhd a disorder in a vacuum. It definitely is here, I can't consistently execute the tasks that that will allow me to safely live.
But there have definitely been times and places where "weirdo who is good with kids, calm in an emergency, and knows a lot of infrequently-used-but-valuable skills" is a role people are allowed to occupy.
I'm definitely disordered within a context where each individual must labor effectively or die. There have been other arrangements though. This is probably true for some, but not all or even maybe most, mental illnesses and neurological disorders as well.
There are some life situations where having ADHD is probably a lifesaver. Those situations are likely far less common these days than 100+ years ago, so that aspect of humanity is now less relevant. But the evolutionary behavior will take a long time to eliminate itself...
There were parts of the book, The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine Aron, which were eye-opening to me in how they illustrated facets of myself (and how they showed the human value of some of those facets). There's definitely a place in the world for fixers, watchers, and people with unusual behaviors.
I suspect there may be uniquely valuable things to be learned or received from autistic people; but we haven't figured out how to bridge the communication gap. So while most people would assume that autistic means broken or useless, it's possible that the rest of us are just not ready or not capable of comprehending what's actually available.
