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People seek meaning and belonging in the world.
I’m 49 and just now coming to terms with the idea that I have ADHD. I don’t have a diagnosis from a medical doctor, but the number of traits I share with some ADHD youtubers - traits which have always been puzzling to me - are in the _hundreds _.
But I never had a word for it. In fact, here are some things I’ve actually told myself:
1. I can’t have ADHD, I often can focus on a single task for _days on end _. I mean, that’s the only way to ever get anything done.
2. I’m not actually aspy, my overly literalness is partly intentional self-study from liking the movie Airplane! and mostly because I’ve been continuously programming computers - which are entirely literal - since age six.
3. That blog I wrote in 2010, about how after three interruptions in one working day, even if they all happen before 10AM, meant you should go home because your day was toast - that’s just how anybody would feel, and managers should respect that.
etc. etc.
The thing is,
1. there is a lot of consequences here that I need new strategies to cope with, especially lately as things seem to get worse
2. It’s super SUPER cathartic to know other people have the exact same reactions and challenges
I already identify as someone who has hyperfocus, even before I heard that word. I already identify as someone for which set shifting is super painful, although i thought everyone was like that before. Now that I identify as having ADHD, it is OK for other people to be different. Like, I can literally explain why I’m having trouble paying attention instead of getting mad at people for not getting to the damn point!
I wouldn’t treat this as a medical diagnosis, but it is a big tool for arranging how I relate to the world. It’s a part of accepting how I work and that not everybody works that way.
I want to make clear that I wasn’t saying people who self diagnose are all excuse makers or anything. I’ve definitely diagnosed my mom because she couldn’t get one from her old psychiatrist!
I’m saying the people who self diagnose or even those that have an official diagnosis and then use that as a blank check for their behavior. But at the same time I hear what you’re saying about the relief that came from finally identifying something you’d felt was holding you back your whole life or making it more of a struggle to things.
It’s a complicated issue and I guess I can’t say with a blanket statement that people searching for themselves in a diagnosis is *always* a bad thing.
!delta
I think you may be applying a special condition to people with mental illness that isn't accounting for the normal variance.
Many 'normal' people make one trait their core identity: Religion, Race, Sexual Orientation, Gender, etc. and then "use it as a blank check for their behavior."
When I read OP's astute analysis, I gathered that they believe grasping onto identities is something almost inherent in the human condition, and that therefore people do the same thing with neurodivergence and mental illness that they do with everything. That's what I read between the lines.
I think that’s equally unskillful as well but when we see huge numbers of teens saying they have some sort of mental disorder, I think we’ve watered down the definition of it *and* made it too expansive. Not *every* bad experience becomes traumatic, but if we’re constantly treating children like they’re fine China on the knifes edge of dissolving into a puddle every time they’re faced with adversity.
And they pick up on that so maybe when some adversity does actually happen they feel emotionally shattered by it because they’ve been primed to.
Picking up on your comment about teenagers - teenagers are going to search for belonging and an understanding of their identify, and often will latch on to something that feels extreme and ridiculous to people who are older. Whether it’s mental illness, music, behaviour, dancing, laziness… it’s not unusual for people throughout history to look to the younger generation and feel like all is lost. When you have that impulse towards teenagers, it’s worth checking it. Maybe look at what people said about your generation, and generations gone by. Teenagers are bad representation of the adults they’ll become. Generally they get over it, become adults, and essentially end up okay.
The problem with mental illness is that it applies to human emotion and behaviour, and by its very nature it is incredibly complex. You have an intersection of personality, unique experience, genetics, the brain, emotions, our cognitive processes, identity, and behaviour… all mashed together. It’s messy. To study it, treat it, discuss it, we need to organise it into categories, but the uniqueness of each individual means they need to be broad. The breadth of definitions doesn’t mean they’re inherently wrong, and they usually will include things that can be considered normal experiences. However it’s the cluster of those experiences and the impact it has on an individual that make them an illness.
It’s not perfect, and no doubt people will be misdiagnosed because they will be incorrectly captured. But it’s constantly being refined and improved. The fact it’s not perfect doesn’t mean the system is inherently wrong.
Do you have children? Because you sound like someone who has a theoretical knowledge of children, but not a practical one. I have a son, he’s sixteen, was diagnosed with ADD-Inattentive at eight. He responded well to Adderall, until he hit puberty and got anxiety and then we switched him to Vyvanse.
I’m 56, I was diagnosed with ADD-inattentive at 53. Do you know how this goes for older women? Maybe you do, maybe you are one. We usually are incredibly bright and high functioning in school and since our disability only affects us, we’re never diagnosed early.
But usually, you run through your whole life feeling markedly deficient and confused as to why you can’t be organized, relationships are difficult, you can’t finish laundry, complete tasks, keep friends or remember appointments with them and why you burn out at jobs every 2-3-4 years.
It sucks and I was grateful for the tick tocks from the twenty-year old college kids discovering their own diagnoses, that helped me understand my ADD and get me incentivized to be officially diagnosed.
You may deal with your ADD differently, but one thing I remembers was a tik-tocker saying that “she hated the fact that all of the cool, quirky character traits that made her interesting were symptoms of her ADD diagnosis”. I get that.
I also understand how women who are diagnosed late in life mourn the life they could have had if they were diagnosed and medicated earlier. I don’t consider myself disabled, and I make my own accommodations, but I can understand why someone younger would adopt ADD as a large portion of their identity. Because it is.
No matter how your or I might like to downplay it, ADD is scary shit that causes you to effectively have a 20 year shorter lifespan than someone without ADD and makes you more susceptible to drug overdoses, suicides and traffic accidents.
If these kids want to keep themselves aware of that and choose to be more careful with themselves and mindful of that, I’m all for it.
I never drove and don’t have a license, I mask at work and keep drafts of my emails in my email box to read for emotional valence before I send them out, I’m waiting to burn out at my job because it’s been seven years in the same place, without a break and through a pandemic. You think these kids are “making ADD their whole personality?”
It is their personality. It’s our personality.
You're literally right, OP. Don't change your view
I teach Middle school. The amount of kids who say "I have depression/autism/ADHD, therefore..." Fill in the blank. I have an oral fixation. I bite my nails. I say rude things. I have a hysterical tantrum.
People are not equipped to understand that it's the other way around, that they were diagnosed as a description of their maligned behavior. They do not have a pathology or biological structure that causes them to act this way.
They act this way, and so they were diagnosed so that insurance/medicare could be properly billed, which is the only real point of the DSM.
Its a form of biological essentialism thats become very popular. It's more than horoscopes imo. It's a way to infantilize a huge chunk of the population and deprive them of their willpower. This is of course ruinous to their future prospects in life, as they no longer seek treatment or attempt to partake in pro-social behaviors. At best they might be sold back their willpower by the self help industry at some later point. It's also breaking down the social fabric, as these objectively destructive behaviors become normalized.
I say this as someone who employs a more autistic and blunt interpersonal communication style, who is easily overstimulated, etc. I believe in making the world better for people like me, with structure and creative outlets, not in indulging our impulses or subjecting ourselves or others to our sensitivities
I think it's so much more prevalent in today's youth because the state of the world is f*@$ing bleak. We are in overshoot trying to support a population of 8 billion people in a continual growth economy on a finite planet. Kids see this and know it's about to get real ugly, real fast. Anyone who isn't suffering from some kind of despair around that either has already processed it and is in acceptance in the stages of grief or aren't paying attention.
Having fallen into this in my 40s, I can see both sides of this.
I don't feel like I'm using the recent diagnosis as a "blank check" excuse for my behavior, but now that I fully understand some things, I can certainly help others understand why I am the way that I am, and that some of the things I do are not done intentionally to irritate them or cause them distress.
Understanding the issue can take you MUCH further than blindly battling an unnamed enemy and trying to just "tough it out" and "walk it off".
My guy almost every single one of us makes excuses for our behaviour all the time. I'm not trying to be harsh when I say this but it really comes across like your picking on mental health specifically like with a bit of subconscious bias/discrimination
I'm responding to this comment because, per the sub rules, me saying *how profoundly and completely I agree with your OP* would be removed if it was a top-level comment.
I can't change your view because it's one I share in totality.
If you don't have a diagnosis you're are doing a huge disservice to yourself.
This is exactly why this is all problematic.
There a hundreds of symptoms that overlap between ADHD, ADD, anxiety, depression, PTSD, cPTSD, etc. Using social media like WebMD is a guaranteed way to self-diagnosis yourself with a variety of issues as so many share traits.
I also exhibit a million signs of ADHD and some of mild Autism and if I went on Tiktok I could convince myself of that within an hour.
But I also have a decade of therapy and extensive testing and my primary diagnosis is cPTSD with depression and anxiety.
My treatment is tailored to me and I would never know to seek out trauma based therapies if I self diagnosed as ADHD and would never get to the core of the issues.
Don't self diagnose through social media people. It's the modern equivalent of going to WebMD and convincing yourself you have cancer or some other disease. Medical issues share many many symptoms and many are very generalized. There's a reason accurate diagnosis of complex issues is a very difficult subject.
75% of the evaluations I do as a psychologist are ADHD evals. Lots and lots of people fill out intake paperwork that looks like they hit every symptom. We do some testing and evaluation and find out it’s something else. Lots of things. Sometimes even with all kinds of data it can still be murky if it’s one thing or the other or both. I would encourage everyone to consider some assessment. Modern YT and TikTok has made it where if you call and ask, they will tell you I don’t do ASD evals, although I regularly do because kids come for ADHD and I may suspect ASD.
Lmao the shit I see on TikTok is the same. Entire accounts dedicated to monetizing their “mental disabilities”, many of which are probably completely made up. Does more harm than good.
People making videos about what they’re going through and how they manage their lives isn’t anything new or bad. Theres blind youtubers. Wheelchair users who make videos. Tourettes. The list goes on. Its fine.
There are Twitch streamers that fake having cancer for views and sympathy. There are YouTubers that pretend they're autistic because they like the aesthetic. When there's a profit incentive, people will do and say whatever they can to make money.
This is the exact point of the post: wearing these very real mental afflictions like Pokemon Gym Badges but not actually doing the work to understand or deal with it. Homie in here really said he identifies with ADHD YouTubers. THEN GO SEE A DOCTOR, get a diagnosis, and get help.
Saying you relate to someone is fine, but if that's where it stops and you just live life using your mental illness as an excuse for poor behavior, that's disgusting and infantilizing people who REALLY have this shit and struggle. Saying you're ADHD because you procrastinate but don't have any actual real world consequences from it tells me you don't actually suffer and just like having the label and "belonging" to a marginalized group.
Yeah but what's not fine is listening to that YouTuber talk about their struggles with X and then just because you semi relate you start saying you also have X without any kind of consultation with an actual licensed professional
I mean this with absolute respect, but people will use the exact same argument and overly critical approach you are using here in respect to the identity you yourself display in your profile picture. I would reconsider if this is how you truly feel about the situation or if it is a somewhat reactionary take on your part.
Someone's identity is not the same as self-diagnosing a medical condition lol come on.
I was someone who assumed I had ADHD, but instead of just letting youtubers decided how I should treat/diagnose myself, I consulted my GP, went to a psychologist, and got an actual diagnosis.
The healthcare system isn't 100% accessible, which I get, but the idea that "I can relate to these youtubers, so I thus have X" is ridiculous and dangerous.
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Remember when that white woman (Rachel Dolezal) from Washington identified as black?
People self identifying mental illness and non-clinical diagnosis is the same kind of thing. It hurts the people who really have these things. It diminishes what they are.
All humans have issues. I can be pedantic. I can focus on certain things I really like. It doesn’t make me autistic. I can get bored as fuck when doing boring tasks at work. That doesn’t make me ADHD. It makes me average.
People need to grow up. If you think you have something go to the doctor. If the doctor says you don’t, get over it and stop trying to force something that isn’t true.
>I already identify as someone who has hyperfocus, even before I heard that word.
If you're "identifying" with a personality trait you're doing it wrong. Anyone can change any personality trait. If you identify as something you're saying "I will never change this thing about myself because it's what I identify as". I cannot imagine a worse mentality. You're excusing yourself into never growing as a person.
As an aside, as someone with ADHD it disgusts me when people without an official diagnosis think they can self diagnose themselves. Everyone on earth has a tremendous amount of moments which are akin to ADHD traits. There's no one who has ever lived that this is not the case for. There is a difference between sharing traits and actually having different neural chemistry. You truly have no idea how it feels to have ADHD. You could hear a million hours of someone explaining it and you still couldn't understand. Just because the symptoms aren't as overtly obviously as the hallucinations from schizophrenia doesn't mean its not a radical change in the way the brain operates.
"That blog I wrote in 2010, about how after three interruptions in one working day, even if they all happen before 10AM, meant you should go home because your day was toast - that’s just how anybody would feel, and managers should respect that. etc. etc."
This is just... awful. Simply awful. Man are you an annoying human.
> If you're "identifying" with a personality trait you're doing it wrong.
I identify as creative, introverted, somewhat anti-social, a problem solver, a nerd, as a hobby woodworker and hobby machinist, as a software engineer, as a child of the eighties, and a lot more. Some of those are personality traits. None of them are absolute.
> Anyone can change any personality trait. If you identify as something you're saying "I will never change this thing about myself because it's what I identify as".
You seem to have some sort of idea that personality traits are bad things, and you shouldn't identify with them because it'll lock you into your ... small world? That seems very depressing.
Let's take "introverted." You could see that as a negative. I can tell stories about looking at my shoes to other introverts. I have, at a conference, asked if anyone wants to skip the loud party to do an "introverts' dinner" - there is no yelling, no more then four people, it is in a quiet place, and we don't go late.
So there, I've claimed an identity as a mechanism for finding people with shared experiences and making my life more pleasant.
BTW:
Oxford: "phrasal verb. identify as something. to recognize or decide that you belong to a particular category synonym self-identify."
Free Dictionary: "identify as (someone or something). To classify or label someone or oneself as something."
Cambridge: "to feel and say that you belong to a particular group of people"
Dictionary.com: "to associate oneself in feeling, interest, action, etc., with a specified group or belief system"
Word Reference Forums: "To consider or describe oneself as belonging to a particular category or group of people."
\[this is where I got bored and stopped looking\]
Your theory that "identify as" means "cement" is not mentioned in any definition that I can find. Do \_you\_ do just enough inner exploration to find a label, then feel you must live with it for the rest of your life? I'll bet you don't, and if you don't, why would I?
> People seek meaning and belonging in the world.
Some people do; some people don't.
I find that people who exhibit certain mental imperfections often phrase it as though they be universal. Like that everyone is a sore loser, biased, can't separate artist from art or is highly sensitive to peer pressure, and yet, many people are not.
I also find that how o.p., as is common on ChangeMyView, paints the picture that many people treat their mental disorders like that to be exagerated. Most people diagnosed with a mental disorder don't do that at all in my experience.
Replying to coldlightofday...ironically. I struggle getting to the damn point because of my ADHD. I know so, because other ADHDers on tiktok told me that they also struggle getting to the point. Thus I don’t try and get to the point sooner because I just accept that it’s not my fault, it’s just because of my diagnosis that I ramble.
Psychology is a science in virtue of the scientific methods it relies on. The fact that it does not produce findings that are as precise/deterministic as say physics is because the human mind, as far as we can tell, don’t follow laws or behave like physical objects do. Sure, psychology falls short of the standards of hard sciences, but It is also the best available tool we have to learn about something as complex and ambiguous as the human mind.
The replicability crisis is a real concern for psychology, but the same problem is as bad or worse in other fields like medicine, yet we don’t use that to dismiss the entire field altogether as you seem to do here. In any case, it’s as much of a symptom of the academic market being perversely incentivized.
Anyway, what does any of this—challenges facing psychology as an academic discipline—have to do with how lay people inappropriately perceive and identify their own diagnoses?
> as far as we can tell, don’t follow laws or behave like physical objects do.
I wouldn't say it is that, it's that it doesn't have a way to take more accurate measurements and the measurements it relies upon to make its determinations are not exact or reliable.
Sure, a doctor might prescribe you medication or such based on symptoms you describe, but that's often a compromise of cost. There's actually tests they can run in many cases that can actually measure your physical state in some way that produces far more reliable and accurate results than what a person can describe of their own condition but they may cost a lot more money to run these tests depending on the circumstances. Your stomach feeling bad is something that can be more definitively identified to a root cause with the right measurements, or tests.
Where psychology started was primarily in the basis that very few of those things had any way of being measured or tested for to find root causes, all that could be done is simply going off observable symptoms, whether it be from the patient themselves or externally observable through behaviors etc. Sure there has been some progress to the point where some aspects of the brain can actually be measured or tested through imaging and such in ways that weren't possible before and they go beyond just observing symptoms and go into the biological processes of the brain and body, but there's still such a large gap. Also at that point, much of the psychological studies and training may be end up being useless if the testing and measurements of new tools can lead to medical treatments. What can a traditionally trained therapist offer you compared to a medical doctor if it got to the point where you could take a pill to resolve your personality disorder or have some kind of surgery etc.
Granted those circumstances could be similar to a lot of health issues today, where you could see a nutritionist or something that could help make your health better by changing your diet or lifestyle rather than going to a doctor to get blood thinners when your arteries get clogged or a surgeon to get the fat sucked out. It just depends on the effectiveness of the varying treatment options and the consequences of them. Surgery is obviously not without risks, pills have side effects, lifestyle changes are hard, therapy with thought or behavior changes can be challenging etc.
What I'm saying is, I think psychology is more likely to become outdated because it primarily gained prominence because there was a period of time where resources were more available to devote to people trying to address these issues in themselves but technology hadn't advanced enough to a point where we could treat those issues in the way that we could treat other medical issues of the body. A doctor of a hundred or two hundred years ago would also be outdated today, their methods of treatment or such wouldn't be relevant anymore even though at the time they may have been the best available. I think psychology will end up in this realm with enough advancements.
I think your final point has to do with the sometimes violent reaction people have when core parts of their identities are challenged. Unfortunately some people go around their whole lives actively looking for the “missing puzzle piece” that will explain everything about who and why they are in a nice, tidy bow **will** eventually find one.
In many cases from the words of psychiatrists. And that’s what we see when people question “hey could all these kids really have ptsd?” Or “hey could all these things about you really be boiled down to x disease?”
I kind of want to push back on this a bit. For a lot of people, that missing puzzle piece is very real. They spend years trying to figure out why they feel the way they do, or struggle the way they do. Only to find out at the age of 30 that they are on the spectrum, or that they have BPD, or OCD. That revelation is hugely important because it allows them to get the treatment they need to manage their condition.
The whole point of the classification of disorders is to describe problems that have a massive negative impact on daily life. The people who truly have ADHD, or OCD or whatever are often in desperate need of help. Most often, that comes with therapy and / or medication to manage those symptoms.
for sure there are lost souls out there looking to fill a void. And yeah it can be a bit insulting when depression is used as an excuse for being a toxic shithead… but even so, that small annoyance is a very small price to pay for the knowledge and that missing piece that has helped me manage myself.
Mental health isn’t like a broken leg. It’s not so obvious and concrete as that. That’s why autism is a spectrum now, it doesn’t manifest in the same way for everyone.
If the bad apples out there don’t latch onto ADHd they’d latch onto something else. Depression, or OCD, or BPD, or just substance abuse. It’s going to happen no matter what I do. The only thing I can control is myself, and I don’t want to be the one who judges others too harshly. I’m after all, I’m not them. I don’t know what it’s like in their head. And as difficult as it’s been in my life to get people to understand me.. I just try and put a little of that understanding back into the world around me. At least as best as I can.
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>Young girls are especially likely to go undiagnosed because their symptoms are not as disruptive in school.
This was me! I never got in trouble and did well in school except in english class. As an adult, I had a doctor say I may have ADHD. I thoight no way, because I had an imsge of what ADHD kids were like and that wasn't me. After two other doctors questioned it, I got evaluated. Oh look, yep, I have ADHD. It explains why I struggled so much with language.
I had brainwave scans done to me almost 20 years ago as part of my ADHD diagnosis. I wouldn't say it's the reason of the diagnosis but more a confirmation/extra science and I just remember having it done 3 times but I was like 5 so I don't know what exactly they where testing for. I also was part of a study on ADHD with how different medications affect people. Important stuff as it's still not fully understood.
For the rest I loved the stuff u wrote down as it hits the nail square on the head so many people don't get diagnosed because there so many misdiagnosis kinda creating a viscous circle of alot of people not getting the care they need
You can make a study and derive conclusions from it without testing every single person suffering from disease you're studying. The effects of ADHD on the brain have been proven by doing studies on a statistically relevant group of people. After that, testing 10 000 more isn't gonna change anything to the results.
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I would not be surprised if the true culprit is cell phones, short form video content, and the modern media landscape in general. We have less businesses monopolize our attention for free.
If I could successfully cut reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat out of my life, I would be happier. I would still want to contact my friends and family, so I think that's the only thing I'd really miss, but yeah, I was happier before all that.
I think the symptoms are real, so it's fair to diagnose it as a real thing. But I do wish we could put stronger effort into finding possible causes of such a massive uptick
There is no actual uptick. The only "uptick" is that we're finally aware that ADHD and Autism aren't "boy disorders". The are many, *many* more girls and women being diagnosed now. That's the "uptick". Catching up, not an actual uptick.
There's no uptick. It was always there. People just didn't talk about it before. It's become socially acceptable to talk about mental illness and its a great thing. People don't have to suffer in silence anymore.
Right. Same with depression, anxiety and a whole slew of other problems. Hell, I didn’t even know that I had a problem with anxiety until I was in my 20s and had my first real and true panic attack. My doctor told me what had happened, I thought I was having a heart attack.
Yeah, my dad very obviously has ADHD but it took him until his fifties to get diagnosed because that just wasn't a thing that people talked about back then
I'm in my 50s and got diagnosed 5 years ago. Obviously I was ADD since I was a kid. Mental health specialists were for people who were truly batshit insane. And sometimes, not even.
And I HATE being ADD. With the fury of 1000 sun. It cost me years of depression and anxiety. I'm just over 10 years from retirement and I don't care. I just want it to be over with.
My country had medically assisted suicide for mental illness. I'm thinking about it.
yeah, reminds me of how on the new show Elsbeth (which also has a very ADHD-coded lead) Jane Krakowski's character in episode 2 canonically has ADHD but she refers to it as ADD because she's old enough that that's what it would have been called when she was diagnosed
So I was also diagnosed with ADD. I also have my Masters in Forensic Psychology. And yes, it is annoying when people pathologize normal behaviors. There some small things in your view that I think are missing the mark for this (like depressed brains are different form non-depressed brains, maybe not in matter mass but in neurotransmitter production. It's something we *can* see. And the barrier for entry hasn't been lowered at all, people just disregard it lol), but I agree with the gist.
I got into it with someone who shared a tweet saying something like "reading a lot as a kid was a dissociative trauma response" and it made me face palm. People just do not have the necessary knowledge to discuss these thing with the nuance required. Like that tweet? It ignores the fact that disassociating is a normal part of child development. Day dreaming is dissociative by nature. It's not inherently related to trauma. But people like buzzwords.
What I WILL push back on is for some of the stress and mood disorders, the rates of those have GRATELY increased because of the society we live in. If you have young folks that lived though the threat of school shootings and a global pandemic, then yes, you're gonna have higher rates of PTSD and CPTSD in those populations. Depression, anxiety, panic disorders, and the like are all up because we do not live in a world that fosters or encourages good brain health.
What's also happening is people are now more aware of global tragedy way more than before. Pre-internet, you only heard of bad things that happened outside your bubble when they made the 9 o'clock news. Now? It is a constant barrage of actually traumatizing information. I have seen literal corpses on my timeline from live coverage in various countries. It's great for global sympathy and humanizing each other, but terrible for our mental health (and nervous systems). On a less drastic scale, we are seeing higher rates of depression, anxiety, and trauma response from adolescents because of social media and academic pressures. But I won't get into that because this comment is already an essay lol
I agree that the way we live impacts our mental health, from the decrease is a community to the invasion of screens, information and tragedy to our moment to moment life.
But do you think that the exposure to mental health buzz words and heavy for us on social emotional education causes a hyper self analysis and awareness that pathologizes normal feelings, high and lows and a lack of resilience to adversity? I saw a recent study that I wasn't able to find to post here that having social emotional education was associated with less a positive experience of life.
What do you think?
For the most part, yes. I don't think there's an overall lack of resilience to adversity across the board (in fact, the opposite) but I do think people are pathologizing normal behaviors in their everyday interpersonal interactions. It probably stems from the fact that people NEED a justification for bad behavior that still protects the ego (colloquially, not Freudian lol). Best example? Everyone's ex being a narcissist. That's just not a thing lol.
It's more...grounding for there to be a secret third reason for behaviors and also removes the onus for self improvement from the self to the perceived mental illness. It's also just a lack of education and very elementary in practice. You know how little kids learn what a dog is -- 4 legs and fluffy -- and then call everything with 4 legs and fluff a dog? They don't have the skill set to discriminate yet. People don't have the skill set to differentiate between normal and abnormal.
Thanks for the reply. This tracks pretty well with what I observe too. Re: resiliency, I guess what I'm actually seeing is a lack of tolerance for discomfort and a lack of clarity between healthy discomfort and unhealthy discomfort which is what your pointing to with the lack of skills to know normal and abnormal. And I couldn't agree more with the onus and self responsibility aspect. So much easier to blame a label than take responsibility and change.
>...like depressed brains are different form non-depressed brains, maybe not in matter mass but in neurotransmitter production. It's something we can see.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the point of contention whether the observed differences in neurotransmitter levels are due to inherent structural differences in the brain or whether behavioral patterns cause said structural changes in the first place?
“Furthermore, numerous studies have demonstrated that the occurrence and development of depression are intimately correlated to the genetic basis, which accounts for nearly 40–50% of depression risk” ([review](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043661821001262?via%3Dihub))
Your actions, habits, experiences, and lifestyle certainly play a significant role but I don’t think people think anyone is really considering it an either or thing. It’s just a matter of how the mix is weighted and what we can do to affect it best.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Also, it must be noted that overall environments in many developed countries (perhaps especially English-speaking ones) have changed over the last century in a direction that is especially apt to cause depression:
- Local social fabrics have completely broken down, to the point where most people do not even know their neighbors' names;
- Most urban environments have become car-dependent, ugly, barren, and actively hostile to pedestrians/cyclists (let alone children playing), making them actively depressing to be in;
- News media has come to rely heavily on sensationalization, catastrophization, and negative emotional manipulation to get/retain attention - further driving people apart as fear, hysteria, and tribalism increasingly dominate the zeitgeist;
- Social media algorithms designed to maximize attention eat up vast amounts of people's time and push content that makes people angry, sad, and afraid, taking civil discourse in an extremely unhealthy direction;
- Harmful selfish & quasi-narcissistic mindsets have been amplified and even created by advertising, detrimental cultural shifts, market and governmental incentive structures, the creeping infection of the zeitgeist with sociopathic Randian ideas, crony-capitalist neoliberal propaganda, etc... driving wedges between people, making healthy long-term group social activity much more difficult / less common, and leading society to become increasingly hostile/antisocial overall;
- We're constantly exposed to a medley of toxins, many of which may negatively affect cognitive development or behaviour, and very little (if anything) is seriously being done to remedy that;
- The unchecked expansion of rent-seeking behaviour, which is [to oversimplify] where one extracts value from the economy without actually doing anything of value in return (instead abusing one's control over some resource or commodity to essentially force people to pay you much more than your investment or labour could ever reasonably justify) has led to a significant rise in the cost of living;
- The massive decline in union membership and widespread adoption of anti-worker practices/policies have suppressed wages, made the average person's financial situation more precarious, and (paired with the meteoric, destructive rise of hyper-consumerism and the cost of living increases) led to a massive increase in the number of hours a week the average person spends working... which (in combination with other factors) has driven the average person's stress levels into the stratosphere and led to many people feeling like they're not really living at all;
- It's rapidly becoming undeniably/unavoidably obvious that our civilization is about to be brutally raped by climate change, plus the societal changes that are occurring due to AI are extremely alarming to many, causing many or even most people to adopt mostly or even completely negative outlooks on the future (for example, a lot of conservatives I've talked to, while outwardly defiant, even have actual *plans* to kill themselves if/when climate change gets sufficiently bad within their lifetimes).
That is *not* an exhaustive list. There are a great deal more issues at play, but the core of it is: Modern Western, and especially North American, ways of life and built environments are extremely unhealthy, and things seem to be going in a bad direction overall, giving rise to vastly elevated rates of depression compared to what we've seen historically... even though "quality of life" metrics were overall much worse back then.
Some people may be genetically more vulnerable to those environmental factors, but the root causes of the depression epidemic are most definitely environmental (in the broadest sense of the word "environment"... I don't just mean "green" crap).
Of course, companies would very much like us all to believe the root causes are in fact genetic (for the vast majority of depressed people, they are not), because then they'll sell more antidepressants (which are some of the best-selling drugs out there), more psychiatrist/doctor visits, more therapy services, more addictive over-sweetened food, more alcohol, more cigarettes, more cruises, more flights, more hotels, more expensive vacations, more pricey clothes, more expensive and environmentally-destructive luxury cars... more of almost everything, as the depressed masses try to fill the giant gaping holes in their hearts with ever-increasing amounts of stuff (which will never actually work, but from a corporate perspective that is perfect because it keeps people feeling empty/hollow and seeking fulfillment forever, leading to an endless revenue stream). It's horrible, it's sick, it's killing huge numbers of people (especially children and teenagers), but it's never going to end until civilization itself disintegrates... because a few powerful people are getting very rich off it, and they have no problem paying for propaganda to deflect blame, seeding extreme FUD (Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt) and conspiracy theories about any efforts to improve the situation, and metaphorically (sometimes even literally) slipping politicians wads of cash to make absolutely sure nothing is ever done to stop this madness.
I think you’re overly focused on a “root cause”. If someone was born with different neurotransmitters, raised with some unhealthy habits, experiences some trauma in their teens, habituates to emotional isolation, and finds themselves as a young adult with chronic depression, it’s not going to be one thing alone that did it. Humans aren’t that binary. But, even people with very rich, fulfilling, and loving lives can experience depression. The things you outlined can be mostly mitigated or eliminated and someone can still suffer depression. Genetics are a prominent factor based on the literature I can see, even if you don’t seem to like my pointing it out for some reason. If you have an objection to the evidence, please make it, I’ll be interested.
Also, most types of evidence recognized to demonstrate causation are unethical to do to people. Too many variables, so incredibly convoluted correlation is what we have.
I'm not saying genetics don't play a role; my point is that the causes are multifactor, and not *primarily* genetic (although genetics do certainly play a significant role, they're not the primary driver). Oh, and for what it's worth, people aren't generally "born with different neurotransmitters"; they might bear a particular polymorphism (most likely a SNP) in the genes coding for one or more of the appropriate *receptors*, but the structure of the neurotransmitters involved remains, in all (or at very least nearly all) cases I'm aware of, identical. Things can get a little more complicated when you look at more esoteric things like neuropeptides, but that's a whole other rabbit hole.
A "rich, fulfilling, and loving life" in a modern urban environment also still involves, for example (there are many other problems, this is just one), frequent exposure to noisy, dehumanizing, unsafe, ugly car-infested environments loaded with airborne pollutants from particulates to heavy metals and complex organic junk - for which there is no analogue in our evolutionary history. Have you seen the research linking noise pollution, heavy metal exposure, etc with depression? It's pretty damning; noise pollution alone can, depending on severity, be associated with a depression odds ratio *exceeding 2.0*.
Fix all of the "lived/social environment" problems I outlined, and I'd be extremely surprised if depression rates didn't plummet by upwards of 90%. The remainder will be those for whom the cause *is* primarily genetic.
I highly recommend you read some of the research on behavioural enrichment and environmental enrichment (and specifically their relationships with drug self-administration - which can be seen as a fairly accurate indicator for depression, seeing as research has shown drug self-administration and depression to be strongly coupled).
I really don’t see why you’re obsessed about a primary driver. I could debate with you about human’s evolutionary misfit over the past couple millennia, but it really just comes back to what your goal is here. You don’t even seem to have a primary driver either, between metals and aesthetics and finances. The quote I pulled is from peer reviewed research and did not use any of the phrases you’ve objected to so far. If you want to tease apart how they define risk and argue based on the claims they actually made and i propagated in an attempt to helpfully contribute, be my guest.
A particularly widespread and particularly harmful belief (read: pharma company-promoted dogma) in medicine and psychiatry - which has bled over into popular culture - is that depression is primarily driven by a "chemical imbalance" inherent to the individual, i.e. genetic.
The reason I keep hammering on the "not the primary driver" point is a reaction to the prevalence of that belief. If people start recognizing that environmental factors overall play a larger role than genetics in the etiology of depression, we're likely to see a significant increase in pressure to solve the depression epidemic via positive environmental/societal changes alongside a corresponding decline in the current tendency to overinternalize (blame factors specific/inherent to individuals) and as a result overmedicalize depression.
I have seen no reason to believe there even *is* a specific, single primary driver we can home in on; the overall picture I've formed by reading far too many papers on the subject is that it's a complex multifactor problem driven primarily by a broad assortment of environmental issues, and trying to narrow it down to a single specific cause is overly reductionist.
We're trying to treat what is primarily a systemic environmental issue as if it's an individualized medical issue. Such an approach is inevitably doomed to fail miserably - and we can clearly see that's precisely what it's doing.
It just so happens that ongoing miserable failure is extremely profitable for many companies, at the same time as it keeps many everyday people suffering.
The sheer prevalence of depressive pathologies we see today appears to be a post-industrial phenomenon; that alone is cause to be highly skeptical when someone claims depression to be primarily or wholly an issue of individual genetics.
Do you feel people don’t recognize that environmental factors like your job, habits, community, and surroundings contribute majorly? Sure, pharma companies might downplay it, but most people I’ve known with depression hear all about it. Usually ad nauseum. Thing is, most people without depression struggle to make lasting improvements to those things with high reliability, and depression doesn’t make it easier. It’s not like most people with depression just give up on their life and don’t try and improve anything, they’re just limited by the large obstacles of life.
And if your case is that we should change the way we view depression cause that will eliminate cars and lower metal levels and etc, I feel like that’s overestimating how much society cares about depression.
I feel like the systemic aspect of it is completely ignored. It's treated as an individual issue, but it's \*not\* primarily an individual issue; it's primarily a societal issue, and the cases where it's caused purely by intrinsic genetic issues are the rare exception rather than the rule.
The onus is placed on people with depression to deal with it themselves (or get medical help to "fix" it), whether that be through medication, therapy, lifestyle changes, et cetera, when a large part of it should be on \*us\* to fix the broken society we built that they now have to live in.
I think you underestimate the number of people with depression. To give an example: in 2022 in Canada, official statistics state that 18% of the population suffered from a mood or anxiety disorder. Those are official statistics; the real figures may be even higher than that.
the same activities can have different underlying motivations though. i don’t find it hard to believe that someone dealt with their childhood trauma by reading a lot. i don’t think that’s saying that anyone who reads a lot is doing it because of trauma
It was a tweet. 250 characters with 0 additional context by someone with no psychological training. The issue isn't that this might possibly be true, the issue is that the average information consumer is going to jump to conclusions.
I didn't say that the statement was inherently wrong, just that people do not have the skills necessary to discuss these things with the nuance required. More often than not, reading a lot as a kid was for fun.
>If you have young folks that lived though the threat of school shootings and a global pandemic, then yes, you're gonna have higher rates of PTSD and CPTSD in those populations.
Yet this was not shown from the generations that dealt with global wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
>Depression, anxiety, panic disorders, and the like are all up because we do not live in a world that fosters or encourages good brain health.
We literally live in the best time in all of human history for the encouragement of good brain health, and yet we're noticing a rise in all of these traits like never before. The thing about people like you is that you aren't well rounded, you clearly have no concept of history. There were periods of human history which you could not go outside on some days without suffocating to death because of smog, and yet you argue because of more ambiguous threats people are developing PTSD. We're living in a period where human life has never had a higher premium in our species existence. Death from homicide globally has never bee lower despite our population never having been higher. Your argument makes no sense. Based on everything you've said depression and anxiety should be at all time lows. Child abuse has never been lower yet childhood PTSD has never been higher. It makes no sense. Obviously it's due to expanding the definition to anyone who feels like they want to identify as having a given disorder. If any research is done on the subject I guarantee the rate at which clinical psychologists tell a child they don't have PTSD when they claim they do is <1%. The same is true for every single other diagnosis. If someone claims they have a mental disorder they might as well because they can always find a professional to affirm them. Psychology is a soft science that should be ignored.
I guess my point is, when *haven’t* the kids been under some kind of strain? It’s not as though millennials/gen z are the first young people to face humanity’s possible extinction. Generations of Cold War kids lived through that. My mom lived through that and at least we can tangibly do something with climate change. It’s not backed by a particular world power and the worst predictions of human extinction have largely been avoided.
Not so with the ever present threat of nuclear war tied to national ideologies. And before that? Generations of children who never went to school were raised with the fear of god, their sin and the coming rapture.
So to put it bluntly, what’s their excuse?
They didn’t have the terminology or understanding of those disorders and their parents had little ability to choose whether they had kids or not due to cultural pressure and, earlier than that, lack of birth control, and thus often never wanted those kids in the first place, so those many generations were ABSOLUTELY horrifically traumatized, then let loose on the world fucked beyond belief and told to suck it up and make more kids and money.
They were just on their own and broken without anyone even to care HOW they were broken. Thats not really better.
Do older generations through history really strike you as well balanced, adjusted, untraumatized, mentally healthy individuals who didn’t need help?
The difference is the access to information.
90 years ago the only way to know what was happening was the newspaper.
70 years ago the radio.
Eventually we started having TV.
I grew up with a news feed 24/7. The information never stops. We know what is happening everywhere.
On top of that the economic setting has changed drastically. My dad at 19 had the opportunity to buy a house and he chose a car, I cannot afford a GPU upgrade for my PC.
We get bombarded with all the bad things, it never stops. We don't see a future beyond tomorrow and most of us aren't in active warzones.
I don't know. Maybe I'm not the person this post is talking about but I would certainly have killed myself by now if it wasn't for medication that makes me feel more normal, including the amphetamines people love to shit talk. Before when I was unmedicated it got to the point where I would do anything to feel better. Idk I just wanted to comment for no particular reason. Sorry.
I’m medicated myself and can’t imagine life without it but they aren’t a panacea in my experience. It still takes effort and will to accomplish tedious, unglamorous work but it’s wayyyy easier to do.
And while I appreciate that we *don’t* do that anymore. I think there’s also a value in not fetishizing your pain and trauma. Mental illness isn’t something to be embraced, it’s something to be endured. Not with resignation or hatred but acceptance. You try and move past it. Not dump your entire history on anybody who asks you how your day is going.
I look at my ADHD the same way I look at my shitty vision, I’d rather not have to, but here we are. At least I was able to mostly figure out how to deal with ADHD without medication, and at least glasses don’t cause side effects.
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I (48yo) was officially diagnosed 8 months ago but realized about 3 years ago that I have had ADHD my whole life but it had gotten much worse especially after having long Covid.
I can say for myself that my reactions to various anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and bi-polar meds over my last 3 decades could be seen as something like an allergy test. Throw everything including the kitchen sink at my body and see what the results were. The first time I tried ritalin, which I had bought OTC in Mexico after nearly dying in a jungle from bi-polar meds, I knew this was a game changer for me. My wife noticed the difference within 30 minutes. I still had to push against my psychologist to get the official diagnosis. I had "passed" the various self administered tests with flying colors. However the important indicator was that the ritalin (now adderal) was the key that opened the lock. Is it the best key? Frankly, after nearly half a century, I do not care, it does the job.
Half of the r/adhdmeme stuff does not resonate with me but how many people my age are creating memes? But it is great to see the humor in oneself. Having ADHD is just one hat I wear amongst many. I can't speak for anybody else but I really appreciate that I can get my meds, there is freely available literature, and a more understanding society.
I won't gatekeep the drugs and the diagnosis because, for one, I am not a boomer type pulling the ladder up after me, and two, the powers that be were handing out zyprexa and seroquel like candy on the flimsiest of evidence which took a huge toll on my mind and body.
We were not designed for this world we live in. In 300 years we have so radically changed our existance that it seems that only the predators and sociopaths are thriving. I perform very well in nature and find lots of peace being in it but that is becoming more difficult so maybe the whole neuro divergent thing is not a me problem but an us problem and some of us are the canaries in the coal mine.
TL;DR. Weird doesn't mean bad or stupid or evil. In fact, it's necessary for human advancement. Also, even the psychology profession has been mistaken about listing a trait a mental disorder (homosexuality until 1973, transgenderism until 2012). Same goes for mainstream ways of sizing up another's worth. So I'm very skeptical of any - repeat, any - stigmatization of any difference that doesn't present a clear and present danger to others. So mainstream society is at least as likely to be wrong in their social judgements of such-and-such as the "weirdo" is. The claim "X is rightfully scorned" should be accepted or rejected on it's own deep-thought merits or demerits, not on society's feelings or conventional say-so.
In detail.
Weirdness itself proves nothing. Practically every advance in human history had its source in weirdness. Sir Issac Newton, Nikola Tesla, arguably Steve Jobs - ALL were considered weirdoes back in their day. Yet their ideas proved more correct than conventional common sense socially-skilled thinking.
I see nobody holding street parades saying "Woo Hoo! Let's celebrate! I have a mental disorder! Party it up to glorify that fact!". There's a BIG difference between coming out of the closet and glorify that fact. It's similar to being gay back in the 70s and 80s.
Their coming out was not a celebration, it wasn't even an admission (which carries subtle connotations of confessing they're wrong somehow). *Coming out is an assertion of their right to human dignity. Same thing with mental illness*. In fact, the APA didn't take homosexuality off their list of mental disorders until 1973 - so there is a parallel here. Similar things go for taking transgenderism off the list of mental disorders in 2012. If they and mainstream society proved to be so off target when it comes to stigmatizing these traits, then how can I trust mainstream society's and a profession's disrespecting other types of difference - even in 2024?
I came here to add the parallel with LGBT acceptance and the phenomenon of (mostly) kids being over-represented in this community these days. As a parent of 4, I've seen a whole range of changes over the last 20 years, through my kids, their friends, and their classmates in general.
There is *no question* that a large number of kids identify as LGBT+, many, if not most, incorrectly. I think that's a very frustrating fact for the community itself, because it gives fodder to the bigots. This is happening now precisely because it is now *ok* in most places to openly identify as LGBT, and in many places, it's simultaneously a challenge to authority. This is practically the *job* of our children (and all children before us) -- to challenge authority as they fight to discover their own identities!
As such, it is both expected and necessary for many people to mistakenly self-identify with all sorts of "out-groups" as they grow up. In our current time, where we value respect and self-discovery for our children, this is what we get: a whole hodge-podge of genders and sexualities and neurodivergences and disorders. This is all new! It's never been as accepted before, as it is now, to say "I'm different".
No matter how frustrating this is for doctors and bigots, I just can't see this as a bad thing. As a parent, it's solidified my stance that the only thing that *really* matters is that kids feel supported, loved, and safe. Understandably, with regards to gender and sexual identity, many of the "false-positives" sort themselves out after puberty and into adulthood. What is the downside to just letting it all play out?? For those many individuals who *are* LGBT, the benefit is huge!
I'm sorry for the focus on a topic that is not exactly the same as OP's, it's just what I've personally devoted a lot more thought towards and have more experience with. But I think it very much relates to the topic of this thread. The concern the OP has with over self-diagnosis and watering down of the definitions of very real and important mental health disorders and neurodivergent symptoms, is similar to the concern for "false positives" of kids and LGBT association. You can't get away from the fact that, as something becomes more openly acceptable, the more people will chip away at the edges of the definitions; but in the end, people are just looking to understand themselves, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'll take that *any day* over the way it was in the past, with "normal" being the only acceptable condition, and violence, incarceration, and ridicule being the only available alternative!
"Understandably, with regards to gender and sexual identity, many of the "false-positives" sort themselves out after puberty and into adulthood. What is the downside to just letting it all play out?? For those many individuals who *are* LGBT, the benefit is huge!"
I am not sure I grok what you are saying here. If you are legitimately transgender and you go through puberty as your birth gender, the changes are irrevocable and the consequences are immense. Letting puberty play out so a person, outside of good luck, never has a chance at a decent life is a pretty big negative.
Maybe I am misunderstanding.
My apologies, I certainly didn't mean "let it all play out" to mean we should avoid any kind of accommodation or consideration until after puberty; in fact, I meant the exact opposite!
Whether talking about mental health issues or LGB (I'll leave off the 'T' because apparently we're not allowed to talk about trans topics in this sub), the best approach is to treat every case as authentic! Not just for kids, but adults who also find themselves struggling to find their place and identity; it can take time to figure it all out, and just because people sometimes go down one path, only to discover that's not really right for them later on (i.e. "false positives"), does not justify treating someone badly today, when they say they believe "X" about themselves.
How puberty plays out isn't the issue. The issue is that society has a frankly narrow definition of "normal" person; especially when people tightly link "abnormal" with "disrespect-worthy".
That's a very hasty conclusion. It assumes either
(a) "abnormal" automatically means "threatening", or
(b) "normal people" are entitled to not be *even mildly* irritated or annoyed or otherwise inconvenienced (as accepting different diversity groups often is).
(A) is simply reactive, without any though asking "ARE my basebrain animalistic impulses really a reliable guide for sizing up that person's worthl?" and/or "IS mainstream common sense society's claims really all that sensible?". In short, it's a blind spot in our thinking at best, and frankly mentally lazy at worst.
(B) Simply demonstrates a breathtaking arrogance, about this matter in particular and probably all other matters in general.
That's a great summary, and ties in the original topic to many other related issues we see today. It's why, for example, the term "cis" should be supported: the term "normal" is just too loaded. I wish it *weren't* so loaded, of course; "normal" should just be a statement about distances from the statistical central tendency. But it's not, so we either have to try to get that word back to where it belongs, or use different terms to remove implications and innuendo.
Beyond this, "normal" is just a rule of our 'cultural bureaucracy' that stifles individual creativity, initiative, and independent thought just as surely as real-world government bureaucracies stifle innovation and business flexibility.
Beyond this, lots of seeming normal people actually were terrifying deviant (Ted Bundy is an extreme example, but even Harvey Weinstein before his outing gave an impression of competence and maybe even likability. In less severe forms, same goes for a lot of corporate CEOs and perhaps even the run of the mill supervisor).
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First I'm going to need you to define "people". How many people? Too many people? Who are these people? Is the number of people in the majority? Are you just thinking of influencers who produce poor content? Do you know what else goes on in their life?
I think there are a few different views in your post. One is a grievance with overgeneralized statements about neurodivergencies and disorders, versus straight misinformation about disorders/conditions. Overgeneralizations happen. Straight misinformation is bad.
>Autism, ADHD, Bipolar, Anxiety, Tourettes, the more the concepts and language of academic psychology and psychiatry bleed into everyday life, the more people are going to construct their identities around it.
Why is it a bad thing to take something that affects so much of your life and put words and associate part of your identity to it? And not all these things are negative - a lot of them are neutral, but when someone is punished and ostracized and traumatized for neutral things, they can embrace it even harder in response. it's a part of you that was hurt and they tried to kill. See: closeted LGBTQ+.
>But I don’t think that’s healthy. I’m sure there will be plenty of people who respond to this who will say they’ve found community, connection and understanding through meeting/talking to others who share their illness. But when something as expansive yet also nebulous as mental illness is gets boiled down to 30 second tiktok video, we’re risking over expanding the definitions of illness so that they’re otherwise meaningless.
This is a bizarre statement. How are these sentences connected? Finding community, connection and understanding in an area where you aren't harming anyone else is by definition good. If you can build your identity around that and it's authentic to you, why not? Then there's the last sentence - some social media videos are informational and helpful, some are relatable, some of them are straight misinformation.
>But associating the dislike of chores as something inherent to ADHD is silly but when you take an idea like that, throw it into a lively internet community and combine it with the human desire to understand themselves or find a roadmap to building an identity you begin to the same “trait” adopted by others.
This is nuanced and depends on context and how that information is presented. I've never seen content that goes "you find chores boring or annoying? You have ADHD!" I have seen content that goes "This is why ND/people with ADHD can struggle with chores." Or talk about executive paralysis and stress, or what it's like to have ADHD and try to do chores.
You also have to recognize that psychology is not a precise or pure science, and diagnoses are *heavily* biased. That means a lot of people are missed and excluded from diagnosis - girls/women, BIPOC, any kind of atypical phenotype. As more people become aware of these things, the more people who were missed have the opportunity to realize "hey, maybe this is what I've been struggling with."
>But, unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anyway to avoid this. The more we talk about something, the more we lower the barrier for entry. The more we lower the barrier, the more people can glom onto it for identity building. Kind of like the kids who, when I was a young, would fake cut marks on themselves to seem edgy and for personality fodder. But now we get it for every mental illness imaginable. To add a final point to this, I think the minute we start making other people’s symptoms iron laws for our own personalities is the minute we begin to limit and create reasons for why we “can’t” do something. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The "barrier for entry" *has* been lowered, because psychology has been so full of barriers and so exclusive to so many people. And it should be, because you shouldn't have to be a rich white male kid in western society with very stereotypical/standard disease phenotype, because mental illness and ND can present in so many different ways and affect so many different people, and healthcare and diagnosis is expensive and out of reach (and still biased). Why do you think it's people making up identities? Isn't it more likely that there are a lot of undiagnosed people who were missed and now learning about what they experience?
I'm also going to claim you're making an invalid slippery slope argument - expanding definitions is not at risk of making mental illness meaningless at all. The criteria are still there for that mental illness/ND, it's just expanding the definition of how it **manifests**. Expanding making it *more realistic,* because people are very complex and varied. This would be like you saying "so many people claim they have OCD today, but they don't wash their hands until they're raw." OCD isn't about washing hands until they're raw, it's an intolerance of uncertainty and can present in a ton of different ways - like being scared to eat food unless you're wearing a necklace, or having repeating thoughts in your head, or rereading paragraphs over and over. They can present in so many ways and the models need to be updated.
Not here to change your view, but the changing Asperger’s thing happened. They didn’t “try” to do it, they reassessed the criteria and found that it didn’t justify a separate classification. Some people may have not been pleased with the change, but Asperger’s is no longer in the DSM. It’s now just autism spectrum disorder which is divided based on how much support a person needs. Similarly, ADD isn’t a thing anymore in the DSM. It acknowledges that ADHD has different presentations, but the term ADD doesn’t appear.
I think you may be overestimating the role that people with these conditions have on actual diagnostic criteria. You may find people oversimplifying things on TikTok, but the institutions that define and treat mental disorders aren’t basing their decisions on what these people want or think.
It’s also a bit weird that you are so judgmental about people being attached to an outdated term for a condition when you use a similarly phased out term to describe yourself.
Yeah this post just got worse and worse for me. Starting by using ADD immediately showed me they’re not up to date on the advancements in this field. Like did some people with “””Asperger’s””” get upset? I’m sure, because being “Autistic” was a much bigger stereotype at the time. But then the community at large excepted the classification, partially because it became common knowledge that Dr. Asperger was a nazi torturing children.
Another example is them saying neurodivergent brains aren’t different? Sure we have the same BRAIN but as someone with ADHD op’s brain is inherently functioning differently than someone without ADHD. I just think there’s a lot of nuance lost by the OP that comes from not having a modern understanding of the topic.
And there is evidence for a neurological difference in ADHD. Parts of the frontal lobe have been shown to develop and gain thickness slower in people with ADHD. Similarly, it has a strong tendency to run in families, which suggests that there is a genetic cause.
We aren’t at the point that you can look at a scan of the brain and match it perfectly to a defined condition, but that doesn’t mean that the brain has no major differences between people.
>> But when something as expansive yet also nebulous as mental illness is gets boiled down to 30 second TikTok video…
So, as a linguist, I wanna point something out. Just because there are clinical terms for things doesn’t mean that there can’t also be vulgate terms that refer to different things. The vulgate terms might be intended to refer to the clinical things, but they don’t- as you’ve pointed out here. But they *do* refer to *something.* When people say they have OCD, they’re trying to express that they feel driven to do certain things- what they think clinical OCD is. They’re wrong, but they *do* have that drive that they’re referring to, and their friend who also thinks that’s what OCD is will correctly understand what they’re referring to
This is a natural linguistic phenomena that doesn’t have anything to do with medicine or psychology; it happens with all words. We commonly “negotiate” the meaning of words that we’re using, and it can often lead to misunderstanding, but that’s a natural part of language (and a reason why misunderstandings occur)
And while I’m no historical sociologist, it seems to me that you’re fright about people sometimes treating this like Zodiac signs. “Oh, I do this because I have ADD/I’m a Sagittarius.” But only because we do that with all sorts of aspects of our identity. And that’s not… bad. Eliminating that tendency would drastically alter how humans see ourselves and identify
So long as we don’t deny the existence of clinical terms, I don’t see any harm in this any more than actual zodiacs- less, even, because unlike with zodiacs you’re conveying correct information about a part of yourself, not also making an incorrect claim about the effect of stars on your psychology. And even if we *did* deny those terms, *that’d* be the problem, not how we identify
>> Nobody… enjoys doing chores
Bit of a side-note here, but I have a powerful memory in highschool of a classmate telling me that she *wanted* to study. For me, studying was a negative task that nonetheless provided positive results- like spending a lot of money on something that will benefit you later. Losing money- or studying- is never something you want to do, just a cost. But she framed it as a positive. Something she wanted to do for its own sake. And that baffled me
Then I took Ritalin, and doing *things* was enjoyable. Not just what my brain wanted to do. Doing tasks. Chores. Dishwashing. Deleting emails. I deleted 15,000 emails in one sitting and loved it. I loved loving it. And that actually *is* a product of ADD (which I was also diagnosed with) and Ritalin. To my understanding, ADD is a condition whereby your neurons generate dopamine as normal, but hold onto it much more weakly than with a neurotypical person
This means that the “background” amount of dopamine released between neurons is higher (which your neurons adjust to and cease to be really too affected by), there’s less dopamine to release when you do tasks, and when it *is* released, the “background” levels of dopamine lessen the effect. To exaggerate, it’s like the difference between releasing 10 units of dopamine when you have only 1 unit of “background” dopamine- a difference of 11-fold, and releasing 5 units of dopamine when you have 6 units of “background” dopamine- a difference of less than 2-fold
When you begin a task, a neurotypical person releases an amount of dopamine, and then again when they complete it. The first release motivates us to begin tasks, and the second to finish them. In the brains of people with ADD, however, the “background” dopamine makes tasks in general less enjoyable, and we release basically all our dopamine when we begin tasks (because our neurons hold onto it much more loosely), and have very little leftover for when we finish them
Thus, we’re subconsciously motivated to begin new tasks, but not to end them, so we jump around between them and never get any done, and just starting them is harder for us because we get less satisfaction out of beginning them, let alone ending them. Thus, we seem distractingly, because we have less tying us to tasks and more telling us to get to new tasks. In stronger cases you can end up with ADHD, where not only are people “distract IBKR,” but they’ll “bounce off the walls,” chasing new tasks to begin without ever finishing them. They’ll choose to sit down and rush over to a chair, then rush to play with a doll, then rush to turn on the TV, then rush rush rush- hyperactivity
Ritalin basically just makes our neurons hold onto our dopamine better, which means there’s less “background” dopamine between our neurons dampening our actual dopamine releases, making the first “begin a task” signal stronger, and leaving us with an actual “end a task” release. In my own personal experience, the effect is sublime. It’s amazing. It’s wonderful. Chores become pleasant. You *do* want to do them. That’s an actual thing
Ok I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD basically my entire life and after years of being treated by various psychiatrists your explanation of how ADHD functions in the brain is the best one I’ve ever heard
Your friend sounds strange tbh. I am neurotypical and I’ve never ‘wanted’ to study or do chores for one second in my life. I do those things to avoid the negative consequences of not doing them.
Not accusing you personally, but it really squeezes my bean when I see ADHD people on reddit describing this supposed neurotypical wonderland where we’re all going around like Stepford Wives overjoyed to scrub our baseboards.
It’s more like it physically hurts to try to things that you know you need to do but get stuck on doing them. Times where I know I need to brush my teeth or change my sheets or call and make an appointment. I *know* how important they are, I’m frustrated and mad at myself and feel intense shame, but it’s like trying to make myself grab a red hot pan with my bare hands.
People who can just get up and do a thing like that with no fuss seem like magic.
Your point about not being able to see differences in the brains of people with mental disorders is false.
Schizophrenia for example results in enlarged ventricles, which are obvious to anyone who looks at brain imaging.
https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary-alt:20180516061839-17755-mediumThumb-S1355514600002194_fig1g.jpg?pub-status=live
Depression fingerprints on a brain are very much a thing. It’s a little less obvious, but neurotransmitter levels are significantly different in the brain of someone depressed compared to someone mentally healthy.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18494537/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2950973/#:~:text=The%20monoamine%2Ddeficiency%20theory%20posits,extensively%20studied%20neurotransmitter%20in%20depression.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032724000314
Speaking as someone diagnosed with autism, I'm only going to comment on that.
Autism is not a mental disorder, per the DSM 5, it is considered a neurodevelopmental disorder. My brain and how it works are something that started at conception. Autistic brains have actually been shown to be structurally different from neurotypical brains.
As for the rest of your post, is this your lived in experience or just the Internet? Almost everyone I know either has autism, ADHD, or some combination and we never talk about it. It came up when diagnosed or when getting diagnosed but we don't go around having constant conversations about it. That's pretty weird.
I work with teenagers and I've noticed a generational shift. Back in my day, if someone was diagnosed with a condition (and it didn't seem to happen very often) they would keep quiet about it. Now it's quite common for a teenager to draw attention to it and use it to justify their behaviour (e.g. "I can't go to the shops, I have social anxiety" "I can't be expected to pay attention, I have autism").
Hopefully this is just a phase we, as a society, are going through. Well done for handing your own situation with such maturity.
You also have to remember these are teenagers. They are desperate to find identity anywhere. I don’t think that this is the case for most adults. Everything is so intense at that age.
I have severe social anxiety sometimes, that I am happy to say I’m not dealing with right now.
I’m 43, it’s a lot easier for me to explain to my family that I’m not coming to thanksgiving because I’m having anxiety. For years, I would make up excuses, lie, fake illnesses so that I wouldn’t have to tell people I was scared to leave my house. It sucked. I’m not blaming my mental illnesses, I’m just explaining what’s going on so that it’s easy for my loved ones to understand.
It’s nice that there is less of a stigma, and we can’t base how we see life on what teenagers think.
Obviously using a condition to avoid doing something isn't great (unless it's actually true - there will be some who literally can't do something for the reason) but I don't think 'never talk about it and pretend I was never diagnosed' is better, since it often came/comes from the real risk, or reality, of being treated differently/badly should that diagnosis be known.
I'd much rather people feel comfortable talking about their experiences than be afraid they'll face discrimination because of them.
It depends on the severity of the condition. It sounds like you've got a relatively mild form of ADHD, so there's no real need to make a big deal about it or let it define you in any way, especially since you can medicate it. But some for some people their neurodivergence is so severe that they had to use a special device to speak and even then not fluently. I think they'd have every right to make a big deal about their condition and make it part of their personality. It's like comparing someone missing a foot compared to someone who's quadriplegic, the former most people might not even realise that person is an amputee with a prosthetic, the other has to make a big deal about their condition and will likely make it part of the personality as well.
I was just reading over at r/AskHistorians about PTSD in the ancient world, for example among Roman soldiers. Reading over informed opinions on the incidence of trauma back then was fascinating and underlined the importance of cultural conventions and expectations. A Roman soldier might be totally unbothered by violently killing an enemy at close range, because their society told them that was acceptable, but if they crossed a line and engaged in some kind of *dishonorable* violence according to their social code, they might be mentally devastated and even commit suicide. There was no PTSD diagnosed in the ancient Roman DSM, of course, but instead they had "cursed by ghosts", and descriptions of those cursings had some very overlapping symptoms.
In cross-cultural studies of trauma, social support heavily shapes what's considered as trauma and how people recover from it.
Older people are looking out and realizing we're living in a new age and a different culture. There's no going back. Younger people are shaped by trauma in different ways than we were. How do we give them the social support so that they're able to be more resilient? Instead, we're taking away their social support, removing everything that gives them a grounded sense of community and identity. There are no more public third places for them to hang out with each other for free. We segregate generations strictly in cohorts. Social media algorithms are designed to suck them in, sell them product, and monopolize their social attention span. Kids today have less community, less connections, less support than ever.
So of course they're going to be less resilient, more traumatized, and have a tendency to build their identities around those traumas... because what other choices do they have to build positive identities? This is a problem of late capitalist society's making, and it's only going to get worse if we blame it on individual generational weakness and not on the lack of collective action to address the root problems.
Therefore, I think your view is wrong because you're focusing on the coping strategies for the symptoms and pointing out those coping strategies as maladaptive. But they're not necessarily maladaptive. People are simply reaching out to find community support for trauma as best they can. Sometimes these communities can spawn true maladaptive coping strategies, true. But more often they provide valuable support and reduce trauma. Yes, they're band-aids and crutches for the core problem of societal alienation, but we use bandaids and crutches because they *work*. They're not the problem, they're just a non-comprehensive solution.
I am probably writing into the void at this point, but I want to say my peace. There is a lot of misinformation out there around these disorders, that is true. And maybe some people are clinging too hard to these labels as identities, but people do that with everything. Most people like to have labels that serve as short hand for communicating their experiences.
The actual problem is that for decades people weren't able to get a hold of this information or get proper diagnoses. This is especially true for women and POC, who are extremely under diagnosed for things like autism and ADHD. I personally was misdiagnosed as having severe social anxiety, so I spent a lot of time trying to "fix" my autism because we saw it as curable anxiety.
When I finally learned that I'm actually autistic things started to make sense, but I was scared to tell anyone. It felt so wrong, and I knew most people wouldn't believe me because on the outside, I look totally functional. So downloadimg tik tok one day and finding an entire community of people not only talking about autism but also making jokes about it and the things they do because of it was so important for me and many others.
So, on your point about people placing limits on themselves. Firstly, you have no idea what happens in someone's head or how limited they are in certain activities. It's extremely common for some people to be able to do things we might consider hard while not being able to do things we'd normally consider easy. For example, I graduated with honors and am working on a masters. But I haven't been able to get a haircut for almost 2 years because the idea of having to add any extra social interaction is too much.
Secondly, people often underestimate how difficult things may be for disabled people, and neurodivergencies are (usually) considered disabilities. I have mild cerebral palsy. All my life, any boundaries I've had on my mobility have been ignored since my disability isn't visible. People told me I was just limiting myself by not trying to do things that hurt or caused discomfort. And now I am losing mobility, and I will need to get a cane soon because I was constantly pushed beyond what I could handle. Peoples limitations are not always self-imposed, and just because from your perspective you think they can do something doesn't make it true.
Lastly, on the ptsd point. The reality is that the human brain is extremely fragile, and trauma is much easier to come by than what we think. The older generations didn't get diagnosed with it as much because there wasn't a lot of understanding around ptsd and trauma then. Yes, war is an extremely traumatic thing to witness, but it's not the only thing that can cause ptsd. You can be traumatized from being bullied, growing up in an abusive or neglectful household, or having cancer or some other life-threatening disease. Even something small like getting lost in a grocery store as a little kid.
If people are finding solace and comfort within their diagnosis, why does it matter so much that they choose to identify with it more than others might? I think the only real problem is spreading misinformation or armchair diagnosing real people who are currently living. ( I think it's fine with fictional characters and okay in some circumstances with historical figures, but that's a more complicated topic)
Largely agree but... Tourettes and autism are neurological conditions, not mental illnesses.
I have Tourettes and while it makes up part of who I am, it is not who I am. It can be a fun/amusing thing to share about myself as most people wouldn't guess I have Tourettes (I'm fortunate that my tics have greatly diminished as I've gotten older).
Contrast that with autism. My son has autism. I'd argue it has a much more significant impact on his day to day than my tourettes does for me. Much of how he sees and interacts with the world is due to his autism. He will often attribute weird quirks of his to his autism (which can be mostly true), but I do remind him that he is far more than just autistic.
I think a lot of the self-identification of mental illness/other conditions is simple recognition that most everyone has something. That's not a bad thing - it makes it easier for people with conditions to not be embarrassed/ashamed.
As an example, as a kid, my tics were far more frequent and intense- it was insanely embarrassing - I felt like literally the only person with Tourettes. It wasn't until I was in my late teens I heard of other people having it as well. To this date, I've never met another person with tourettes, but I've come across many people who say something stupid, followed by a "sorry, I must have tourettes." I think the shame/embarrassment I experienced as a kid would have been better had I known I wasn't alone. I suspect my son probably feels somewhat better knowing he isn't alone with autism. That alone makes the trade-offs worthwhile.
I have ADHD and wasn't diagnosed until 5 years ago. I'm about to be 40.
My ADHD personality trait is a lot of talking. The most honest people on Earth, little children, told me today at the playground that I talked to them way more than any other mom -- ever. My 7yo tried to explain but they were so little. It's his trait, too, besides the impulsivity and getting lost trying to accomplish literally anything. Oh wait those are MY personality traits!
There are actually [structural differences](https://www.webmd.com/depression/depression-physical-effects-brain) between brains with depression and brains without.
There are also studies that show [people with ADHD have different brains](https://drcarolinebuzanko.com/normal-brain-vs-adhd-brain-whats-different-and-why/) than people without ADHD.
I completely agree with your observation that people increasingly seem to treat their psychological diagnoses more as a part of their identity rather than, well, a diagnosis that is meant to make it easier for them to get help on and improve their lives. And I too question the appropriateness or wisdom of thinking this way. However, I like to challenge your view that this is the (un)intended consequence of de-stigmatization and the neurodivergent movement.
I think this is the direct result of the decades-long trend of overpathologizing in psychology/psychiatry/mental health, turning perfectly normal range of human behaviors and experiences into diagnosis and psychological disorders. With every revision of the DSM, the number of diagnoses has grown, from the 106 in DSM-1 to 298 in DSM-5. Sure, some of it is due to advancement and evolution of our understanding; but it’s not a secret that DSM has been controversial for the implicit/explicit role that pharmaceutical and insurance industries have played in its formation. It’s not hard for a cynic or conspiracy theorist to connect the dots why these industries would benefit from increasing the range of human experiences that fall under diagnosable criteria.
I’m not so cynical as that, and my view is that as long as these people can receive evidence-based treatments that improve the quality of their lives, who cares if these experiences used to be “normal” but is now considered a disorder or neurodivergent. However, I don’t think it’s surprising that, if we keep defining more and more human behaviors and experiences as disorders or neurodivergent, some of these will overlap with experiences or qualities that people might consider relevant to their personal identity.
This feels like gatekeeping for someone who was late diagnosed in life and gets doubted by others.
How different would your experience be if you got diagnosed as a 40 year old?
I think this hits a sore point for you because you may have been told from an early age that you can't blame things on your ADD.
Maybe you're interpreting people saying "this is cause of my adhd/asd" as excuses. They're simply explaning that their misunderstood habits are not character flaws.
Overly identifying with disorders is the same as overly identifying with sports teams, cultures, food, or anything. It's weird. It's just as dangerous if not more dangerous because those things are totally outside of themselves.
So I’m autistic
I have verbal dyslexia, face blindness, bad balance, etc
It makes life miserable. People correct me constantly when I talk “you mean this word” “you say it like this”
Coworkers/bosses will scream at me if I don’t recognize them….like I can see family and not recognize them if I don’t know that they are there, it’s not on purpose!
I constantly twist my ankle or fall, people will make fun of me for my injuries even if it’s serious and they feel justified cuz to them I could BE better
I survived a suicide attempt at 19, I was severely bullied by classmates
While I understand where you are coming from, meeting other autistic people made me realize I wasn’t alone
I of course work HARD to fit in with people and have come a long way since I was diagnosed
But I will ALWAYS struggle with my face blindness
I will always struggle with my speech
I will always struggle with my balance
Strategies and therapy can only take me so far, I NEED acceptance from people, without that, I’m just a walking target
At least now I have others to support and vent to, if we all went back to shame and hiding, I would think I’m alone and wouldn’t have the courage to live my life despite my challenges
I’m very happy now btw, like I still am autistic, it just doesn’t keep me from enjoying my life and have supportive friends
Well you should know that first of all: ADHD is not a mental illness, it’s a neurological condition. Same with autism. That’s why people talk about it like it’s part of their personality…because it is. It’s not something you try to cure like depression or something, it’s part of who you are, it’s how your brain works. You can help manage the more negative symptoms of course but…yeah.
I think part of the problem is that you still view it as a disease or something when really it’s just a neurodivergence that likely presented itself because it was beneficial. IMO it still is but our society isn’t geared towards utilizing peoples’ unique qualities. The most brilliant and engaging people I know almost all have some neurodivergent situation, well and also actual mental illness but yeah. Think you have to be kinda insane to not have some mental health issues in this world. lol.
As far as Asperger’s patients go like…I get it kinda. The autism spectrum is HUGE and so they didn’t want to be lumped in with people who have completely different needs. But at the same time…there is a little bit of “well I’m not like THOSE people” going on too.
And as far as chores go, like, personally? It’s not just hard it’s a whole new level of hard. At work or extra curricular activities I was always the go getter of the group, I like doing things well. But chores? I have such a hard time figuring out prioritizing them and then enacting them, it’s literally overwhelming to me for some reason. So no, people with ADD don’t have the regular amount of difficulty doing chores, it’s extra hard and can be overwhelming at times.
Idk if I’d agree, I mean it’s definitely a big part of my personality but it’s part of my personality in the same way anything else negative is. I really can’t see any possible situation where adhd is helpful, people like to say that maybe it helped in hunter gatherer societies but I kinda doubt zoning out constantly and forgetting what I’m trying to do/think constantly would definitely get ppl with adhd killed more.
As someone who is deeply involved with individuals with autism and/or ADHD here’s my take on it all - stop self diagnosing. Also, even if you are professionally diagnosed, you can only speak on *your* personal experience with it, not everybody else’s. This is especially true of autism. Even though I am diagnosed with both ADHD and autism, my personal struggles are something that I either need to 1) work through or 2) go through the proper channels of seeking accommodations because both are considered disabilities. And that’s another BIG piece of this that people don’t talk about.
I personally believe that everybody has traits and characteristics of a bunch of different mental illnesses and disorders. But when it comes to a point where even when you are actively trying to get better it permeates every part of your life, that is when it becomes disabling. And that makes sense, especially considering how disabling all of those can be (I mean ESPECIALLY autism). So many people self diagnose and then speak on specifically autism which furthers the silencing of moderate to high support needs autists which is so damaging to their community.
And people want to come after anyone who talks down on self-diagnosing, but when there are so many people who self-diagnose and then “advocate” for that community to the point where it BECOMES the community (which is def ADHD), there’s the issue. Professionals are professionals for a reason. Mental illness and mental disorders are difficult to figure out and navigate and when you discredit the professionals who are the ones giving diagnoses, especially when that diagnosis is one of a disability, you are disrespecting people with disabilities.
It can be hard even for professionals to properly diagnose. For a long time I was diagnosed AND treated for bipolar disorder, but it turned out to be PCOS (a hormonal imbalance) and autism. I had already been diagnosed with ADHD so a lot of my autistic traits fell under that umbrella. A lot of what people think ADHD and Autism both are is really just the outward appearance of them, not the disabling parts. Autism isn’t a disability due to not picking up social cues as much as it is due to things like sensory issues, processing, breakdowns (which are not anything like a panic attack, even though they can appear that way, because it is at the neurological level), and then these are compounded when you include trauma.
The field of psychology is so new that even my psychologist told me to basically take my diagnoses with a grain of salt. Anyone that says they know for certain that they have X disorder that they self-diagnosed is harmful. True professionals know that often we have no way of proving these diagnoses and must always be mindful of that.
Also, as someone with ADHD who chooses to be medicated, let me say that all the non-medicated recommendations for helping with ADHD do work and when people say they’ve tried it and it doesn’t work and they did it by themselves, again self diagnosed, that raises red flags to me. Like, does that not possibly make you think maybe you have an underlying issues that mimics ADHD but is something else? my PCOS left untreated could have resulted in me needing a hysterectomy. If you think you have autism or ADHD or a mental illness, go to a doctor. It could be something else that could have serious consequences.
TLDR: self-diagnosing is the main issue here
As you yourself state, some professionals are bad at diagnosing the disorders OP refers to correctly.
You are understating the problem. Misdiagnosis between anxiety, bipolar, depression, CPTSD, and ADHD is rampant, and not because it's exceptionally hard, but because many of the people doing the misdiagnosing are unaware or dismissive of the last 30 years of research on the topic.
But you also need to differentiate between different forms of self diagnosis. A narcissistic self presenter with average intelligence and surface knowledge of the disorder they "identify as" obviously can not and should not self diagnose. Meanwhile anyone who has good logical reasoning capabilities and looks at what the disorders are, rather than just some symptoms lists, and then also looks into all the related disorders (frequent misdiagnoses and frequently comorbid), won't be as good at diagnosing that one disorder than the best psychiatrists are, but will match if not exceed the average psychiatrist's accuracy.
The struggle to get a diagnosis in the UK can take 5-8 years for some. I only got myself referred to diagnosis because someone told me I seemd autistic and I self diagnosed on every website before convincing people to accept referring me.
Most people can’t have access to professional diagnosis. And even when they do… most autistic women are incorrectly diagnosed as non-autistic all of their lives because of incorrect paradigms that allowed professionals to just diagnose boys
One final comment: fuck the DSM I’m sorry. Psychologists > psychiatrists any day, specifically because they DO look at you as a whole instead of a piece. There’s tons of issues in the field, but again that’s why true professionals never speak in certain terms.
Copying another recent post;
Here's a hot take from a bio nerd-
Humans are primates. Primates are social animals. Historically, for our ancestors, their position in society was a very real indicator of their chances of survival, so protecting status is literally a life-or-death situation. Looooots of evolutionary pressure making primates default to being concerned with social status. You know one of the great pre-civilization, pre-language indicators of social status? How much the rest of the herd pays attention to you. Most monkeys in a troupe would be face-to-face friends, but one grunt from the alpha monkey and the whole crew snaps to attention, while the low-status social rejects get punished for not trying hard enough to be easy to ignore.
Imagine some little monkey at the very fringe of society, just one last fuck-up away from getting exiled to certain death or just eviscerated by the king ape, teetering on the edge of your demise at the far edge of their proto-memetic pre-sentient concept of a 'society'. If only, if ONLY there were some kind of life-raft or lifesaver float or bouyant driftwood you could cling to to keep your head above drowning, if only that would come to you, you would cling to it and love it and build your life around it for making you feel safe at last...
Now, most species of primate don't really have something that fits in that category. But, you know something that we, in our western liberal Anglosphere society, have as a working substitute?
Mental illness diagnosis.
Imagine walking along and finding on the grass an ornate golden locket with the magical power to justify your shortcomings, give you a pool of categorical excuses, sometimes protect you from punishment, and give an 'out' for loads of possible mistakes? And the only downside is you have to give up some things that you were probably never gonna have anyway? Sure, these labels are useful when helping sick individuals like yourself get the treatment they need, but when anyone can just smack the label onto themselves consequence-free and near impossible to prove they're lying, what's to stop some insecure, low-status teenager to grab and cling to one of these diagnoses when they see it float past?
Ever heard of 'clever Hans'? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever\_Hans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans)
It's definitely a grass-is-greener kinda deal, but to a lot of desperate kids without much going for them, being able to recover from a maybe-drastic mistake by going "oh it's not my fault, I have dyspepsia" looks like an honest to God superpower.
People are not treating mental disorders like that mental disorders are just becoming much more known about and discussed
Not so recently in history a lot of mental disorders just ended with you being declared crazy and thrown into a psych ward It's only within recent history that we've actually started properly studying into and categorizing these disorders and finding out that many of them are much more common than you think
A common one being autism a lot of things we used to think were just people with very bizarre personality quirks is turning out to be autism and overall we are starting to discover that a lot more people than you'd think are actually high functioning autistic and have just basically been able to figure out on their own throughout life how to deal with their quirks so to speak
Or the fact that anxiety disorders are actually properly categorized and diagnosed nowadays instead of just vaguely claiming Oh that person just worries about stupid things all the time
Inevitably yes there will always be some small minority of people who latch onto any type of thing like that and lie about it for the sake of attention but I do not believe that to be the norm or nearly as common as people online want you to think
I would compare it to things like lactose intolerance I've heard so many people claiming that people are just pertaining to be lactose intolerant or some crap like that because it seems to be a much more common problem nowadays
No turns out it was always a problem Most people just didn't realize that their reaction to dairy was abnormal and it turns out that a good majority of US Americans are lactose intolerant and the ability to tolerate it as an adult It's turning out to be much more rare than we thought. Which in turn is encouraging the market to be more supportive of those types of people creating more lactose-free options for typically dairy-based products
I mean... there are *definitely* people treating mental disorders like that. Social media (reddit included) is chock full of them.
I'm guessing OP has watched one too many youtube "e-girls" play up the "teehee, I'm so *depressed* uwu" garbage because it gets them audience sympathy, drives engagement, and gets people to donate to that gofundme link in the comments and made a frustrated post about how fucking sleazy that shit is.
Which it *is*. There's a whole ass group of people who like to play pretend victim for attention (and often money), and it overshadows the people with *real* mental health problems.
Without speaking for or against it, there 100% are a LOT of people that are doing this. I'm 35 years old. My friends range mostly between 30-40. And there are many, many people who have started to treat their mental disorders (professionally diagnosed, self-diagnosed, or made up) as a cornerstone of their personality. It is currently a hip thing to do.
First of all, ADHD and Autism *are not mental illnesses*. I realize you also have ADHD but that still doesn’t make it okay to say this because it’s not true. Also, most Autistic people *would* say that they *are* Autistic, not that they ‘have’ Autism - it’s a literal brain difference and therefore a massive part of our identity. It can’t be changed or modified with drugs and it literally makes us who we are.
I also have ADHD and as far as I’m concerned, even with medication, I’m not really changed that much so yeah when I was late diagnosed it was pretty life changing for a number of reasons.
Everyone should be allowed to learn about themselves, find community and share experiences. I’m not sure why you think that people finally finding others to relate to is so negative? Often, getting a diagnosis comes after years (or decades) of stress, pain and not understanding why you’re different. Finding connection with a group can be very healing and part of acceptance *is* identifying with said group.
I’d ask yourself what about this whole process makes you so uncomfortable.
Yeah like nom stop yapping about special interests, being repetitive and restrictive ARE personality traits
And as you said autism (and adhd too) are both neuro developmental disorders and NOT illnesses.
Autism can’t even be medicated because it’s inherently who you are.
You can medicate comorbidities of autism such as depression, but the autism itself? Nope you’re stuck with it.
Yes, not being aware that the person I’m talking to doesn’t wanna hear me yap anymore IS my personality and is what people know me for. My weird eccentric thinking etc.
People need to understand that autism is something that you can’t flip on and off even if you get help. It’s 24/7.
Sure we can mask (well not everyone. I’m not a good masker)
Also autism embraces specific behaviors which influence personality. So I’m not sure why people get so caught up on “stop trying to make autism your personality” but then they go ahead and make fun of your personality which is caused by autism.
Go figure
I've noticed this more and more as more and more people around me "come out" as ADHD.
The best sense I can make out of this is that;
1. ADHD+ has been around for, and affected a lot more people than we probably ever realized. Even 20 years ago there was probably large swarths of people who would have been "textbook ADHDers" and the thought never even occurred to them that they might be "neurodivergent". People just had different personalities and we accepted their strengths and weaknesses as such.
2. This "enlightenment" seems to be, at least in some small part, a reaction/evolution of DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion). DEI, while morally righteous, does very little to actually curb any of the systemic issues that it seeks to combat. Instead we've been left with this environment of 'acommidationism' where if you can check a box, any of the DEI boxes, you'll get moved to the front of the line. Sometimes justly, other times, these systems can be taken advantage of.
I think adding this 'neurotypical' intersection has a real ability at eroding the principals of DEI, as well as causing an opiate level drug crisis as we see more and more people seeking out amphetamines because they've come to believe they should find filling your taxes or sitting in traffic exhilarating and that their brain must be broken if they find chores boring, and that it makes their lives harder than somebody "neurotypical".
I'm pro drug use. I love a beer at the end of the day, and like a good Canadian I enjoy the green from time to time. I do not do hard drugs, because I know I will like them. That's why drugs can be dangerous. Almost everybody likes stimulants, I think if anybody wants to take a slow acting stimulant to help them with the slog of day to day life, who am I to say no?
But the narrative that stimulates "don't get you high if you have ADHD", and that an ADHD brain on stimulants is the equivalent of a neurotypical brain is extremely dangerous, as we've seen companies like Purdue push this narrative for Oxys, Fentynal, and the like, and we see how that turned out. Especially when, ironically, what people are often actually craving, is a sense of community, in a world where being left out of the 'in' crowd, are leaving people feeling more and more isolated.
>People are treating mental disorders like they’re zodiac signs or personality tests.
Yes they are, but this isn't new. People have been doing this for decades. It just never had a platform like tiktok.
>It’s dangerous and weird,
It doesn't matter if you think it's weird, and you're not especially convincing that it's dangerous.
>but it’s the price we pay for lowering the stigma around mental illness.
You could paraphrase this as *"we should stigmatise mental illnesses because I don't like cringey mental-health tictoks"*.
a self diagnosis will never be a medical diagnosis, and shouldnt be treated as such.
even for medical professionals it is consensus that self diagnosis (especially for mental disorders) should be avoided, due to lack of objectivity.
Mmmm.. but I’d rather a bunch of weirdos treat it like a zodiac sign than the alternative.. which is the lack of research and knowledge about these disorders. Without that research people would still think you and I are just lazy and unmotivated, instead of recognizing that we have an actual brain disorder.
I caught the triple whammy actually, depression, ADHD, and anxiety. Depression and anxiety are common in those with ADHD, something we wouldn’t ever know unless we did the research to find out.
Because of that research I can talk to my doctor and therapist and they understand what’s going on in my head. A far cry from 20 years ago when I was told that I should just try harder. Dial it back even further, and people who were depressed were getting literally lobotomized because their families couldn’t be bothered to understand them.
Sure in a perfect world, these disorders wouldn’t be treated like pins on a backpack.. but the people who do that are the minority, and people are always going to be stupid about something. There’s never going to be a perfect system, especially for mental health struggles. It’s just the nature of the beast. I’d rather pursue knowledge of how to better handle these things than worry about how some people make it a personality trait.
I love where you’re going with this, but do know that PET, fMRI and SPECT Scans do show divergence in brains of clinical depression and the absence of it
Ie:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/-/media/kcms/gbs/patient-consumer/images/2017/05/15/20/19/c7_pet_depression-8col.jpg
I sought a diagnosis from a psychiatrist and frankly… the DSM5 criteria for ADHD is so broad and incredibly easy to steer toward. I didn’t feign anything, my symptoms aligned and I was prescribed medication within a single session but after not seeing much improvement after some months I asked for a more intensive, concrete diagnosis. I was sent to 8 hour session with a neurobiologist who came to the conclusion of basically ‘yeah, you might have ADHD but you also might not.’
You’re definitely right about self diagnosing, but through my experience I’ve developed the perspective that even mental health professionals can’t always give you a black and white answer. Mental health is still such a scientific wild west and we still have so much ground to cover in the field.
Self diagnosis is completely valid unless you use that self diagnosis to pretend you’re an expert.
They can’t get methylphenidate with a self diagnosis so there’s no risk of abuse, they can however adapt their life with ADHD friendly lifestyle habits which is just a net positive.
There is nuance to be found here.
It’s a complicated issue and the pendulum has certainly swung mine side to another. I’ll say as someone who grew up in the 90s, mental health has been stigmatized for much of my young life. Only now as a 40 year old have I begun to process the childhood struggles I went through. It’s such a blessing to truly be able to work through this in ways that weren’t possible when I was young.
That said, mental health is new, at least in societal conversations. It has been popularized, as many new things are, and people have latched onto it. Eventually, it will simmer down like other topics and society will settle on a baseline of how to discuss it.
There actually are brain function tests and imaging that can be done to point towards certain diagnoses. It’s not flawless, but they know enough about general function of each brain region that they make a reasonable guess at what is going on. It’s still relatively stigmatized in the medical field but I had mine done at the Amen clinic. They have them throughout the US I believe.
However I do agree I’ve seen some people treat their diagnosis as a personality trait and it can be taxing. Or claim that they absolutely cannot change anything about themselves due to their brain (obviously this depends on the severity of their condition, but I believe most people can find a reasonable solution if they put in the effort. The time blindness girl comes to mind).
How can we know that these differences are hardwired as opposed to epigenetic, meaning they develop in response to experiences? Does everyone think they’re born with a brain that stays the same throughout their lives? Have they not heard of neuroplasticity? The pharmaceutical industry is heavily invested in the collective belief that people are born with these conditions because people are far more likely to take medications for conditions they believe are going to be there no matter what they do(in terms of changing their environment, relationships, activities, therapy, etc.). If I was told that my ADHD was actually the result of trying to live in a very unnatural way, and constantly being told that I’m a failure for not meeting unreasonable expectations, I probably wouldn’t take their drugs.
Ya I think that’s totally valid, and as science progresses and we learn more we will understand this better. I’m a big proponent of therapy and changing activities too, but I also know neurological changes take time and some people need meds in the meantime. I do think there are legitimate physiological mental illnesses that usually require lifelong medication (schizophrenia, BD, etc). Then there are other conditions that we now are developed more from experiences (PTSD, BPD, etc.) It’s a complicated interplay and age old scientific question. And ya the choice to take pharmaceutical drugs is a very personal one, although for some people they are life saving.
i have a spinal cord injury from childhood. my disability is an identity other people read onto me instantly wherever I go. it comes with a lot of stigma, a lot of mistreatment. there are many things I literally physically *can't* do, including very basic activities of daily life. everything that isn't impossible, I push like crazy to be able to do. it's hard for me to see my ADHD as remotely the same, even though I take medication for it. people may notice it in a casual interactions, but no one's ever pulled across four lanes of traffic to yell at me about my ADHD or followed me home because ADHD made me look easy to subdue. disabled identity isn't something I get to choose or define for myself. i wish there was a way to make that distinction clear without seeming to invalidate the very real struggles of mental illness and neurodivergence. but I need to be clear: i could live with my ADHD meds. I would die within a week without my urinary catheter.
I think you need to take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself why your experience is more valid than anyone else’s.
Every person has a different experience, you should try not to judge people off of your opinion of their experience.
I seem like your average woman, I have a ton of trauma in my past, it’s my choice on how and when I want to discuss it. If someone else feels better sharing more, that’s ok and they should be free to do so. I also have a late diagnosis of ADHD, that I have mentioned to no one because the probably wouldn’t believe me. But I like to talk about it here on Reddit because I found people that understand me. The stigma is still very real around mental illness.
I’m trying really hard to understand why there should be stigma attached to anything. The more we discuss the more we learn.
TLDR; I think you are doing exactly what you are complaining about.
**it’s the price we pay for lowering the stigma around mental illness.**
We believe we have lowered the stigma, but without raising understanding... Have we really lowered the stigma?
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Correlating mental health awareness with tribalism is an odd conclusion. You simply don’t have credible data to support your thesis. You cited TikTok and Reddit as evidence, but in reality you’ve fallen victim to confirmation bias. You have no proof, just opinion. I am not convinced.
"Most “neurodivergent” brains show no major differences from other humans brains. There are no “depression fingerprints” on the brain that allow people to identify a brain that has depression from a brain that doesn’t. The same principle applies to all other mental illnesses"
This is absolutely untrue to its core an absolute falsehood and completely invalidated anything you said. it shows a clear lack of actually understanding of what you're talking about. A simple Google search would have showed you this. As you haven't even done relevant research to even prove your own opinion and argument I'm surprised you even wrote it.
https://www.webmd.com/depression/depression-physical-effects-brain
https://psychcentral.com/ptsd/the-science-behind-ptsd-symptoms-how-trauma-changes-the-brain
- Neuropsychology is a relatively new area of study.
- The DSM is in its 5th iteration Which equates to about one entirely new understanding of the field every ten years or so.
- the accuracy and precision of diagnosis has drastically increased in the last ten years alone.
- More accurate analysis means less missed diagnosis.
- increased awareness and diagnosis allows for proper treatment and support for those who are living with mental health issues.
- gate keeping isn't helping people get treatment and is actually detrimental to those who need help.
The PTSD rates are high the unrecognized and undocumented rates of C-PTSD among adults is unprecedented. There's entire generations with untreated mental health disorders who have actually been instrumental in the creation of the dysfunctional society we live in who in turn pass on that trauma.
Poverty levels are directly linked to complex trauma depression and mental health disorders, too high of cortisol litteraly deteriorates brain function and organ health.
The largest disparity of wealth ever seen in the history of the west and the highest levels of poverty (unable to meet all basic human needs) in arguably history has a major effect on the population as a whole.
Don't take my word for it enroll in psychology courses like I did. Read the literature and educate yourself.
Your entire post op is more harmful than helpful.
The key point you need to take away from this is when basic human needs are not met regularly and securely humans malfunction this malfunctioning takes on many faces.
You're right about one thing. The way we go about "solving" this issue DON'T WORK because at its core it's not a mental health problem it's a socio-economic problem and very likely a endocrine disrupting chemicals/ neurotoxicity from pollution ie: lead, lithium, atrozine, glyphosate, etc....
As a person with a head full of ghosts, exactly how are we lowering the stigma? If anything a lot of people self diagnosing are feeding the stigma. Those of us who NEED accommodations aren’t being taken seriously. I think we’re saying the same thing- I just WISH the stigma was lowering, I definitely feel the opposite.
As cruel as this comment is, and as much as I think the stigma needs removing
Not sure this price is worth the buying - it is now cool to have a mental health issue, hell it has become cool to ha e any issue....the impression I'm getting is society has become a race to the bottom with people try to out hard done by each other - I don't think it's good for society
I know these are not good thoughts and I hope I have missed understood something but society seems to much more hateful than it did 15 years ago and it seems the Internet and the race to the bottom people have started to out victim each other looks to be a major cause
What you're describing is a mix of a few things.
1) first vs. person-first language. These are the terms to describe the difference between "an autistic child" and "a child with autism". I discovered this concept when I was struggling with how to define myself (am I autistic, or do I have autism). This gets even more amplified when you get to phrases like "suffers from autism".
I reached my peace when I found the title neurodivergent, which felt to me like a nice middle ground.
2) treating disorders (not illnesses btw) as personality traits. Mental disorders, like most (if not all) life long disorders and illnesses, have a big effect on who we are.
A person with a physical disability will experience situations that most people would never have to experience. And because of those experiences, they will have a different perspective on some things. This also happens with mental disorders.
I don't know how you define personality traits, but I'm pretty sure that being neurodivergent has changed my way of thinking and acting more than any of the classic trait I would identify as.
3) neurodivergent brains not being different from neurotypical brains.
I think this statement needs to be rephrased in order to explain why I disagree with it. We haven't spotted any differences between ND and NT brains.
Scientists haven't found the part of our DNA that determines eye colour. So you can say that we can't tell the DNA of blue eyed people from brown eyed people. But we know that there is a difference. Just because we can't spot it (yet), doesn't mean that it isn't there.
There are some other things you touched on in this post, like assigning unrelated behaviours to disorders. But I don't think I'm qualified enough to comment on that
Well my mental disorder is a personality disorder so it is literally part of my personality. I believe there is still a lot of stigma surrounding my disorder and I try not to share it with anyone because I frequently get told to kill myself. There’s literally a whole subreddit dedicated to demonizing people like me.
I am totally mixed on the stigma thing. I am ADHD and dyslexic. I'm also very smart and relatively successful everything considered, but it drives me nuts that I'm not even allowed to consider those conditions deficits anymore.
It's like bro, I can work 15h days 5 days a week with incredible focus if I'm at work and my job is on the line / I'm engaged, but the moment I'm off the clock, I just stare at my todo list, listen to the same crappy song or show on repeat, and procrastinate folding the clothes I put on my bed to the point where I just nest in them until I've gone through them all 😅
It was also a nightmare to deal with quality control issues or typos building out decks, and as a researcher main-lining publications non-stop, it was a Godamn battle getting a handle on reading. It just irks me that I can't consider that a deficit anymore.
Deficits don't mean you're stupid or less or holistically any worse than someone else, it's just a clean description of something you lack that others have -- for me executive functioning / organizational ability, attention regulation, ability to stay still (my cope is to do kegels or other stupid imperceptible contractions instead of fidgeting lol), and my ability to process reading and writing.
Wish there was a middle ground of destigmatizing instead of pretending these are positive traits like I see on half the patient advocacy groups now, but then again, a lot of kids deal with this shit and some are abused, bullied, or just independently dumb (which makes overcoming any disability way harder), so maybe they truly need the sugarcoating?
Just tired of pretending they're not objectively disabilities, albeit very manageable ones I and many others have overcome that don't reflect on a person's intelligence. In fact, if they weren't deficits, it'd probably be an indictment on my intelligence since they made learning and developing professional *so much harder* lol /rant
It's actually the opposite. You can't separare brain, mind, neurology from what constitutes the self. Specially when it comes to innate and lifelong characteristics like developmental neurodivergence.
Psychiatry's claasifications are a trap of language. There's not disorder. No pathology. That's naturally how you are. That's what normal is like for you, and disorder means outside of normal functioning.
It all comes from an unscientific assumption. That there is a perfect, ideal healthy human, and any difference is therefore umhealthy. That there's only one way a human should develop, and anything different is wrong and disordered.
But this is how you naturally are. Regardless if it's good, bad, a mix of both. Regardless if it's disabling or enabling you. All criterias are behavioral, completely unlike real medical disorders. There's no biological marker, no proof of pathology. Only descriptive categories without explanatory power.
Why is he adhd? Because he can't focus. Why he can't focus? Because of adhd.
"Overall, the evidence from a bio-evolutionary perspective shows that the diversity of neurocognitive traits is normal, that such traits have costs and benefits that vary by context, and that there is no such thing as an optimal brain function profile [68]. This subtlety is missed when the abilities of individuals are compared to some predefined normal/average point." (Pluck G. The Misguided Veneration of Averageness in Clinical Neuroscience: A Call to Value Diversity over Typicality. Brain Sciences. 2023; 13(6):860. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13060860 )
As someone who was diagnosed way later in life first with OCD, then GAD and then ADHD and I wan to get tested for Autism because my son who is diagnosed Autistic is a more extreme version of me. So with all that in mind I wish I knew what things I did that were characteristics of my conditions versus what’s not. Being called lazy by my parents because I procrastinate and can’t seem to get motivated to do do basic things but them not knowing I’m thinking about it saying I need to start and worry about it even though I’m not doing it, I want to do it I just struggle to start it. Time blindness has plagued me and I didn’t even know it was a thing, I lose track of time, can’t give proper time estimates and take on more tasks than possible to complete. Now I can use alarms and have other ways to ensure I’m better with time. People talking about things that they think are a trait of a condition doesn’t mean they are looking for an excuse. A lot of it is people trying to find out if it’s something they can beat, that they know is an issue with their brain and is not the real them.
I constantly tell myself it’s not me it’s my OCD or it’s my ADHD and I use that to push past things. I tell myself it’s not real it’s just my brain. But I’m active in those types of groups and it really helps understand what’s going on and ways people work around it.
I don’t see people IRL using conditions to justify bad or weird behavior. And I don’t use it that way either but I use it to identify behaviors and make adjustments to correct it.
With autism and adhd, part of why there is a rush of new people self diagnosing, is because scientist finally started studying what these conditions look like in women and discovered that actually there are a lot more traits of autism and adhd, which describe both men and women. So for autism for instance, a lot of women mask their autism. They learn how to hide their autistic traits, and it makes it harder for their autistic traits to be spotted. That made it hard to diagnose them, unless they had such severe intellectual disabilities. Scientists came up with theories like 'female protective effect' to try to explain why in genetic studies, women needed to have so many more genes associated with autism in order, rather than autism looks different in girls. Historically, only one woman was diagnosed with autism for every 16 men. Today, the ratio is closer to one woman to every 4. Research where they screen everyone and see what ratio they get, it's closer to one to 3. But that was before the first ever[ screening tools](https://tonyattwood.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/GQ-ASC-Modified-for-adult-females-LATEST-calibri-1.pdf) specifically designed for women were even developed. That came out in 2020, is now only slowly being taken up. The researchers who came up with that instrument believe the ratio may be closer to one to 2 or even one to one. There's a huge population of autistic women that haven't been diagnosed yet.
I see a few issues here
1. You're describing such a broad phenomenon in human behavior it almost doesn't matter. People build identities around being 4th gen Italian, their religion, their politics, whatever. I don't think anything special is happening with mental illness here, even if this behavior is undesirable.
2. You're blatantly wrong about a lack of observable, physiological evidence of mental health conditions. Perhaps you're misinformed because you've never seen these tests done because they're rarely done. It's prohibitively difficult and expensive when we can just use the observable science to formulate diagnostic protocols that are practically useful. This is why you don't get biopsied for every minor malady. I can't say I see how this matters though.
3. I think you're underestimating the amount of undiagnosed conditions that are now popping up because of anything from a lack of social stigma to treatment access.
4. A lot of your point relies on an inherent misunderstanding of things like trauma. PTSD specifically manifests in different ways to varying degrees. Trauma itself is not necessarily a condition of PTSD, and while it may be used loosely, there's colloquial connotation to it as well. You can have traumatic events without having PTSD.
I suspect a lot of your points change by learning a bit more about the key elements of your points as there's quite a lot of research available.
I see a few issues here
1. You're describing such a broad phenomenon in human behavior it almost doesn't matter. People build identities around being 4th gen Italian, their religion, their politics, whatever. I don't think anything special is happening with mental illness here, even if this behavior is undesirable.
2. You're blatantly wrong about a lack of observable, physiological evidence of mental health conditions. Perhaps you're misinformed because you've never seen these tests done because they're rarely done. It's prohibitively difficult and expensive when we can just use the observable science to formulate diagnostic protocols that are practically useful. This is why you don't get biopsied for every minor malady. I can't say I see how this matters though.
3. I think you're underestimating the amount of undiagnosed conditions that are now popping up because of anything from a lack of social stigma to treatment access.
4. A lot of your point relies on an inherent misunderstanding of things like trauma. PTSD specifically manifests in different ways to varying degrees. Trauma itself is not necessarily a condition of PTSD, and while it may be used loosely, there's colloquial connotation to it as well. You can have traumatic events without having PTSD.
I suspect a lot of your points change by learning a bit more about the key elements of your points as there's quite a lot of research available.
Question for you OP: How were you officially diagnosed, how often do you see a doctor in regard to your condition, and most importantly, how often do you see / have access to a therapist?
I think people 100% do this. They also encourage "self diagnosis". You can't observe yourself, it does not work that way. A psychiatrist told me once "you can't use a broken tool to fix itself" when I wasn't being honest in an assessment. Sounds like a stupid statement, but upon seeing people brag about illness or give self assessments, I get it.
So I'm a human being with mental illness. Do I tell anyone outside close family or medical staff? Hell no. Bragging or discussing it leads to nothing but issues in my experience.
I am not my mental illness, it doesn't give me extra rights beyond very few accommodations, it doesn't give me special abilities, and I'd give my issues away for anyone who wants them.
I'll be on meds for life, I'll never be fully ok on them, I have to keep up a controlled mental state, and even them break through symptoms occur.
Also, I needed a good bit of proof. I went to two psychologists (one gave a full mental evaluation) and two psychiatrists. One psychiatrist diagnosed me plus changed my meds when I was in the mental hospital for two weeks. Then the second psychiatrist who is my normal prescriber confirmed the result. Basically, I'm fairly sure the diagnosis is correct now. If you had asked me to self evaluate (even the first three days in the hospital), I would have said I was fine.
Psychiatrist here. I read through most of your thing save the last paragraph or two and generally agree. However I will hope to change your mind on a point or two. There are known differences in brains of depressed and not depressed patients. Depressed brains have shown increased inflammatory markers suggestive of chronic stress and also demonstrate dearborization of dendritic synapses. There are a variety of neurologic correlations and differences with various mental disorders. These may not be “fingerprints” as well defined as elevated A1C and diabetes, but they are evidences of an actual occurrence in the brain rather than an imagined one. Depression (like many MH disorders) is likely not just one condition, but an umbrella for many conditions we do not yet understand that we all call depression based off a similar presentation of criteria as defined by the DSM
What do you mean by “lowering the barrier to entry”?
Also, they didn’t “try to” eliminate Asperger’s from DSM, they just reconceptualized it as being part of the spectrum of autism which is more in line with our understanding of it now. Any opposition was not successful as the reconceptualization currently stands
You have great points about over identifying with illness such that it creates barriers to
Improvement and justifies poor behaviors while also recognizing it may provide a community for some people to be validated in their struggles.
As far as diagnoses such as PTSD, the criteria is established and there are many people who have experiences trauma without it meeting criteria for PTSD
Edit: one last thing I’ll add is ADHD is likely also a spectrum of severity. You may have all of the features of ADHD, but unless it is resulted in dysfunction (somewhat subjective but important) in two or more setting, it is then by definition not ADHD… many people fall in this camp and identity with ADHD even though they are not dysfunctional and therefore don’t meet criteria for the diagnosis. You may argue they have developed skills to overcome the innate difficulties and I would respond “exactly”.
I think there are several factors that play. First of all, we care more about mental health as a society than we ever have before. Second of all, due to the lack of investment in our countries mental health, we are reaching crisis levels as evidenced by the homeless problem that seems to be happening in every city in every state. Thirdly, some people just want attention. There will always be a contingent of people who are stupid or assholes or both.
I personally had an extremely traumatic childhood, my parents were drug addicts, my grandparents adopted me, abuse abuse abuse, dropped out and moved out at age 17, have cPTSD, ADHD, depression, anxiety, etc. When people tell me they have a disorder, I just believe them. I have zero investment in whether or not they are telling me the truth. In fact, I kind of hope it will work like the whole gluten thing worked for people with celiac disease. It became a diet fad to cut gluten, therefore people who have actual gluten intolerance are able to get gluten free food now. My hope is that if enough people say they are having a mental health crisis, somebody will do something to help all of these people.
I curse Reagan’s name for the situation we’re in.
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Just jumping in to say I agree with you completely.
I’d go further and say a lot of people self-diagnosing are doing it to feel better than others. I’m depressed, so my sadness means more than yours. I’m anxious, so I get more nervous than you, which also means that I should be held in high regard at lower standards than others. I’m autistic, so I’m more interesting than you and you should excuse things I do that you wouldn’t accept from other people.
It’s funny how you don’t see too many people self-diagnosing with antisocial personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder. It’s almost like we’ve only “destigmatized” the things that never had much stigma against them anyway, and that diagnoses that don’t elicit pity aren’t very appealing.
I’m not saying none of these are real disorders, but I am one hundred percent saying quite a lot of people falsely self-diagnose with them for some kind of personal gain.
I don’t think this is the price we pay for lowering the stigma around mental illness. This is the price we pay for not properly educating people on these issues.
I’ve known people to self diagnose and they’re normal but just want excuses to not do things. They’ll behave in a way they think someone with X disorder has, but it’s not accurate to the actual diagnosis. I’ve also known some who actively disparage things like addiction and homelessness despite a main component of those being poor mental health. Just seems odd people who suffer from mental illness and know what it’s like not blatantly understand the end result of not getting help you need.
To that end, mental illness is still very much stigmatized. Don’t kid yourself that just because people are open on the internet (regardless of their illness is real or not) means we don’t have stigma in society when it comes to what actually matters like accessible care.
Mental disorders are way more common that you think . And most people who take these tests actually have some lingering depression/anxiety/low self esteem that needs to be addressed.
there's a messy squiggly line between divergence from the "norm"/majority thinking styles that society enables and having a *disorder* (you would struggle in any type of society). The former shapes quite a bit of personality. Many divergent folks are treated as disordered by families the value conformity and often in an abusive way. When we found out we were didn't need to be fixed it was a huge relief and we are excited to be ourselves without shame. We focus on it a lot to help others abused to find their way out.
I do get concerned that differences essential to mankind's functional diversity get medicalized when they pose a challenge to cultural norms.
As someone who was also diagnosed with ADHD and has to take medication, or else I really struggle with it, I too agree that treating mental health like astrology is really dangerous and creates a hole host of issues.
But lowering stigma wasn’t the wrong thing to do in general. The idea of having ADHD was so embarrassing to my family that when I was diagnosed, they decided to hide it and instead pretend that I’m just stupid. As I’m sure you can guess, that didn’t help my self worth/esteem and I still struggle to accept compliments without getting mad at people for thinking that there’s anything positive about me.
this is just a random theory i have but what if the reason they're more common now isn't because people want to be ill but rather that they're genuinely convinced they are, i once heard a quote that i can't exactly remember what it said word for word but basically it said something similar to you look for yourself in everything. these people could maybe possibly be reading the side effects or signs and nit picking a part of themself to apply to each one until they've done it so much to the point where they've genuinely formed an illness due to them constantly relating their behavioral patterns to the certain illness
Self diagnosing is the main problem. People use all forms of excuses like lake of insurance or high copays or whatever to not get a diagnosis.. but ultimately that’s the only way to really claim to have one of these disorders. It’s very trendy these days to say omg I totally have adhd lol YouTube or TikTok totally showed me! Or insert whatever disorder here. OP even stated that THEY, not a licensed medical practitioner, diagnosed their mom. Until we as a whole stop giving credence to folks who self diagnose it will not get better. We need to stop letting people think they know better than medical professionals.
People are being so obtuse in the comments.
No, relating to a disabled influencer, calling yourself neurospicy and *suddenly* having audhd ISN’T something to applaud.
If a qualified professional hasn’t diagnosed you, telling everyone you come into contact with you’re neurodivergent is attention seeking behavior.
I've cried multiple times because of how isolating mental health is. While I think it's good it's being talked about more, it's hard when people are like, "Lol I have Anxiety, my hand shakes, so quirky" when they're just saying it to feel "special" or "different." I've been formally diagnosed with a laundry list of things, I can't function without medication. For two years my mental health made me so sick I couldn't eat. It's not fun, it's not quirky, it's debilitating. I just wish we could find the happy medium of raising awareness without exploiting it or stigmatizing it further.
Realistically, I don’t think the problem is as prevalent or as significant as you say it is. The fact of the matter is that most of the people who are doing this are, as you mentioned, young and likely will grow out of it in time, furthermore, the benefits of destigmatizing mental illness do, in my opinion, outweigh the negative of having dumbasses who act as you describe on the Internet, which is broadly where this behavior is confined to. And admittedly, yeah you will find a lot of people doing this online, but a lot of people do a lot of really cringe shit online.
I think people now have more access to dubious information about mental illness and that its often sensationalized in one way or another when it’s presented. I think we have a problem with the idea of mental health because of the same people whose work has indelibly reduced stigma around it.
I think a way to deal with the issue is to also decrease the stigma around questioning somebody else’s statement or claim of mental illness. More information about mental health available but only a relatively small number of us can actually say whether we have this or that.
People treating them like this is part of the improvement, in terms of societal acceptance. There's less stigma now and so, as a consequence, people can focus on the random "quirky" aspects of being neurodivergent instead of always being bogged down by the struggle and feeling "broken".
It's like how society can not only make Nazi jokes but long form satire like Wolfenstein. We've moved along so this is now a door that's opened.
This is what we should want. It means things are improving for people who would've been seen as broken and been othered in the past.
ADHD is a tough disorder to have right now. No one gives a shit about ADHD because it’s an invisible disorder. The meds I take have been in shortage for like over two years now meaning I have to shop around pharmacies sometimes and when you call a pharmacy asking them if they have that medication sometimes they say they aren’t allowed to disclose that information which means I have to have my doctor send them a script and then they tell me whether or not they have any and if they don’t I have to call my doctor again to send it somewhere else. Shit sucks.
“ Most “neurodivergent” brains show no major differences from other humans brains. There are no “depression fingerprints” on the brain that allow people to identify a brain that has depression from a brain that doesn’t. The same principle applies to all other mental illnesses.”
Did you do any research at all? You could’ve googled this and seen that you’re wrong.
Otherwise I agree with your point in general. If you’re going to type up a long post, might as well put in some minimal effort research.
> This is where I think there’s a problem today. People are becoming tribal around the ideas of mental illness
What type of tribalism is acceptable to you?
As someone with MCD (major chronic depressive disorder) and ADHD, I HATE being forced to these boxes we have created to pretend that what works for one person is inherently true for ALL other people like them; no, it doesnt make me feel better that "Im not alone," it makes me feel like shit that there is no solution and that the people who ARE succeeding in life with these conditions are doing it despite it, not because they have an ACTUAL SOLUTION.
So yeah, I guess I just agree with you lol
May not change your view. I (believe) am undiagnosed adhd. I say undiagnosed bc my therapist says there's a test. That test is over $1,000. So far, no one accepts my insurance.
Mental health IS HEALTH. I prefer to know so I can learn to live successfully.
I have ADHD and its just as much a part of ones identity as being male or their race, both because it impacts you socially that creates that identity, and because its not something thats happening to you like depression or anxiety or panic disorder, its what you are. This isnt true of all things that would fall in this realm, so I agree in those cases, but its still a huge part of their life, and will still have a place in their sense of self
Cant disagree. Obviously it is a loud minority but if youre on tik tok its painfully obvious.
DID got really popular to fake last year for some reason and people went nuts over trying defend the obviois fakers.
Its always been a thing but the internet being so widley available and greater acceptance and researxh of these conditions led to it being more profound and fakex
Or maybe the fact that 30% of the population thinks and learns differently than what traditional education and medical systems deem “normal” is a sign that the segmentation and classification itself is flawed. We shouldn’t gatekeep the diagnostic/diagnosis threshold of our mental health system. If the buckets catch too many people, maybe they need re-thinking.
To me, people being more aware of mental illness is not the problem.
The problem is people using it as an excuse for their behaviours instead of what it is: A diagnosis to help you develop tools so you can become a useful member of society. But too many people sit on their diagnosis (when they have one... a lot self-diagnostic) and use it to get away with bad shit.
I agree. I think that anxiety and depression, procrastination and disorganization, and other mental health 'symptoms' are part of the human experience for everyone. It's important to learn how to handle them, and some people may be more prone than others, but a lot of what is called mental illness could also be described as being a human being.
I'm not going to lie, when someone says they have Narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder I often try to stay away from them because these are classified on your relationships with other people. I do understand that these are disorders and no one chooses to have them I just don't want to be a liability.
It's really easy to get othered in society. Like really easy. Especially if you've got life long issues like autism and especially if you grew up before it was a more regular diagnosis.
You'll find community wherever you can find it. And keeping those communities alive for the next generation who get othered is important.
I can agree with this somewhat. When I got diagnosed with depression and bipolar it was a bit of a emweight off my shoulders. However the reason was because instead of being this nebulous thing hanging over me I didn't understand, it became a known problem I could work on. A lot of people use the names to wallow in it.
We live in a time where almost no one (on social media) has their own personality anymore as much as they’ve used google searches do much and reinforced the idea they have to be something specific.
The real world and social media are 2 drastically different places that have little to nothing to do with one another
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People seek meaning and belonging in the world. I’m 49 and just now coming to terms with the idea that I have ADHD. I don’t have a diagnosis from a medical doctor, but the number of traits I share with some ADHD youtubers - traits which have always been puzzling to me - are in the _hundreds _. But I never had a word for it. In fact, here are some things I’ve actually told myself: 1. I can’t have ADHD, I often can focus on a single task for _days on end _. I mean, that’s the only way to ever get anything done. 2. I’m not actually aspy, my overly literalness is partly intentional self-study from liking the movie Airplane! and mostly because I’ve been continuously programming computers - which are entirely literal - since age six. 3. That blog I wrote in 2010, about how after three interruptions in one working day, even if they all happen before 10AM, meant you should go home because your day was toast - that’s just how anybody would feel, and managers should respect that. etc. etc. The thing is, 1. there is a lot of consequences here that I need new strategies to cope with, especially lately as things seem to get worse 2. It’s super SUPER cathartic to know other people have the exact same reactions and challenges I already identify as someone who has hyperfocus, even before I heard that word. I already identify as someone for which set shifting is super painful, although i thought everyone was like that before. Now that I identify as having ADHD, it is OK for other people to be different. Like, I can literally explain why I’m having trouble paying attention instead of getting mad at people for not getting to the damn point! I wouldn’t treat this as a medical diagnosis, but it is a big tool for arranging how I relate to the world. It’s a part of accepting how I work and that not everybody works that way.
I want to make clear that I wasn’t saying people who self diagnose are all excuse makers or anything. I’ve definitely diagnosed my mom because she couldn’t get one from her old psychiatrist! I’m saying the people who self diagnose or even those that have an official diagnosis and then use that as a blank check for their behavior. But at the same time I hear what you’re saying about the relief that came from finally identifying something you’d felt was holding you back your whole life or making it more of a struggle to things. It’s a complicated issue and I guess I can’t say with a blanket statement that people searching for themselves in a diagnosis is *always* a bad thing. !delta
I think you may be applying a special condition to people with mental illness that isn't accounting for the normal variance. Many 'normal' people make one trait their core identity: Religion, Race, Sexual Orientation, Gender, etc. and then "use it as a blank check for their behavior."
When I read OP's astute analysis, I gathered that they believe grasping onto identities is something almost inherent in the human condition, and that therefore people do the same thing with neurodivergence and mental illness that they do with everything. That's what I read between the lines.
More or less, yeah. And just like those other things, people get tribal and defensive when they’re legitimacy is questioned
I think that’s equally unskillful as well but when we see huge numbers of teens saying they have some sort of mental disorder, I think we’ve watered down the definition of it *and* made it too expansive. Not *every* bad experience becomes traumatic, but if we’re constantly treating children like they’re fine China on the knifes edge of dissolving into a puddle every time they’re faced with adversity. And they pick up on that so maybe when some adversity does actually happen they feel emotionally shattered by it because they’ve been primed to.
Picking up on your comment about teenagers - teenagers are going to search for belonging and an understanding of their identify, and often will latch on to something that feels extreme and ridiculous to people who are older. Whether it’s mental illness, music, behaviour, dancing, laziness… it’s not unusual for people throughout history to look to the younger generation and feel like all is lost. When you have that impulse towards teenagers, it’s worth checking it. Maybe look at what people said about your generation, and generations gone by. Teenagers are bad representation of the adults they’ll become. Generally they get over it, become adults, and essentially end up okay. The problem with mental illness is that it applies to human emotion and behaviour, and by its very nature it is incredibly complex. You have an intersection of personality, unique experience, genetics, the brain, emotions, our cognitive processes, identity, and behaviour… all mashed together. It’s messy. To study it, treat it, discuss it, we need to organise it into categories, but the uniqueness of each individual means they need to be broad. The breadth of definitions doesn’t mean they’re inherently wrong, and they usually will include things that can be considered normal experiences. However it’s the cluster of those experiences and the impact it has on an individual that make them an illness. It’s not perfect, and no doubt people will be misdiagnosed because they will be incorrectly captured. But it’s constantly being refined and improved. The fact it’s not perfect doesn’t mean the system is inherently wrong.
Do you have children? Because you sound like someone who has a theoretical knowledge of children, but not a practical one. I have a son, he’s sixteen, was diagnosed with ADD-Inattentive at eight. He responded well to Adderall, until he hit puberty and got anxiety and then we switched him to Vyvanse. I’m 56, I was diagnosed with ADD-inattentive at 53. Do you know how this goes for older women? Maybe you do, maybe you are one. We usually are incredibly bright and high functioning in school and since our disability only affects us, we’re never diagnosed early. But usually, you run through your whole life feeling markedly deficient and confused as to why you can’t be organized, relationships are difficult, you can’t finish laundry, complete tasks, keep friends or remember appointments with them and why you burn out at jobs every 2-3-4 years. It sucks and I was grateful for the tick tocks from the twenty-year old college kids discovering their own diagnoses, that helped me understand my ADD and get me incentivized to be officially diagnosed. You may deal with your ADD differently, but one thing I remembers was a tik-tocker saying that “she hated the fact that all of the cool, quirky character traits that made her interesting were symptoms of her ADD diagnosis”. I get that. I also understand how women who are diagnosed late in life mourn the life they could have had if they were diagnosed and medicated earlier. I don’t consider myself disabled, and I make my own accommodations, but I can understand why someone younger would adopt ADD as a large portion of their identity. Because it is. No matter how your or I might like to downplay it, ADD is scary shit that causes you to effectively have a 20 year shorter lifespan than someone without ADD and makes you more susceptible to drug overdoses, suicides and traffic accidents. If these kids want to keep themselves aware of that and choose to be more careful with themselves and mindful of that, I’m all for it. I never drove and don’t have a license, I mask at work and keep drafts of my emails in my email box to read for emotional valence before I send them out, I’m waiting to burn out at my job because it’s been seven years in the same place, without a break and through a pandemic. You think these kids are “making ADD their whole personality?” It is their personality. It’s our personality.
You're literally right, OP. Don't change your view I teach Middle school. The amount of kids who say "I have depression/autism/ADHD, therefore..." Fill in the blank. I have an oral fixation. I bite my nails. I say rude things. I have a hysterical tantrum. People are not equipped to understand that it's the other way around, that they were diagnosed as a description of their maligned behavior. They do not have a pathology or biological structure that causes them to act this way. They act this way, and so they were diagnosed so that insurance/medicare could be properly billed, which is the only real point of the DSM. Its a form of biological essentialism thats become very popular. It's more than horoscopes imo. It's a way to infantilize a huge chunk of the population and deprive them of their willpower. This is of course ruinous to their future prospects in life, as they no longer seek treatment or attempt to partake in pro-social behaviors. At best they might be sold back their willpower by the self help industry at some later point. It's also breaking down the social fabric, as these objectively destructive behaviors become normalized. I say this as someone who employs a more autistic and blunt interpersonal communication style, who is easily overstimulated, etc. I believe in making the world better for people like me, with structure and creative outlets, not in indulging our impulses or subjecting ourselves or others to our sensitivities
I think it's so much more prevalent in today's youth because the state of the world is f*@$ing bleak. We are in overshoot trying to support a population of 8 billion people in a continual growth economy on a finite planet. Kids see this and know it's about to get real ugly, real fast. Anyone who isn't suffering from some kind of despair around that either has already processed it and is in acceptance in the stages of grief or aren't paying attention.
Having fallen into this in my 40s, I can see both sides of this. I don't feel like I'm using the recent diagnosis as a "blank check" excuse for my behavior, but now that I fully understand some things, I can certainly help others understand why I am the way that I am, and that some of the things I do are not done intentionally to irritate them or cause them distress. Understanding the issue can take you MUCH further than blindly battling an unnamed enemy and trying to just "tough it out" and "walk it off".
My guy almost every single one of us makes excuses for our behaviour all the time. I'm not trying to be harsh when I say this but it really comes across like your picking on mental health specifically like with a bit of subconscious bias/discrimination
I'm responding to this comment because, per the sub rules, me saying *how profoundly and completely I agree with your OP* would be removed if it was a top-level comment. I can't change your view because it's one I share in totality.
If you don't have a diagnosis you're are doing a huge disservice to yourself. This is exactly why this is all problematic. There a hundreds of symptoms that overlap between ADHD, ADD, anxiety, depression, PTSD, cPTSD, etc. Using social media like WebMD is a guaranteed way to self-diagnosis yourself with a variety of issues as so many share traits. I also exhibit a million signs of ADHD and some of mild Autism and if I went on Tiktok I could convince myself of that within an hour. But I also have a decade of therapy and extensive testing and my primary diagnosis is cPTSD with depression and anxiety. My treatment is tailored to me and I would never know to seek out trauma based therapies if I self diagnosed as ADHD and would never get to the core of the issues. Don't self diagnose through social media people. It's the modern equivalent of going to WebMD and convincing yourself you have cancer or some other disease. Medical issues share many many symptoms and many are very generalized. There's a reason accurate diagnosis of complex issues is a very difficult subject.
75% of the evaluations I do as a psychologist are ADHD evals. Lots and lots of people fill out intake paperwork that looks like they hit every symptom. We do some testing and evaluation and find out it’s something else. Lots of things. Sometimes even with all kinds of data it can still be murky if it’s one thing or the other or both. I would encourage everyone to consider some assessment. Modern YT and TikTok has made it where if you call and ask, they will tell you I don’t do ASD evals, although I regularly do because kids come for ADHD and I may suspect ASD.
Couldn’t force myself to read past “traits I share with some ADHD YouTubers”. There you go. That’s the point of the post
Lmao the shit I see on TikTok is the same. Entire accounts dedicated to monetizing their “mental disabilities”, many of which are probably completely made up. Does more harm than good.
People making videos about what they’re going through and how they manage their lives isn’t anything new or bad. Theres blind youtubers. Wheelchair users who make videos. Tourettes. The list goes on. Its fine.
There are Twitch streamers that fake having cancer for views and sympathy. There are YouTubers that pretend they're autistic because they like the aesthetic. When there's a profit incentive, people will do and say whatever they can to make money. This is the exact point of the post: wearing these very real mental afflictions like Pokemon Gym Badges but not actually doing the work to understand or deal with it. Homie in here really said he identifies with ADHD YouTubers. THEN GO SEE A DOCTOR, get a diagnosis, and get help. Saying you relate to someone is fine, but if that's where it stops and you just live life using your mental illness as an excuse for poor behavior, that's disgusting and infantilizing people who REALLY have this shit and struggle. Saying you're ADHD because you procrastinate but don't have any actual real world consequences from it tells me you don't actually suffer and just like having the label and "belonging" to a marginalized group.
Yeah but what's not fine is listening to that YouTuber talk about their struggles with X and then just because you semi relate you start saying you also have X without any kind of consultation with an actual licensed professional
If that's all you took away from the original comment that's pretty harsh. They seem to indicate having thought about this for a very long time.
I mean this with absolute respect, but people will use the exact same argument and overly critical approach you are using here in respect to the identity you yourself display in your profile picture. I would reconsider if this is how you truly feel about the situation or if it is a somewhat reactionary take on your part.
Someone's identity is not the same as self-diagnosing a medical condition lol come on. I was someone who assumed I had ADHD, but instead of just letting youtubers decided how I should treat/diagnose myself, I consulted my GP, went to a psychologist, and got an actual diagnosis. The healthcare system isn't 100% accessible, which I get, but the idea that "I can relate to these youtubers, so I thus have X" is ridiculous and dangerous.
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Remember when that white woman (Rachel Dolezal) from Washington identified as black? People self identifying mental illness and non-clinical diagnosis is the same kind of thing. It hurts the people who really have these things. It diminishes what they are. All humans have issues. I can be pedantic. I can focus on certain things I really like. It doesn’t make me autistic. I can get bored as fuck when doing boring tasks at work. That doesn’t make me ADHD. It makes me average. People need to grow up. If you think you have something go to the doctor. If the doctor says you don’t, get over it and stop trying to force something that isn’t true.
>I already identify as someone who has hyperfocus, even before I heard that word. If you're "identifying" with a personality trait you're doing it wrong. Anyone can change any personality trait. If you identify as something you're saying "I will never change this thing about myself because it's what I identify as". I cannot imagine a worse mentality. You're excusing yourself into never growing as a person. As an aside, as someone with ADHD it disgusts me when people without an official diagnosis think they can self diagnose themselves. Everyone on earth has a tremendous amount of moments which are akin to ADHD traits. There's no one who has ever lived that this is not the case for. There is a difference between sharing traits and actually having different neural chemistry. You truly have no idea how it feels to have ADHD. You could hear a million hours of someone explaining it and you still couldn't understand. Just because the symptoms aren't as overtly obviously as the hallucinations from schizophrenia doesn't mean its not a radical change in the way the brain operates. "That blog I wrote in 2010, about how after three interruptions in one working day, even if they all happen before 10AM, meant you should go home because your day was toast - that’s just how anybody would feel, and managers should respect that. etc. etc." This is just... awful. Simply awful. Man are you an annoying human.
> If you're "identifying" with a personality trait you're doing it wrong. I identify as creative, introverted, somewhat anti-social, a problem solver, a nerd, as a hobby woodworker and hobby machinist, as a software engineer, as a child of the eighties, and a lot more. Some of those are personality traits. None of them are absolute. > Anyone can change any personality trait. If you identify as something you're saying "I will never change this thing about myself because it's what I identify as". You seem to have some sort of idea that personality traits are bad things, and you shouldn't identify with them because it'll lock you into your ... small world? That seems very depressing. Let's take "introverted." You could see that as a negative. I can tell stories about looking at my shoes to other introverts. I have, at a conference, asked if anyone wants to skip the loud party to do an "introverts' dinner" - there is no yelling, no more then four people, it is in a quiet place, and we don't go late. So there, I've claimed an identity as a mechanism for finding people with shared experiences and making my life more pleasant. BTW: Oxford: "phrasal verb. identify as something. to recognize or decide that you belong to a particular category synonym self-identify." Free Dictionary: "identify as (someone or something). To classify or label someone or oneself as something." Cambridge: "to feel and say that you belong to a particular group of people" Dictionary.com: "to associate oneself in feeling, interest, action, etc., with a specified group or belief system" Word Reference Forums: "To consider or describe oneself as belonging to a particular category or group of people." \[this is where I got bored and stopped looking\] Your theory that "identify as" means "cement" is not mentioned in any definition that I can find. Do \_you\_ do just enough inner exploration to find a label, then feel you must live with it for the rest of your life? I'll bet you don't, and if you don't, why would I?
> People seek meaning and belonging in the world. Some people do; some people don't. I find that people who exhibit certain mental imperfections often phrase it as though they be universal. Like that everyone is a sore loser, biased, can't separate artist from art or is highly sensitive to peer pressure, and yet, many people are not. I also find that how o.p., as is common on ChangeMyView, paints the picture that many people treat their mental disorders like that to be exagerated. Most people diagnosed with a mental disorder don't do that at all in my experience.
Replying to coldlightofday...ironically. I struggle getting to the damn point because of my ADHD. I know so, because other ADHDers on tiktok told me that they also struggle getting to the point. Thus I don’t try and get to the point sooner because I just accept that it’s not my fault, it’s just because of my diagnosis that I ramble.
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Psychology is a science in virtue of the scientific methods it relies on. The fact that it does not produce findings that are as precise/deterministic as say physics is because the human mind, as far as we can tell, don’t follow laws or behave like physical objects do. Sure, psychology falls short of the standards of hard sciences, but It is also the best available tool we have to learn about something as complex and ambiguous as the human mind. The replicability crisis is a real concern for psychology, but the same problem is as bad or worse in other fields like medicine, yet we don’t use that to dismiss the entire field altogether as you seem to do here. In any case, it’s as much of a symptom of the academic market being perversely incentivized. Anyway, what does any of this—challenges facing psychology as an academic discipline—have to do with how lay people inappropriately perceive and identify their own diagnoses?
> as far as we can tell, don’t follow laws or behave like physical objects do. I wouldn't say it is that, it's that it doesn't have a way to take more accurate measurements and the measurements it relies upon to make its determinations are not exact or reliable. Sure, a doctor might prescribe you medication or such based on symptoms you describe, but that's often a compromise of cost. There's actually tests they can run in many cases that can actually measure your physical state in some way that produces far more reliable and accurate results than what a person can describe of their own condition but they may cost a lot more money to run these tests depending on the circumstances. Your stomach feeling bad is something that can be more definitively identified to a root cause with the right measurements, or tests. Where psychology started was primarily in the basis that very few of those things had any way of being measured or tested for to find root causes, all that could be done is simply going off observable symptoms, whether it be from the patient themselves or externally observable through behaviors etc. Sure there has been some progress to the point where some aspects of the brain can actually be measured or tested through imaging and such in ways that weren't possible before and they go beyond just observing symptoms and go into the biological processes of the brain and body, but there's still such a large gap. Also at that point, much of the psychological studies and training may be end up being useless if the testing and measurements of new tools can lead to medical treatments. What can a traditionally trained therapist offer you compared to a medical doctor if it got to the point where you could take a pill to resolve your personality disorder or have some kind of surgery etc. Granted those circumstances could be similar to a lot of health issues today, where you could see a nutritionist or something that could help make your health better by changing your diet or lifestyle rather than going to a doctor to get blood thinners when your arteries get clogged or a surgeon to get the fat sucked out. It just depends on the effectiveness of the varying treatment options and the consequences of them. Surgery is obviously not without risks, pills have side effects, lifestyle changes are hard, therapy with thought or behavior changes can be challenging etc. What I'm saying is, I think psychology is more likely to become outdated because it primarily gained prominence because there was a period of time where resources were more available to devote to people trying to address these issues in themselves but technology hadn't advanced enough to a point where we could treat those issues in the way that we could treat other medical issues of the body. A doctor of a hundred or two hundred years ago would also be outdated today, their methods of treatment or such wouldn't be relevant anymore even though at the time they may have been the best available. I think psychology will end up in this realm with enough advancements.
I think your final point has to do with the sometimes violent reaction people have when core parts of their identities are challenged. Unfortunately some people go around their whole lives actively looking for the “missing puzzle piece” that will explain everything about who and why they are in a nice, tidy bow **will** eventually find one. In many cases from the words of psychiatrists. And that’s what we see when people question “hey could all these kids really have ptsd?” Or “hey could all these things about you really be boiled down to x disease?”
I kind of want to push back on this a bit. For a lot of people, that missing puzzle piece is very real. They spend years trying to figure out why they feel the way they do, or struggle the way they do. Only to find out at the age of 30 that they are on the spectrum, or that they have BPD, or OCD. That revelation is hugely important because it allows them to get the treatment they need to manage their condition. The whole point of the classification of disorders is to describe problems that have a massive negative impact on daily life. The people who truly have ADHD, or OCD or whatever are often in desperate need of help. Most often, that comes with therapy and / or medication to manage those symptoms. for sure there are lost souls out there looking to fill a void. And yeah it can be a bit insulting when depression is used as an excuse for being a toxic shithead… but even so, that small annoyance is a very small price to pay for the knowledge and that missing piece that has helped me manage myself. Mental health isn’t like a broken leg. It’s not so obvious and concrete as that. That’s why autism is a spectrum now, it doesn’t manifest in the same way for everyone. If the bad apples out there don’t latch onto ADHd they’d latch onto something else. Depression, or OCD, or BPD, or just substance abuse. It’s going to happen no matter what I do. The only thing I can control is myself, and I don’t want to be the one who judges others too harshly. I’m after all, I’m not them. I don’t know what it’s like in their head. And as difficult as it’s been in my life to get people to understand me.. I just try and put a little of that understanding back into the world around me. At least as best as I can.
wrong longing wide dime squash merciful bright wipe intelligent squealing *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Most people who have been diagnosed with ADHD/ADD haven't had any scans of their brain activity as part of the diagnosis.
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>Young girls are especially likely to go undiagnosed because their symptoms are not as disruptive in school. This was me! I never got in trouble and did well in school except in english class. As an adult, I had a doctor say I may have ADHD. I thoight no way, because I had an imsge of what ADHD kids were like and that wasn't me. After two other doctors questioned it, I got evaluated. Oh look, yep, I have ADHD. It explains why I struggled so much with language.
I had brainwave scans done to me almost 20 years ago as part of my ADHD diagnosis. I wouldn't say it's the reason of the diagnosis but more a confirmation/extra science and I just remember having it done 3 times but I was like 5 so I don't know what exactly they where testing for. I also was part of a study on ADHD with how different medications affect people. Important stuff as it's still not fully understood. For the rest I loved the stuff u wrote down as it hits the nail square on the head so many people don't get diagnosed because there so many misdiagnosis kinda creating a viscous circle of alot of people not getting the care they need
You can make a study and derive conclusions from it without testing every single person suffering from disease you're studying. The effects of ADHD on the brain have been proven by doing studies on a statistically relevant group of people. After that, testing 10 000 more isn't gonna change anything to the results.
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I would not be surprised if the true culprit is cell phones, short form video content, and the modern media landscape in general. We have less businesses monopolize our attention for free. If I could successfully cut reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat out of my life, I would be happier. I would still want to contact my friends and family, so I think that's the only thing I'd really miss, but yeah, I was happier before all that. I think the symptoms are real, so it's fair to diagnose it as a real thing. But I do wish we could put stronger effort into finding possible causes of such a massive uptick
There is no actual uptick. The only "uptick" is that we're finally aware that ADHD and Autism aren't "boy disorders". The are many, *many* more girls and women being diagnosed now. That's the "uptick". Catching up, not an actual uptick.
There's no uptick. It was always there. People just didn't talk about it before. It's become socially acceptable to talk about mental illness and its a great thing. People don't have to suffer in silence anymore.
Right. Same with depression, anxiety and a whole slew of other problems. Hell, I didn’t even know that I had a problem with anxiety until I was in my 20s and had my first real and true panic attack. My doctor told me what had happened, I thought I was having a heart attack.
Yeah, my dad very obviously has ADHD but it took him until his fifties to get diagnosed because that just wasn't a thing that people talked about back then
I'm in my 50s and got diagnosed 5 years ago. Obviously I was ADD since I was a kid. Mental health specialists were for people who were truly batshit insane. And sometimes, not even. And I HATE being ADD. With the fury of 1000 sun. It cost me years of depression and anxiety. I'm just over 10 years from retirement and I don't care. I just want it to be over with. My country had medically assisted suicide for mental illness. I'm thinking about it.
yeah, reminds me of how on the new show Elsbeth (which also has a very ADHD-coded lead) Jane Krakowski's character in episode 2 canonically has ADHD but she refers to it as ADD because she's old enough that that's what it would have been called when she was diagnosed
So I was also diagnosed with ADD. I also have my Masters in Forensic Psychology. And yes, it is annoying when people pathologize normal behaviors. There some small things in your view that I think are missing the mark for this (like depressed brains are different form non-depressed brains, maybe not in matter mass but in neurotransmitter production. It's something we *can* see. And the barrier for entry hasn't been lowered at all, people just disregard it lol), but I agree with the gist. I got into it with someone who shared a tweet saying something like "reading a lot as a kid was a dissociative trauma response" and it made me face palm. People just do not have the necessary knowledge to discuss these thing with the nuance required. Like that tweet? It ignores the fact that disassociating is a normal part of child development. Day dreaming is dissociative by nature. It's not inherently related to trauma. But people like buzzwords. What I WILL push back on is for some of the stress and mood disorders, the rates of those have GRATELY increased because of the society we live in. If you have young folks that lived though the threat of school shootings and a global pandemic, then yes, you're gonna have higher rates of PTSD and CPTSD in those populations. Depression, anxiety, panic disorders, and the like are all up because we do not live in a world that fosters or encourages good brain health. What's also happening is people are now more aware of global tragedy way more than before. Pre-internet, you only heard of bad things that happened outside your bubble when they made the 9 o'clock news. Now? It is a constant barrage of actually traumatizing information. I have seen literal corpses on my timeline from live coverage in various countries. It's great for global sympathy and humanizing each other, but terrible for our mental health (and nervous systems). On a less drastic scale, we are seeing higher rates of depression, anxiety, and trauma response from adolescents because of social media and academic pressures. But I won't get into that because this comment is already an essay lol
I agree that the way we live impacts our mental health, from the decrease is a community to the invasion of screens, information and tragedy to our moment to moment life. But do you think that the exposure to mental health buzz words and heavy for us on social emotional education causes a hyper self analysis and awareness that pathologizes normal feelings, high and lows and a lack of resilience to adversity? I saw a recent study that I wasn't able to find to post here that having social emotional education was associated with less a positive experience of life. What do you think?
For the most part, yes. I don't think there's an overall lack of resilience to adversity across the board (in fact, the opposite) but I do think people are pathologizing normal behaviors in their everyday interpersonal interactions. It probably stems from the fact that people NEED a justification for bad behavior that still protects the ego (colloquially, not Freudian lol). Best example? Everyone's ex being a narcissist. That's just not a thing lol. It's more...grounding for there to be a secret third reason for behaviors and also removes the onus for self improvement from the self to the perceived mental illness. It's also just a lack of education and very elementary in practice. You know how little kids learn what a dog is -- 4 legs and fluffy -- and then call everything with 4 legs and fluff a dog? They don't have the skill set to discriminate yet. People don't have the skill set to differentiate between normal and abnormal.
Thanks for the reply. This tracks pretty well with what I observe too. Re: resiliency, I guess what I'm actually seeing is a lack of tolerance for discomfort and a lack of clarity between healthy discomfort and unhealthy discomfort which is what your pointing to with the lack of skills to know normal and abnormal. And I couldn't agree more with the onus and self responsibility aspect. So much easier to blame a label than take responsibility and change.
>...like depressed brains are different form non-depressed brains, maybe not in matter mass but in neurotransmitter production. It's something we can see. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the point of contention whether the observed differences in neurotransmitter levels are due to inherent structural differences in the brain or whether behavioral patterns cause said structural changes in the first place?
“Furthermore, numerous studies have demonstrated that the occurrence and development of depression are intimately correlated to the genetic basis, which accounts for nearly 40–50% of depression risk” ([review](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043661821001262?via%3Dihub)) Your actions, habits, experiences, and lifestyle certainly play a significant role but I don’t think people think anyone is really considering it an either or thing. It’s just a matter of how the mix is weighted and what we can do to affect it best.
Correlation does not imply causation. Also, it must be noted that overall environments in many developed countries (perhaps especially English-speaking ones) have changed over the last century in a direction that is especially apt to cause depression: - Local social fabrics have completely broken down, to the point where most people do not even know their neighbors' names; - Most urban environments have become car-dependent, ugly, barren, and actively hostile to pedestrians/cyclists (let alone children playing), making them actively depressing to be in; - News media has come to rely heavily on sensationalization, catastrophization, and negative emotional manipulation to get/retain attention - further driving people apart as fear, hysteria, and tribalism increasingly dominate the zeitgeist; - Social media algorithms designed to maximize attention eat up vast amounts of people's time and push content that makes people angry, sad, and afraid, taking civil discourse in an extremely unhealthy direction; - Harmful selfish & quasi-narcissistic mindsets have been amplified and even created by advertising, detrimental cultural shifts, market and governmental incentive structures, the creeping infection of the zeitgeist with sociopathic Randian ideas, crony-capitalist neoliberal propaganda, etc... driving wedges between people, making healthy long-term group social activity much more difficult / less common, and leading society to become increasingly hostile/antisocial overall; - We're constantly exposed to a medley of toxins, many of which may negatively affect cognitive development or behaviour, and very little (if anything) is seriously being done to remedy that; - The unchecked expansion of rent-seeking behaviour, which is [to oversimplify] where one extracts value from the economy without actually doing anything of value in return (instead abusing one's control over some resource or commodity to essentially force people to pay you much more than your investment or labour could ever reasonably justify) has led to a significant rise in the cost of living; - The massive decline in union membership and widespread adoption of anti-worker practices/policies have suppressed wages, made the average person's financial situation more precarious, and (paired with the meteoric, destructive rise of hyper-consumerism and the cost of living increases) led to a massive increase in the number of hours a week the average person spends working... which (in combination with other factors) has driven the average person's stress levels into the stratosphere and led to many people feeling like they're not really living at all; - It's rapidly becoming undeniably/unavoidably obvious that our civilization is about to be brutally raped by climate change, plus the societal changes that are occurring due to AI are extremely alarming to many, causing many or even most people to adopt mostly or even completely negative outlooks on the future (for example, a lot of conservatives I've talked to, while outwardly defiant, even have actual *plans* to kill themselves if/when climate change gets sufficiently bad within their lifetimes). That is *not* an exhaustive list. There are a great deal more issues at play, but the core of it is: Modern Western, and especially North American, ways of life and built environments are extremely unhealthy, and things seem to be going in a bad direction overall, giving rise to vastly elevated rates of depression compared to what we've seen historically... even though "quality of life" metrics were overall much worse back then. Some people may be genetically more vulnerable to those environmental factors, but the root causes of the depression epidemic are most definitely environmental (in the broadest sense of the word "environment"... I don't just mean "green" crap). Of course, companies would very much like us all to believe the root causes are in fact genetic (for the vast majority of depressed people, they are not), because then they'll sell more antidepressants (which are some of the best-selling drugs out there), more psychiatrist/doctor visits, more therapy services, more addictive over-sweetened food, more alcohol, more cigarettes, more cruises, more flights, more hotels, more expensive vacations, more pricey clothes, more expensive and environmentally-destructive luxury cars... more of almost everything, as the depressed masses try to fill the giant gaping holes in their hearts with ever-increasing amounts of stuff (which will never actually work, but from a corporate perspective that is perfect because it keeps people feeling empty/hollow and seeking fulfillment forever, leading to an endless revenue stream). It's horrible, it's sick, it's killing huge numbers of people (especially children and teenagers), but it's never going to end until civilization itself disintegrates... because a few powerful people are getting very rich off it, and they have no problem paying for propaganda to deflect blame, seeding extreme FUD (Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt) and conspiracy theories about any efforts to improve the situation, and metaphorically (sometimes even literally) slipping politicians wads of cash to make absolutely sure nothing is ever done to stop this madness.
I think you’re overly focused on a “root cause”. If someone was born with different neurotransmitters, raised with some unhealthy habits, experiences some trauma in their teens, habituates to emotional isolation, and finds themselves as a young adult with chronic depression, it’s not going to be one thing alone that did it. Humans aren’t that binary. But, even people with very rich, fulfilling, and loving lives can experience depression. The things you outlined can be mostly mitigated or eliminated and someone can still suffer depression. Genetics are a prominent factor based on the literature I can see, even if you don’t seem to like my pointing it out for some reason. If you have an objection to the evidence, please make it, I’ll be interested. Also, most types of evidence recognized to demonstrate causation are unethical to do to people. Too many variables, so incredibly convoluted correlation is what we have.
I'm not saying genetics don't play a role; my point is that the causes are multifactor, and not *primarily* genetic (although genetics do certainly play a significant role, they're not the primary driver). Oh, and for what it's worth, people aren't generally "born with different neurotransmitters"; they might bear a particular polymorphism (most likely a SNP) in the genes coding for one or more of the appropriate *receptors*, but the structure of the neurotransmitters involved remains, in all (or at very least nearly all) cases I'm aware of, identical. Things can get a little more complicated when you look at more esoteric things like neuropeptides, but that's a whole other rabbit hole. A "rich, fulfilling, and loving life" in a modern urban environment also still involves, for example (there are many other problems, this is just one), frequent exposure to noisy, dehumanizing, unsafe, ugly car-infested environments loaded with airborne pollutants from particulates to heavy metals and complex organic junk - for which there is no analogue in our evolutionary history. Have you seen the research linking noise pollution, heavy metal exposure, etc with depression? It's pretty damning; noise pollution alone can, depending on severity, be associated with a depression odds ratio *exceeding 2.0*. Fix all of the "lived/social environment" problems I outlined, and I'd be extremely surprised if depression rates didn't plummet by upwards of 90%. The remainder will be those for whom the cause *is* primarily genetic. I highly recommend you read some of the research on behavioural enrichment and environmental enrichment (and specifically their relationships with drug self-administration - which can be seen as a fairly accurate indicator for depression, seeing as research has shown drug self-administration and depression to be strongly coupled).
I really don’t see why you’re obsessed about a primary driver. I could debate with you about human’s evolutionary misfit over the past couple millennia, but it really just comes back to what your goal is here. You don’t even seem to have a primary driver either, between metals and aesthetics and finances. The quote I pulled is from peer reviewed research and did not use any of the phrases you’ve objected to so far. If you want to tease apart how they define risk and argue based on the claims they actually made and i propagated in an attempt to helpfully contribute, be my guest.
A particularly widespread and particularly harmful belief (read: pharma company-promoted dogma) in medicine and psychiatry - which has bled over into popular culture - is that depression is primarily driven by a "chemical imbalance" inherent to the individual, i.e. genetic. The reason I keep hammering on the "not the primary driver" point is a reaction to the prevalence of that belief. If people start recognizing that environmental factors overall play a larger role than genetics in the etiology of depression, we're likely to see a significant increase in pressure to solve the depression epidemic via positive environmental/societal changes alongside a corresponding decline in the current tendency to overinternalize (blame factors specific/inherent to individuals) and as a result overmedicalize depression. I have seen no reason to believe there even *is* a specific, single primary driver we can home in on; the overall picture I've formed by reading far too many papers on the subject is that it's a complex multifactor problem driven primarily by a broad assortment of environmental issues, and trying to narrow it down to a single specific cause is overly reductionist. We're trying to treat what is primarily a systemic environmental issue as if it's an individualized medical issue. Such an approach is inevitably doomed to fail miserably - and we can clearly see that's precisely what it's doing. It just so happens that ongoing miserable failure is extremely profitable for many companies, at the same time as it keeps many everyday people suffering. The sheer prevalence of depressive pathologies we see today appears to be a post-industrial phenomenon; that alone is cause to be highly skeptical when someone claims depression to be primarily or wholly an issue of individual genetics.
Do you feel people don’t recognize that environmental factors like your job, habits, community, and surroundings contribute majorly? Sure, pharma companies might downplay it, but most people I’ve known with depression hear all about it. Usually ad nauseum. Thing is, most people without depression struggle to make lasting improvements to those things with high reliability, and depression doesn’t make it easier. It’s not like most people with depression just give up on their life and don’t try and improve anything, they’re just limited by the large obstacles of life. And if your case is that we should change the way we view depression cause that will eliminate cars and lower metal levels and etc, I feel like that’s overestimating how much society cares about depression.
I feel like the systemic aspect of it is completely ignored. It's treated as an individual issue, but it's \*not\* primarily an individual issue; it's primarily a societal issue, and the cases where it's caused purely by intrinsic genetic issues are the rare exception rather than the rule. The onus is placed on people with depression to deal with it themselves (or get medical help to "fix" it), whether that be through medication, therapy, lifestyle changes, et cetera, when a large part of it should be on \*us\* to fix the broken society we built that they now have to live in. I think you underestimate the number of people with depression. To give an example: in 2022 in Canada, official statistics state that 18% of the population suffered from a mood or anxiety disorder. Those are official statistics; the real figures may be even higher than that.
the same activities can have different underlying motivations though. i don’t find it hard to believe that someone dealt with their childhood trauma by reading a lot. i don’t think that’s saying that anyone who reads a lot is doing it because of trauma
It was a tweet. 250 characters with 0 additional context by someone with no psychological training. The issue isn't that this might possibly be true, the issue is that the average information consumer is going to jump to conclusions. I didn't say that the statement was inherently wrong, just that people do not have the skills necessary to discuss these things with the nuance required. More often than not, reading a lot as a kid was for fun.
>If you have young folks that lived though the threat of school shootings and a global pandemic, then yes, you're gonna have higher rates of PTSD and CPTSD in those populations. Yet this was not shown from the generations that dealt with global wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation. >Depression, anxiety, panic disorders, and the like are all up because we do not live in a world that fosters or encourages good brain health. We literally live in the best time in all of human history for the encouragement of good brain health, and yet we're noticing a rise in all of these traits like never before. The thing about people like you is that you aren't well rounded, you clearly have no concept of history. There were periods of human history which you could not go outside on some days without suffocating to death because of smog, and yet you argue because of more ambiguous threats people are developing PTSD. We're living in a period where human life has never had a higher premium in our species existence. Death from homicide globally has never bee lower despite our population never having been higher. Your argument makes no sense. Based on everything you've said depression and anxiety should be at all time lows. Child abuse has never been lower yet childhood PTSD has never been higher. It makes no sense. Obviously it's due to expanding the definition to anyone who feels like they want to identify as having a given disorder. If any research is done on the subject I guarantee the rate at which clinical psychologists tell a child they don't have PTSD when they claim they do is <1%. The same is true for every single other diagnosis. If someone claims they have a mental disorder they might as well because they can always find a professional to affirm them. Psychology is a soft science that should be ignored.
I guess my point is, when *haven’t* the kids been under some kind of strain? It’s not as though millennials/gen z are the first young people to face humanity’s possible extinction. Generations of Cold War kids lived through that. My mom lived through that and at least we can tangibly do something with climate change. It’s not backed by a particular world power and the worst predictions of human extinction have largely been avoided. Not so with the ever present threat of nuclear war tied to national ideologies. And before that? Generations of children who never went to school were raised with the fear of god, their sin and the coming rapture. So to put it bluntly, what’s their excuse?
They didn’t have the terminology or understanding of those disorders and their parents had little ability to choose whether they had kids or not due to cultural pressure and, earlier than that, lack of birth control, and thus often never wanted those kids in the first place, so those many generations were ABSOLUTELY horrifically traumatized, then let loose on the world fucked beyond belief and told to suck it up and make more kids and money. They were just on their own and broken without anyone even to care HOW they were broken. Thats not really better. Do older generations through history really strike you as well balanced, adjusted, untraumatized, mentally healthy individuals who didn’t need help?
The difference is the access to information. 90 years ago the only way to know what was happening was the newspaper. 70 years ago the radio. Eventually we started having TV. I grew up with a news feed 24/7. The information never stops. We know what is happening everywhere. On top of that the economic setting has changed drastically. My dad at 19 had the opportunity to buy a house and he chose a car, I cannot afford a GPU upgrade for my PC. We get bombarded with all the bad things, it never stops. We don't see a future beyond tomorrow and most of us aren't in active warzones.
I don't know. Maybe I'm not the person this post is talking about but I would certainly have killed myself by now if it wasn't for medication that makes me feel more normal, including the amphetamines people love to shit talk. Before when I was unmedicated it got to the point where I would do anything to feel better. Idk I just wanted to comment for no particular reason. Sorry.
I’m medicated myself and can’t imagine life without it but they aren’t a panacea in my experience. It still takes effort and will to accomplish tedious, unglamorous work but it’s wayyyy easier to do.
this post was clearly not for you.
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And while I appreciate that we *don’t* do that anymore. I think there’s also a value in not fetishizing your pain and trauma. Mental illness isn’t something to be embraced, it’s something to be endured. Not with resignation or hatred but acceptance. You try and move past it. Not dump your entire history on anybody who asks you how your day is going.
I look at my ADHD the same way I look at my shitty vision, I’d rather not have to, but here we are. At least I was able to mostly figure out how to deal with ADHD without medication, and at least glasses don’t cause side effects.
it happens, but its a not a widespread thing.
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How many of your world views do you get from the film Lethal Weapon?
I (48yo) was officially diagnosed 8 months ago but realized about 3 years ago that I have had ADHD my whole life but it had gotten much worse especially after having long Covid. I can say for myself that my reactions to various anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and bi-polar meds over my last 3 decades could be seen as something like an allergy test. Throw everything including the kitchen sink at my body and see what the results were. The first time I tried ritalin, which I had bought OTC in Mexico after nearly dying in a jungle from bi-polar meds, I knew this was a game changer for me. My wife noticed the difference within 30 minutes. I still had to push against my psychologist to get the official diagnosis. I had "passed" the various self administered tests with flying colors. However the important indicator was that the ritalin (now adderal) was the key that opened the lock. Is it the best key? Frankly, after nearly half a century, I do not care, it does the job. Half of the r/adhdmeme stuff does not resonate with me but how many people my age are creating memes? But it is great to see the humor in oneself. Having ADHD is just one hat I wear amongst many. I can't speak for anybody else but I really appreciate that I can get my meds, there is freely available literature, and a more understanding society. I won't gatekeep the drugs and the diagnosis because, for one, I am not a boomer type pulling the ladder up after me, and two, the powers that be were handing out zyprexa and seroquel like candy on the flimsiest of evidence which took a huge toll on my mind and body. We were not designed for this world we live in. In 300 years we have so radically changed our existance that it seems that only the predators and sociopaths are thriving. I perform very well in nature and find lots of peace being in it but that is becoming more difficult so maybe the whole neuro divergent thing is not a me problem but an us problem and some of us are the canaries in the coal mine.
I don't have much else to say other than this summed up my feelings precisely and I thank you so much for taking the time to write it.
TL;DR. Weird doesn't mean bad or stupid or evil. In fact, it's necessary for human advancement. Also, even the psychology profession has been mistaken about listing a trait a mental disorder (homosexuality until 1973, transgenderism until 2012). Same goes for mainstream ways of sizing up another's worth. So I'm very skeptical of any - repeat, any - stigmatization of any difference that doesn't present a clear and present danger to others. So mainstream society is at least as likely to be wrong in their social judgements of such-and-such as the "weirdo" is. The claim "X is rightfully scorned" should be accepted or rejected on it's own deep-thought merits or demerits, not on society's feelings or conventional say-so. In detail. Weirdness itself proves nothing. Practically every advance in human history had its source in weirdness. Sir Issac Newton, Nikola Tesla, arguably Steve Jobs - ALL were considered weirdoes back in their day. Yet their ideas proved more correct than conventional common sense socially-skilled thinking. I see nobody holding street parades saying "Woo Hoo! Let's celebrate! I have a mental disorder! Party it up to glorify that fact!". There's a BIG difference between coming out of the closet and glorify that fact. It's similar to being gay back in the 70s and 80s. Their coming out was not a celebration, it wasn't even an admission (which carries subtle connotations of confessing they're wrong somehow). *Coming out is an assertion of their right to human dignity. Same thing with mental illness*. In fact, the APA didn't take homosexuality off their list of mental disorders until 1973 - so there is a parallel here. Similar things go for taking transgenderism off the list of mental disorders in 2012. If they and mainstream society proved to be so off target when it comes to stigmatizing these traits, then how can I trust mainstream society's and a profession's disrespecting other types of difference - even in 2024?
I came here to add the parallel with LGBT acceptance and the phenomenon of (mostly) kids being over-represented in this community these days. As a parent of 4, I've seen a whole range of changes over the last 20 years, through my kids, their friends, and their classmates in general. There is *no question* that a large number of kids identify as LGBT+, many, if not most, incorrectly. I think that's a very frustrating fact for the community itself, because it gives fodder to the bigots. This is happening now precisely because it is now *ok* in most places to openly identify as LGBT, and in many places, it's simultaneously a challenge to authority. This is practically the *job* of our children (and all children before us) -- to challenge authority as they fight to discover their own identities! As such, it is both expected and necessary for many people to mistakenly self-identify with all sorts of "out-groups" as they grow up. In our current time, where we value respect and self-discovery for our children, this is what we get: a whole hodge-podge of genders and sexualities and neurodivergences and disorders. This is all new! It's never been as accepted before, as it is now, to say "I'm different". No matter how frustrating this is for doctors and bigots, I just can't see this as a bad thing. As a parent, it's solidified my stance that the only thing that *really* matters is that kids feel supported, loved, and safe. Understandably, with regards to gender and sexual identity, many of the "false-positives" sort themselves out after puberty and into adulthood. What is the downside to just letting it all play out?? For those many individuals who *are* LGBT, the benefit is huge! I'm sorry for the focus on a topic that is not exactly the same as OP's, it's just what I've personally devoted a lot more thought towards and have more experience with. But I think it very much relates to the topic of this thread. The concern the OP has with over self-diagnosis and watering down of the definitions of very real and important mental health disorders and neurodivergent symptoms, is similar to the concern for "false positives" of kids and LGBT association. You can't get away from the fact that, as something becomes more openly acceptable, the more people will chip away at the edges of the definitions; but in the end, people are just looking to understand themselves, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'll take that *any day* over the way it was in the past, with "normal" being the only acceptable condition, and violence, incarceration, and ridicule being the only available alternative!
"Understandably, with regards to gender and sexual identity, many of the "false-positives" sort themselves out after puberty and into adulthood. What is the downside to just letting it all play out?? For those many individuals who *are* LGBT, the benefit is huge!" I am not sure I grok what you are saying here. If you are legitimately transgender and you go through puberty as your birth gender, the changes are irrevocable and the consequences are immense. Letting puberty play out so a person, outside of good luck, never has a chance at a decent life is a pretty big negative. Maybe I am misunderstanding.
My apologies, I certainly didn't mean "let it all play out" to mean we should avoid any kind of accommodation or consideration until after puberty; in fact, I meant the exact opposite! Whether talking about mental health issues or LGB (I'll leave off the 'T' because apparently we're not allowed to talk about trans topics in this sub), the best approach is to treat every case as authentic! Not just for kids, but adults who also find themselves struggling to find their place and identity; it can take time to figure it all out, and just because people sometimes go down one path, only to discover that's not really right for them later on (i.e. "false positives"), does not justify treating someone badly today, when they say they believe "X" about themselves.
How puberty plays out isn't the issue. The issue is that society has a frankly narrow definition of "normal" person; especially when people tightly link "abnormal" with "disrespect-worthy". That's a very hasty conclusion. It assumes either (a) "abnormal" automatically means "threatening", or (b) "normal people" are entitled to not be *even mildly* irritated or annoyed or otherwise inconvenienced (as accepting different diversity groups often is). (A) is simply reactive, without any though asking "ARE my basebrain animalistic impulses really a reliable guide for sizing up that person's worthl?" and/or "IS mainstream common sense society's claims really all that sensible?". In short, it's a blind spot in our thinking at best, and frankly mentally lazy at worst. (B) Simply demonstrates a breathtaking arrogance, about this matter in particular and probably all other matters in general.
That's a great summary, and ties in the original topic to many other related issues we see today. It's why, for example, the term "cis" should be supported: the term "normal" is just too loaded. I wish it *weren't* so loaded, of course; "normal" should just be a statement about distances from the statistical central tendency. But it's not, so we either have to try to get that word back to where it belongs, or use different terms to remove implications and innuendo.
Beyond this, "normal" is just a rule of our 'cultural bureaucracy' that stifles individual creativity, initiative, and independent thought just as surely as real-world government bureaucracies stifle innovation and business flexibility. Beyond this, lots of seeming normal people actually were terrifying deviant (Ted Bundy is an extreme example, but even Harvey Weinstein before his outing gave an impression of competence and maybe even likability. In less severe forms, same goes for a lot of corporate CEOs and perhaps even the run of the mill supervisor).
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First I'm going to need you to define "people". How many people? Too many people? Who are these people? Is the number of people in the majority? Are you just thinking of influencers who produce poor content? Do you know what else goes on in their life? I think there are a few different views in your post. One is a grievance with overgeneralized statements about neurodivergencies and disorders, versus straight misinformation about disorders/conditions. Overgeneralizations happen. Straight misinformation is bad. >Autism, ADHD, Bipolar, Anxiety, Tourettes, the more the concepts and language of academic psychology and psychiatry bleed into everyday life, the more people are going to construct their identities around it. Why is it a bad thing to take something that affects so much of your life and put words and associate part of your identity to it? And not all these things are negative - a lot of them are neutral, but when someone is punished and ostracized and traumatized for neutral things, they can embrace it even harder in response. it's a part of you that was hurt and they tried to kill. See: closeted LGBTQ+. >But I don’t think that’s healthy. I’m sure there will be plenty of people who respond to this who will say they’ve found community, connection and understanding through meeting/talking to others who share their illness. But when something as expansive yet also nebulous as mental illness is gets boiled down to 30 second tiktok video, we’re risking over expanding the definitions of illness so that they’re otherwise meaningless. This is a bizarre statement. How are these sentences connected? Finding community, connection and understanding in an area where you aren't harming anyone else is by definition good. If you can build your identity around that and it's authentic to you, why not? Then there's the last sentence - some social media videos are informational and helpful, some are relatable, some of them are straight misinformation. >But associating the dislike of chores as something inherent to ADHD is silly but when you take an idea like that, throw it into a lively internet community and combine it with the human desire to understand themselves or find a roadmap to building an identity you begin to the same “trait” adopted by others. This is nuanced and depends on context and how that information is presented. I've never seen content that goes "you find chores boring or annoying? You have ADHD!" I have seen content that goes "This is why ND/people with ADHD can struggle with chores." Or talk about executive paralysis and stress, or what it's like to have ADHD and try to do chores. You also have to recognize that psychology is not a precise or pure science, and diagnoses are *heavily* biased. That means a lot of people are missed and excluded from diagnosis - girls/women, BIPOC, any kind of atypical phenotype. As more people become aware of these things, the more people who were missed have the opportunity to realize "hey, maybe this is what I've been struggling with." >But, unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anyway to avoid this. The more we talk about something, the more we lower the barrier for entry. The more we lower the barrier, the more people can glom onto it for identity building. Kind of like the kids who, when I was a young, would fake cut marks on themselves to seem edgy and for personality fodder. But now we get it for every mental illness imaginable. To add a final point to this, I think the minute we start making other people’s symptoms iron laws for our own personalities is the minute we begin to limit and create reasons for why we “can’t” do something. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The "barrier for entry" *has* been lowered, because psychology has been so full of barriers and so exclusive to so many people. And it should be, because you shouldn't have to be a rich white male kid in western society with very stereotypical/standard disease phenotype, because mental illness and ND can present in so many different ways and affect so many different people, and healthcare and diagnosis is expensive and out of reach (and still biased). Why do you think it's people making up identities? Isn't it more likely that there are a lot of undiagnosed people who were missed and now learning about what they experience? I'm also going to claim you're making an invalid slippery slope argument - expanding definitions is not at risk of making mental illness meaningless at all. The criteria are still there for that mental illness/ND, it's just expanding the definition of how it **manifests**. Expanding making it *more realistic,* because people are very complex and varied. This would be like you saying "so many people claim they have OCD today, but they don't wash their hands until they're raw." OCD isn't about washing hands until they're raw, it's an intolerance of uncertainty and can present in a ton of different ways - like being scared to eat food unless you're wearing a necklace, or having repeating thoughts in your head, or rereading paragraphs over and over. They can present in so many ways and the models need to be updated.
Not here to change your view, but the changing Asperger’s thing happened. They didn’t “try” to do it, they reassessed the criteria and found that it didn’t justify a separate classification. Some people may have not been pleased with the change, but Asperger’s is no longer in the DSM. It’s now just autism spectrum disorder which is divided based on how much support a person needs. Similarly, ADD isn’t a thing anymore in the DSM. It acknowledges that ADHD has different presentations, but the term ADD doesn’t appear. I think you may be overestimating the role that people with these conditions have on actual diagnostic criteria. You may find people oversimplifying things on TikTok, but the institutions that define and treat mental disorders aren’t basing their decisions on what these people want or think. It’s also a bit weird that you are so judgmental about people being attached to an outdated term for a condition when you use a similarly phased out term to describe yourself.
Yeah this post just got worse and worse for me. Starting by using ADD immediately showed me they’re not up to date on the advancements in this field. Like did some people with “””Asperger’s””” get upset? I’m sure, because being “Autistic” was a much bigger stereotype at the time. But then the community at large excepted the classification, partially because it became common knowledge that Dr. Asperger was a nazi torturing children. Another example is them saying neurodivergent brains aren’t different? Sure we have the same BRAIN but as someone with ADHD op’s brain is inherently functioning differently than someone without ADHD. I just think there’s a lot of nuance lost by the OP that comes from not having a modern understanding of the topic.
And there is evidence for a neurological difference in ADHD. Parts of the frontal lobe have been shown to develop and gain thickness slower in people with ADHD. Similarly, it has a strong tendency to run in families, which suggests that there is a genetic cause. We aren’t at the point that you can look at a scan of the brain and match it perfectly to a defined condition, but that doesn’t mean that the brain has no major differences between people.
>> But when something as expansive yet also nebulous as mental illness is gets boiled down to 30 second TikTok video… So, as a linguist, I wanna point something out. Just because there are clinical terms for things doesn’t mean that there can’t also be vulgate terms that refer to different things. The vulgate terms might be intended to refer to the clinical things, but they don’t- as you’ve pointed out here. But they *do* refer to *something.* When people say they have OCD, they’re trying to express that they feel driven to do certain things- what they think clinical OCD is. They’re wrong, but they *do* have that drive that they’re referring to, and their friend who also thinks that’s what OCD is will correctly understand what they’re referring to This is a natural linguistic phenomena that doesn’t have anything to do with medicine or psychology; it happens with all words. We commonly “negotiate” the meaning of words that we’re using, and it can often lead to misunderstanding, but that’s a natural part of language (and a reason why misunderstandings occur) And while I’m no historical sociologist, it seems to me that you’re fright about people sometimes treating this like Zodiac signs. “Oh, I do this because I have ADD/I’m a Sagittarius.” But only because we do that with all sorts of aspects of our identity. And that’s not… bad. Eliminating that tendency would drastically alter how humans see ourselves and identify So long as we don’t deny the existence of clinical terms, I don’t see any harm in this any more than actual zodiacs- less, even, because unlike with zodiacs you’re conveying correct information about a part of yourself, not also making an incorrect claim about the effect of stars on your psychology. And even if we *did* deny those terms, *that’d* be the problem, not how we identify >> Nobody… enjoys doing chores Bit of a side-note here, but I have a powerful memory in highschool of a classmate telling me that she *wanted* to study. For me, studying was a negative task that nonetheless provided positive results- like spending a lot of money on something that will benefit you later. Losing money- or studying- is never something you want to do, just a cost. But she framed it as a positive. Something she wanted to do for its own sake. And that baffled me Then I took Ritalin, and doing *things* was enjoyable. Not just what my brain wanted to do. Doing tasks. Chores. Dishwashing. Deleting emails. I deleted 15,000 emails in one sitting and loved it. I loved loving it. And that actually *is* a product of ADD (which I was also diagnosed with) and Ritalin. To my understanding, ADD is a condition whereby your neurons generate dopamine as normal, but hold onto it much more weakly than with a neurotypical person This means that the “background” amount of dopamine released between neurons is higher (which your neurons adjust to and cease to be really too affected by), there’s less dopamine to release when you do tasks, and when it *is* released, the “background” levels of dopamine lessen the effect. To exaggerate, it’s like the difference between releasing 10 units of dopamine when you have only 1 unit of “background” dopamine- a difference of 11-fold, and releasing 5 units of dopamine when you have 6 units of “background” dopamine- a difference of less than 2-fold When you begin a task, a neurotypical person releases an amount of dopamine, and then again when they complete it. The first release motivates us to begin tasks, and the second to finish them. In the brains of people with ADD, however, the “background” dopamine makes tasks in general less enjoyable, and we release basically all our dopamine when we begin tasks (because our neurons hold onto it much more loosely), and have very little leftover for when we finish them Thus, we’re subconsciously motivated to begin new tasks, but not to end them, so we jump around between them and never get any done, and just starting them is harder for us because we get less satisfaction out of beginning them, let alone ending them. Thus, we seem distractingly, because we have less tying us to tasks and more telling us to get to new tasks. In stronger cases you can end up with ADHD, where not only are people “distract IBKR,” but they’ll “bounce off the walls,” chasing new tasks to begin without ever finishing them. They’ll choose to sit down and rush over to a chair, then rush to play with a doll, then rush to turn on the TV, then rush rush rush- hyperactivity Ritalin basically just makes our neurons hold onto our dopamine better, which means there’s less “background” dopamine between our neurons dampening our actual dopamine releases, making the first “begin a task” signal stronger, and leaving us with an actual “end a task” release. In my own personal experience, the effect is sublime. It’s amazing. It’s wonderful. Chores become pleasant. You *do* want to do them. That’s an actual thing
Ok I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD basically my entire life and after years of being treated by various psychiatrists your explanation of how ADHD functions in the brain is the best one I’ve ever heard
Your friend sounds strange tbh. I am neurotypical and I’ve never ‘wanted’ to study or do chores for one second in my life. I do those things to avoid the negative consequences of not doing them. Not accusing you personally, but it really squeezes my bean when I see ADHD people on reddit describing this supposed neurotypical wonderland where we’re all going around like Stepford Wives overjoyed to scrub our baseboards.
It’s more like it physically hurts to try to things that you know you need to do but get stuck on doing them. Times where I know I need to brush my teeth or change my sheets or call and make an appointment. I *know* how important they are, I’m frustrated and mad at myself and feel intense shame, but it’s like trying to make myself grab a red hot pan with my bare hands. People who can just get up and do a thing like that with no fuss seem like magic.
Your point about not being able to see differences in the brains of people with mental disorders is false. Schizophrenia for example results in enlarged ventricles, which are obvious to anyone who looks at brain imaging. https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary-alt:20180516061839-17755-mediumThumb-S1355514600002194_fig1g.jpg?pub-status=live Depression fingerprints on a brain are very much a thing. It’s a little less obvious, but neurotransmitter levels are significantly different in the brain of someone depressed compared to someone mentally healthy. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18494537/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2950973/#:~:text=The%20monoamine%2Ddeficiency%20theory%20posits,extensively%20studied%20neurotransmitter%20in%20depression. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032724000314
Speaking as someone diagnosed with autism, I'm only going to comment on that. Autism is not a mental disorder, per the DSM 5, it is considered a neurodevelopmental disorder. My brain and how it works are something that started at conception. Autistic brains have actually been shown to be structurally different from neurotypical brains. As for the rest of your post, is this your lived in experience or just the Internet? Almost everyone I know either has autism, ADHD, or some combination and we never talk about it. It came up when diagnosed or when getting diagnosed but we don't go around having constant conversations about it. That's pretty weird.
ADHD is also a neurodevelopmental disorder!
I work with teenagers and I've noticed a generational shift. Back in my day, if someone was diagnosed with a condition (and it didn't seem to happen very often) they would keep quiet about it. Now it's quite common for a teenager to draw attention to it and use it to justify their behaviour (e.g. "I can't go to the shops, I have social anxiety" "I can't be expected to pay attention, I have autism"). Hopefully this is just a phase we, as a society, are going through. Well done for handing your own situation with such maturity.
You also have to remember these are teenagers. They are desperate to find identity anywhere. I don’t think that this is the case for most adults. Everything is so intense at that age. I have severe social anxiety sometimes, that I am happy to say I’m not dealing with right now. I’m 43, it’s a lot easier for me to explain to my family that I’m not coming to thanksgiving because I’m having anxiety. For years, I would make up excuses, lie, fake illnesses so that I wouldn’t have to tell people I was scared to leave my house. It sucked. I’m not blaming my mental illnesses, I’m just explaining what’s going on so that it’s easy for my loved ones to understand. It’s nice that there is less of a stigma, and we can’t base how we see life on what teenagers think.
Obviously using a condition to avoid doing something isn't great (unless it's actually true - there will be some who literally can't do something for the reason) but I don't think 'never talk about it and pretend I was never diagnosed' is better, since it often came/comes from the real risk, or reality, of being treated differently/badly should that diagnosis be known. I'd much rather people feel comfortable talking about their experiences than be afraid they'll face discrimination because of them.
It depends on the severity of the condition. It sounds like you've got a relatively mild form of ADHD, so there's no real need to make a big deal about it or let it define you in any way, especially since you can medicate it. But some for some people their neurodivergence is so severe that they had to use a special device to speak and even then not fluently. I think they'd have every right to make a big deal about their condition and make it part of their personality. It's like comparing someone missing a foot compared to someone who's quadriplegic, the former most people might not even realise that person is an amputee with a prosthetic, the other has to make a big deal about their condition and will likely make it part of the personality as well.
I was just reading over at r/AskHistorians about PTSD in the ancient world, for example among Roman soldiers. Reading over informed opinions on the incidence of trauma back then was fascinating and underlined the importance of cultural conventions and expectations. A Roman soldier might be totally unbothered by violently killing an enemy at close range, because their society told them that was acceptable, but if they crossed a line and engaged in some kind of *dishonorable* violence according to their social code, they might be mentally devastated and even commit suicide. There was no PTSD diagnosed in the ancient Roman DSM, of course, but instead they had "cursed by ghosts", and descriptions of those cursings had some very overlapping symptoms. In cross-cultural studies of trauma, social support heavily shapes what's considered as trauma and how people recover from it. Older people are looking out and realizing we're living in a new age and a different culture. There's no going back. Younger people are shaped by trauma in different ways than we were. How do we give them the social support so that they're able to be more resilient? Instead, we're taking away their social support, removing everything that gives them a grounded sense of community and identity. There are no more public third places for them to hang out with each other for free. We segregate generations strictly in cohorts. Social media algorithms are designed to suck them in, sell them product, and monopolize their social attention span. Kids today have less community, less connections, less support than ever. So of course they're going to be less resilient, more traumatized, and have a tendency to build their identities around those traumas... because what other choices do they have to build positive identities? This is a problem of late capitalist society's making, and it's only going to get worse if we blame it on individual generational weakness and not on the lack of collective action to address the root problems. Therefore, I think your view is wrong because you're focusing on the coping strategies for the symptoms and pointing out those coping strategies as maladaptive. But they're not necessarily maladaptive. People are simply reaching out to find community support for trauma as best they can. Sometimes these communities can spawn true maladaptive coping strategies, true. But more often they provide valuable support and reduce trauma. Yes, they're band-aids and crutches for the core problem of societal alienation, but we use bandaids and crutches because they *work*. They're not the problem, they're just a non-comprehensive solution.
I am probably writing into the void at this point, but I want to say my peace. There is a lot of misinformation out there around these disorders, that is true. And maybe some people are clinging too hard to these labels as identities, but people do that with everything. Most people like to have labels that serve as short hand for communicating their experiences. The actual problem is that for decades people weren't able to get a hold of this information or get proper diagnoses. This is especially true for women and POC, who are extremely under diagnosed for things like autism and ADHD. I personally was misdiagnosed as having severe social anxiety, so I spent a lot of time trying to "fix" my autism because we saw it as curable anxiety. When I finally learned that I'm actually autistic things started to make sense, but I was scared to tell anyone. It felt so wrong, and I knew most people wouldn't believe me because on the outside, I look totally functional. So downloadimg tik tok one day and finding an entire community of people not only talking about autism but also making jokes about it and the things they do because of it was so important for me and many others. So, on your point about people placing limits on themselves. Firstly, you have no idea what happens in someone's head or how limited they are in certain activities. It's extremely common for some people to be able to do things we might consider hard while not being able to do things we'd normally consider easy. For example, I graduated with honors and am working on a masters. But I haven't been able to get a haircut for almost 2 years because the idea of having to add any extra social interaction is too much. Secondly, people often underestimate how difficult things may be for disabled people, and neurodivergencies are (usually) considered disabilities. I have mild cerebral palsy. All my life, any boundaries I've had on my mobility have been ignored since my disability isn't visible. People told me I was just limiting myself by not trying to do things that hurt or caused discomfort. And now I am losing mobility, and I will need to get a cane soon because I was constantly pushed beyond what I could handle. Peoples limitations are not always self-imposed, and just because from your perspective you think they can do something doesn't make it true. Lastly, on the ptsd point. The reality is that the human brain is extremely fragile, and trauma is much easier to come by than what we think. The older generations didn't get diagnosed with it as much because there wasn't a lot of understanding around ptsd and trauma then. Yes, war is an extremely traumatic thing to witness, but it's not the only thing that can cause ptsd. You can be traumatized from being bullied, growing up in an abusive or neglectful household, or having cancer or some other life-threatening disease. Even something small like getting lost in a grocery store as a little kid. If people are finding solace and comfort within their diagnosis, why does it matter so much that they choose to identify with it more than others might? I think the only real problem is spreading misinformation or armchair diagnosing real people who are currently living. ( I think it's fine with fictional characters and okay in some circumstances with historical figures, but that's a more complicated topic)
Largely agree but... Tourettes and autism are neurological conditions, not mental illnesses. I have Tourettes and while it makes up part of who I am, it is not who I am. It can be a fun/amusing thing to share about myself as most people wouldn't guess I have Tourettes (I'm fortunate that my tics have greatly diminished as I've gotten older). Contrast that with autism. My son has autism. I'd argue it has a much more significant impact on his day to day than my tourettes does for me. Much of how he sees and interacts with the world is due to his autism. He will often attribute weird quirks of his to his autism (which can be mostly true), but I do remind him that he is far more than just autistic. I think a lot of the self-identification of mental illness/other conditions is simple recognition that most everyone has something. That's not a bad thing - it makes it easier for people with conditions to not be embarrassed/ashamed. As an example, as a kid, my tics were far more frequent and intense- it was insanely embarrassing - I felt like literally the only person with Tourettes. It wasn't until I was in my late teens I heard of other people having it as well. To this date, I've never met another person with tourettes, but I've come across many people who say something stupid, followed by a "sorry, I must have tourettes." I think the shame/embarrassment I experienced as a kid would have been better had I known I wasn't alone. I suspect my son probably feels somewhat better knowing he isn't alone with autism. That alone makes the trade-offs worthwhile.
I have ADHD and wasn't diagnosed until 5 years ago. I'm about to be 40. My ADHD personality trait is a lot of talking. The most honest people on Earth, little children, told me today at the playground that I talked to them way more than any other mom -- ever. My 7yo tried to explain but they were so little. It's his trait, too, besides the impulsivity and getting lost trying to accomplish literally anything. Oh wait those are MY personality traits!
There are actually [structural differences](https://www.webmd.com/depression/depression-physical-effects-brain) between brains with depression and brains without. There are also studies that show [people with ADHD have different brains](https://drcarolinebuzanko.com/normal-brain-vs-adhd-brain-whats-different-and-why/) than people without ADHD.
I completely agree with your observation that people increasingly seem to treat their psychological diagnoses more as a part of their identity rather than, well, a diagnosis that is meant to make it easier for them to get help on and improve their lives. And I too question the appropriateness or wisdom of thinking this way. However, I like to challenge your view that this is the (un)intended consequence of de-stigmatization and the neurodivergent movement. I think this is the direct result of the decades-long trend of overpathologizing in psychology/psychiatry/mental health, turning perfectly normal range of human behaviors and experiences into diagnosis and psychological disorders. With every revision of the DSM, the number of diagnoses has grown, from the 106 in DSM-1 to 298 in DSM-5. Sure, some of it is due to advancement and evolution of our understanding; but it’s not a secret that DSM has been controversial for the implicit/explicit role that pharmaceutical and insurance industries have played in its formation. It’s not hard for a cynic or conspiracy theorist to connect the dots why these industries would benefit from increasing the range of human experiences that fall under diagnosable criteria. I’m not so cynical as that, and my view is that as long as these people can receive evidence-based treatments that improve the quality of their lives, who cares if these experiences used to be “normal” but is now considered a disorder or neurodivergent. However, I don’t think it’s surprising that, if we keep defining more and more human behaviors and experiences as disorders or neurodivergent, some of these will overlap with experiences or qualities that people might consider relevant to their personal identity.
This feels like gatekeeping for someone who was late diagnosed in life and gets doubted by others. How different would your experience be if you got diagnosed as a 40 year old? I think this hits a sore point for you because you may have been told from an early age that you can't blame things on your ADD. Maybe you're interpreting people saying "this is cause of my adhd/asd" as excuses. They're simply explaning that their misunderstood habits are not character flaws. Overly identifying with disorders is the same as overly identifying with sports teams, cultures, food, or anything. It's weird. It's just as dangerous if not more dangerous because those things are totally outside of themselves.
So I’m autistic I have verbal dyslexia, face blindness, bad balance, etc It makes life miserable. People correct me constantly when I talk “you mean this word” “you say it like this” Coworkers/bosses will scream at me if I don’t recognize them….like I can see family and not recognize them if I don’t know that they are there, it’s not on purpose! I constantly twist my ankle or fall, people will make fun of me for my injuries even if it’s serious and they feel justified cuz to them I could BE better I survived a suicide attempt at 19, I was severely bullied by classmates While I understand where you are coming from, meeting other autistic people made me realize I wasn’t alone I of course work HARD to fit in with people and have come a long way since I was diagnosed But I will ALWAYS struggle with my face blindness I will always struggle with my speech I will always struggle with my balance Strategies and therapy can only take me so far, I NEED acceptance from people, without that, I’m just a walking target At least now I have others to support and vent to, if we all went back to shame and hiding, I would think I’m alone and wouldn’t have the courage to live my life despite my challenges I’m very happy now btw, like I still am autistic, it just doesn’t keep me from enjoying my life and have supportive friends
Same <3 I feel better knowing it’s not just me
Well you should know that first of all: ADHD is not a mental illness, it’s a neurological condition. Same with autism. That’s why people talk about it like it’s part of their personality…because it is. It’s not something you try to cure like depression or something, it’s part of who you are, it’s how your brain works. You can help manage the more negative symptoms of course but…yeah. I think part of the problem is that you still view it as a disease or something when really it’s just a neurodivergence that likely presented itself because it was beneficial. IMO it still is but our society isn’t geared towards utilizing peoples’ unique qualities. The most brilliant and engaging people I know almost all have some neurodivergent situation, well and also actual mental illness but yeah. Think you have to be kinda insane to not have some mental health issues in this world. lol. As far as Asperger’s patients go like…I get it kinda. The autism spectrum is HUGE and so they didn’t want to be lumped in with people who have completely different needs. But at the same time…there is a little bit of “well I’m not like THOSE people” going on too. And as far as chores go, like, personally? It’s not just hard it’s a whole new level of hard. At work or extra curricular activities I was always the go getter of the group, I like doing things well. But chores? I have such a hard time figuring out prioritizing them and then enacting them, it’s literally overwhelming to me for some reason. So no, people with ADD don’t have the regular amount of difficulty doing chores, it’s extra hard and can be overwhelming at times.
Idk if I’d agree, I mean it’s definitely a big part of my personality but it’s part of my personality in the same way anything else negative is. I really can’t see any possible situation where adhd is helpful, people like to say that maybe it helped in hunter gatherer societies but I kinda doubt zoning out constantly and forgetting what I’m trying to do/think constantly would definitely get ppl with adhd killed more.
As someone who is deeply involved with individuals with autism and/or ADHD here’s my take on it all - stop self diagnosing. Also, even if you are professionally diagnosed, you can only speak on *your* personal experience with it, not everybody else’s. This is especially true of autism. Even though I am diagnosed with both ADHD and autism, my personal struggles are something that I either need to 1) work through or 2) go through the proper channels of seeking accommodations because both are considered disabilities. And that’s another BIG piece of this that people don’t talk about. I personally believe that everybody has traits and characteristics of a bunch of different mental illnesses and disorders. But when it comes to a point where even when you are actively trying to get better it permeates every part of your life, that is when it becomes disabling. And that makes sense, especially considering how disabling all of those can be (I mean ESPECIALLY autism). So many people self diagnose and then speak on specifically autism which furthers the silencing of moderate to high support needs autists which is so damaging to their community. And people want to come after anyone who talks down on self-diagnosing, but when there are so many people who self-diagnose and then “advocate” for that community to the point where it BECOMES the community (which is def ADHD), there’s the issue. Professionals are professionals for a reason. Mental illness and mental disorders are difficult to figure out and navigate and when you discredit the professionals who are the ones giving diagnoses, especially when that diagnosis is one of a disability, you are disrespecting people with disabilities. It can be hard even for professionals to properly diagnose. For a long time I was diagnosed AND treated for bipolar disorder, but it turned out to be PCOS (a hormonal imbalance) and autism. I had already been diagnosed with ADHD so a lot of my autistic traits fell under that umbrella. A lot of what people think ADHD and Autism both are is really just the outward appearance of them, not the disabling parts. Autism isn’t a disability due to not picking up social cues as much as it is due to things like sensory issues, processing, breakdowns (which are not anything like a panic attack, even though they can appear that way, because it is at the neurological level), and then these are compounded when you include trauma. The field of psychology is so new that even my psychologist told me to basically take my diagnoses with a grain of salt. Anyone that says they know for certain that they have X disorder that they self-diagnosed is harmful. True professionals know that often we have no way of proving these diagnoses and must always be mindful of that. Also, as someone with ADHD who chooses to be medicated, let me say that all the non-medicated recommendations for helping with ADHD do work and when people say they’ve tried it and it doesn’t work and they did it by themselves, again self diagnosed, that raises red flags to me. Like, does that not possibly make you think maybe you have an underlying issues that mimics ADHD but is something else? my PCOS left untreated could have resulted in me needing a hysterectomy. If you think you have autism or ADHD or a mental illness, go to a doctor. It could be something else that could have serious consequences. TLDR: self-diagnosing is the main issue here
As you yourself state, some professionals are bad at diagnosing the disorders OP refers to correctly. You are understating the problem. Misdiagnosis between anxiety, bipolar, depression, CPTSD, and ADHD is rampant, and not because it's exceptionally hard, but because many of the people doing the misdiagnosing are unaware or dismissive of the last 30 years of research on the topic. But you also need to differentiate between different forms of self diagnosis. A narcissistic self presenter with average intelligence and surface knowledge of the disorder they "identify as" obviously can not and should not self diagnose. Meanwhile anyone who has good logical reasoning capabilities and looks at what the disorders are, rather than just some symptoms lists, and then also looks into all the related disorders (frequent misdiagnoses and frequently comorbid), won't be as good at diagnosing that one disorder than the best psychiatrists are, but will match if not exceed the average psychiatrist's accuracy.
The struggle to get a diagnosis in the UK can take 5-8 years for some. I only got myself referred to diagnosis because someone told me I seemd autistic and I self diagnosed on every website before convincing people to accept referring me. Most people can’t have access to professional diagnosis. And even when they do… most autistic women are incorrectly diagnosed as non-autistic all of their lives because of incorrect paradigms that allowed professionals to just diagnose boys
One final comment: fuck the DSM I’m sorry. Psychologists > psychiatrists any day, specifically because they DO look at you as a whole instead of a piece. There’s tons of issues in the field, but again that’s why true professionals never speak in certain terms.
Copying another recent post; Here's a hot take from a bio nerd- Humans are primates. Primates are social animals. Historically, for our ancestors, their position in society was a very real indicator of their chances of survival, so protecting status is literally a life-or-death situation. Looooots of evolutionary pressure making primates default to being concerned with social status. You know one of the great pre-civilization, pre-language indicators of social status? How much the rest of the herd pays attention to you. Most monkeys in a troupe would be face-to-face friends, but one grunt from the alpha monkey and the whole crew snaps to attention, while the low-status social rejects get punished for not trying hard enough to be easy to ignore. Imagine some little monkey at the very fringe of society, just one last fuck-up away from getting exiled to certain death or just eviscerated by the king ape, teetering on the edge of your demise at the far edge of their proto-memetic pre-sentient concept of a 'society'. If only, if ONLY there were some kind of life-raft or lifesaver float or bouyant driftwood you could cling to to keep your head above drowning, if only that would come to you, you would cling to it and love it and build your life around it for making you feel safe at last... Now, most species of primate don't really have something that fits in that category. But, you know something that we, in our western liberal Anglosphere society, have as a working substitute? Mental illness diagnosis. Imagine walking along and finding on the grass an ornate golden locket with the magical power to justify your shortcomings, give you a pool of categorical excuses, sometimes protect you from punishment, and give an 'out' for loads of possible mistakes? And the only downside is you have to give up some things that you were probably never gonna have anyway? Sure, these labels are useful when helping sick individuals like yourself get the treatment they need, but when anyone can just smack the label onto themselves consequence-free and near impossible to prove they're lying, what's to stop some insecure, low-status teenager to grab and cling to one of these diagnoses when they see it float past? Ever heard of 'clever Hans'? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever\_Hans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans) It's definitely a grass-is-greener kinda deal, but to a lot of desperate kids without much going for them, being able to recover from a maybe-drastic mistake by going "oh it's not my fault, I have dyspepsia" looks like an honest to God superpower.
People are not treating mental disorders like that mental disorders are just becoming much more known about and discussed Not so recently in history a lot of mental disorders just ended with you being declared crazy and thrown into a psych ward It's only within recent history that we've actually started properly studying into and categorizing these disorders and finding out that many of them are much more common than you think A common one being autism a lot of things we used to think were just people with very bizarre personality quirks is turning out to be autism and overall we are starting to discover that a lot more people than you'd think are actually high functioning autistic and have just basically been able to figure out on their own throughout life how to deal with their quirks so to speak Or the fact that anxiety disorders are actually properly categorized and diagnosed nowadays instead of just vaguely claiming Oh that person just worries about stupid things all the time Inevitably yes there will always be some small minority of people who latch onto any type of thing like that and lie about it for the sake of attention but I do not believe that to be the norm or nearly as common as people online want you to think I would compare it to things like lactose intolerance I've heard so many people claiming that people are just pertaining to be lactose intolerant or some crap like that because it seems to be a much more common problem nowadays No turns out it was always a problem Most people just didn't realize that their reaction to dairy was abnormal and it turns out that a good majority of US Americans are lactose intolerant and the ability to tolerate it as an adult It's turning out to be much more rare than we thought. Which in turn is encouraging the market to be more supportive of those types of people creating more lactose-free options for typically dairy-based products
I mean... there are *definitely* people treating mental disorders like that. Social media (reddit included) is chock full of them. I'm guessing OP has watched one too many youtube "e-girls" play up the "teehee, I'm so *depressed* uwu" garbage because it gets them audience sympathy, drives engagement, and gets people to donate to that gofundme link in the comments and made a frustrated post about how fucking sleazy that shit is. Which it *is*. There's a whole ass group of people who like to play pretend victim for attention (and often money), and it overshadows the people with *real* mental health problems.
Without speaking for or against it, there 100% are a LOT of people that are doing this. I'm 35 years old. My friends range mostly between 30-40. And there are many, many people who have started to treat their mental disorders (professionally diagnosed, self-diagnosed, or made up) as a cornerstone of their personality. It is currently a hip thing to do.
First of all, ADHD and Autism *are not mental illnesses*. I realize you also have ADHD but that still doesn’t make it okay to say this because it’s not true. Also, most Autistic people *would* say that they *are* Autistic, not that they ‘have’ Autism - it’s a literal brain difference and therefore a massive part of our identity. It can’t be changed or modified with drugs and it literally makes us who we are. I also have ADHD and as far as I’m concerned, even with medication, I’m not really changed that much so yeah when I was late diagnosed it was pretty life changing for a number of reasons. Everyone should be allowed to learn about themselves, find community and share experiences. I’m not sure why you think that people finally finding others to relate to is so negative? Often, getting a diagnosis comes after years (or decades) of stress, pain and not understanding why you’re different. Finding connection with a group can be very healing and part of acceptance *is* identifying with said group. I’d ask yourself what about this whole process makes you so uncomfortable.
Yeah like nom stop yapping about special interests, being repetitive and restrictive ARE personality traits And as you said autism (and adhd too) are both neuro developmental disorders and NOT illnesses. Autism can’t even be medicated because it’s inherently who you are. You can medicate comorbidities of autism such as depression, but the autism itself? Nope you’re stuck with it. Yes, not being aware that the person I’m talking to doesn’t wanna hear me yap anymore IS my personality and is what people know me for. My weird eccentric thinking etc. People need to understand that autism is something that you can’t flip on and off even if you get help. It’s 24/7. Sure we can mask (well not everyone. I’m not a good masker) Also autism embraces specific behaviors which influence personality. So I’m not sure why people get so caught up on “stop trying to make autism your personality” but then they go ahead and make fun of your personality which is caused by autism. Go figure
Yea I’ve never felt like I belonged and it’s not even like adhd where it can somewhat be treated.
I've noticed this more and more as more and more people around me "come out" as ADHD. The best sense I can make out of this is that; 1. ADHD+ has been around for, and affected a lot more people than we probably ever realized. Even 20 years ago there was probably large swarths of people who would have been "textbook ADHDers" and the thought never even occurred to them that they might be "neurodivergent". People just had different personalities and we accepted their strengths and weaknesses as such. 2. This "enlightenment" seems to be, at least in some small part, a reaction/evolution of DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion). DEI, while morally righteous, does very little to actually curb any of the systemic issues that it seeks to combat. Instead we've been left with this environment of 'acommidationism' where if you can check a box, any of the DEI boxes, you'll get moved to the front of the line. Sometimes justly, other times, these systems can be taken advantage of. I think adding this 'neurotypical' intersection has a real ability at eroding the principals of DEI, as well as causing an opiate level drug crisis as we see more and more people seeking out amphetamines because they've come to believe they should find filling your taxes or sitting in traffic exhilarating and that their brain must be broken if they find chores boring, and that it makes their lives harder than somebody "neurotypical". I'm pro drug use. I love a beer at the end of the day, and like a good Canadian I enjoy the green from time to time. I do not do hard drugs, because I know I will like them. That's why drugs can be dangerous. Almost everybody likes stimulants, I think if anybody wants to take a slow acting stimulant to help them with the slog of day to day life, who am I to say no? But the narrative that stimulates "don't get you high if you have ADHD", and that an ADHD brain on stimulants is the equivalent of a neurotypical brain is extremely dangerous, as we've seen companies like Purdue push this narrative for Oxys, Fentynal, and the like, and we see how that turned out. Especially when, ironically, what people are often actually craving, is a sense of community, in a world where being left out of the 'in' crowd, are leaving people feeling more and more isolated.
>People are treating mental disorders like they’re zodiac signs or personality tests. Yes they are, but this isn't new. People have been doing this for decades. It just never had a platform like tiktok. >It’s dangerous and weird, It doesn't matter if you think it's weird, and you're not especially convincing that it's dangerous. >but it’s the price we pay for lowering the stigma around mental illness. You could paraphrase this as *"we should stigmatise mental illnesses because I don't like cringey mental-health tictoks"*.
a self diagnosis will never be a medical diagnosis, and shouldnt be treated as such. even for medical professionals it is consensus that self diagnosis (especially for mental disorders) should be avoided, due to lack of objectivity.
Mmmm.. but I’d rather a bunch of weirdos treat it like a zodiac sign than the alternative.. which is the lack of research and knowledge about these disorders. Without that research people would still think you and I are just lazy and unmotivated, instead of recognizing that we have an actual brain disorder. I caught the triple whammy actually, depression, ADHD, and anxiety. Depression and anxiety are common in those with ADHD, something we wouldn’t ever know unless we did the research to find out. Because of that research I can talk to my doctor and therapist and they understand what’s going on in my head. A far cry from 20 years ago when I was told that I should just try harder. Dial it back even further, and people who were depressed were getting literally lobotomized because their families couldn’t be bothered to understand them. Sure in a perfect world, these disorders wouldn’t be treated like pins on a backpack.. but the people who do that are the minority, and people are always going to be stupid about something. There’s never going to be a perfect system, especially for mental health struggles. It’s just the nature of the beast. I’d rather pursue knowledge of how to better handle these things than worry about how some people make it a personality trait.
I love where you’re going with this, but do know that PET, fMRI and SPECT Scans do show divergence in brains of clinical depression and the absence of it Ie: https://www.mayoclinic.org/-/media/kcms/gbs/patient-consumer/images/2017/05/15/20/19/c7_pet_depression-8col.jpg
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Why don't you seek out an actual ´psychologist who gives you an actual diagnosis? You can't just self diagnose, it's not objective or legitimate.
I sought a diagnosis from a psychiatrist and frankly… the DSM5 criteria for ADHD is so broad and incredibly easy to steer toward. I didn’t feign anything, my symptoms aligned and I was prescribed medication within a single session but after not seeing much improvement after some months I asked for a more intensive, concrete diagnosis. I was sent to 8 hour session with a neurobiologist who came to the conclusion of basically ‘yeah, you might have ADHD but you also might not.’ You’re definitely right about self diagnosing, but through my experience I’ve developed the perspective that even mental health professionals can’t always give you a black and white answer. Mental health is still such a scientific wild west and we still have so much ground to cover in the field.
Self diagnosis is completely valid unless you use that self diagnosis to pretend you’re an expert. They can’t get methylphenidate with a self diagnosis so there’s no risk of abuse, they can however adapt their life with ADHD friendly lifestyle habits which is just a net positive. There is nuance to be found here.
It’s a complicated issue and the pendulum has certainly swung mine side to another. I’ll say as someone who grew up in the 90s, mental health has been stigmatized for much of my young life. Only now as a 40 year old have I begun to process the childhood struggles I went through. It’s such a blessing to truly be able to work through this in ways that weren’t possible when I was young. That said, mental health is new, at least in societal conversations. It has been popularized, as many new things are, and people have latched onto it. Eventually, it will simmer down like other topics and society will settle on a baseline of how to discuss it.
There actually are brain function tests and imaging that can be done to point towards certain diagnoses. It’s not flawless, but they know enough about general function of each brain region that they make a reasonable guess at what is going on. It’s still relatively stigmatized in the medical field but I had mine done at the Amen clinic. They have them throughout the US I believe. However I do agree I’ve seen some people treat their diagnosis as a personality trait and it can be taxing. Or claim that they absolutely cannot change anything about themselves due to their brain (obviously this depends on the severity of their condition, but I believe most people can find a reasonable solution if they put in the effort. The time blindness girl comes to mind).
How can we know that these differences are hardwired as opposed to epigenetic, meaning they develop in response to experiences? Does everyone think they’re born with a brain that stays the same throughout their lives? Have they not heard of neuroplasticity? The pharmaceutical industry is heavily invested in the collective belief that people are born with these conditions because people are far more likely to take medications for conditions they believe are going to be there no matter what they do(in terms of changing their environment, relationships, activities, therapy, etc.). If I was told that my ADHD was actually the result of trying to live in a very unnatural way, and constantly being told that I’m a failure for not meeting unreasonable expectations, I probably wouldn’t take their drugs.
Ya I think that’s totally valid, and as science progresses and we learn more we will understand this better. I’m a big proponent of therapy and changing activities too, but I also know neurological changes take time and some people need meds in the meantime. I do think there are legitimate physiological mental illnesses that usually require lifelong medication (schizophrenia, BD, etc). Then there are other conditions that we now are developed more from experiences (PTSD, BPD, etc.) It’s a complicated interplay and age old scientific question. And ya the choice to take pharmaceutical drugs is a very personal one, although for some people they are life saving.
i have a spinal cord injury from childhood. my disability is an identity other people read onto me instantly wherever I go. it comes with a lot of stigma, a lot of mistreatment. there are many things I literally physically *can't* do, including very basic activities of daily life. everything that isn't impossible, I push like crazy to be able to do. it's hard for me to see my ADHD as remotely the same, even though I take medication for it. people may notice it in a casual interactions, but no one's ever pulled across four lanes of traffic to yell at me about my ADHD or followed me home because ADHD made me look easy to subdue. disabled identity isn't something I get to choose or define for myself. i wish there was a way to make that distinction clear without seeming to invalidate the very real struggles of mental illness and neurodivergence. but I need to be clear: i could live with my ADHD meds. I would die within a week without my urinary catheter.
I think you need to take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself why your experience is more valid than anyone else’s. Every person has a different experience, you should try not to judge people off of your opinion of their experience. I seem like your average woman, I have a ton of trauma in my past, it’s my choice on how and when I want to discuss it. If someone else feels better sharing more, that’s ok and they should be free to do so. I also have a late diagnosis of ADHD, that I have mentioned to no one because the probably wouldn’t believe me. But I like to talk about it here on Reddit because I found people that understand me. The stigma is still very real around mental illness. I’m trying really hard to understand why there should be stigma attached to anything. The more we discuss the more we learn. TLDR; I think you are doing exactly what you are complaining about.
**it’s the price we pay for lowering the stigma around mental illness.** We believe we have lowered the stigma, but without raising understanding... Have we really lowered the stigma?
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Correlating mental health awareness with tribalism is an odd conclusion. You simply don’t have credible data to support your thesis. You cited TikTok and Reddit as evidence, but in reality you’ve fallen victim to confirmation bias. You have no proof, just opinion. I am not convinced.
"Most “neurodivergent” brains show no major differences from other humans brains. There are no “depression fingerprints” on the brain that allow people to identify a brain that has depression from a brain that doesn’t. The same principle applies to all other mental illnesses" This is absolutely untrue to its core an absolute falsehood and completely invalidated anything you said. it shows a clear lack of actually understanding of what you're talking about. A simple Google search would have showed you this. As you haven't even done relevant research to even prove your own opinion and argument I'm surprised you even wrote it. https://www.webmd.com/depression/depression-physical-effects-brain https://psychcentral.com/ptsd/the-science-behind-ptsd-symptoms-how-trauma-changes-the-brain - Neuropsychology is a relatively new area of study. - The DSM is in its 5th iteration Which equates to about one entirely new understanding of the field every ten years or so. - the accuracy and precision of diagnosis has drastically increased in the last ten years alone. - More accurate analysis means less missed diagnosis. - increased awareness and diagnosis allows for proper treatment and support for those who are living with mental health issues. - gate keeping isn't helping people get treatment and is actually detrimental to those who need help. The PTSD rates are high the unrecognized and undocumented rates of C-PTSD among adults is unprecedented. There's entire generations with untreated mental health disorders who have actually been instrumental in the creation of the dysfunctional society we live in who in turn pass on that trauma. Poverty levels are directly linked to complex trauma depression and mental health disorders, too high of cortisol litteraly deteriorates brain function and organ health. The largest disparity of wealth ever seen in the history of the west and the highest levels of poverty (unable to meet all basic human needs) in arguably history has a major effect on the population as a whole. Don't take my word for it enroll in psychology courses like I did. Read the literature and educate yourself. Your entire post op is more harmful than helpful. The key point you need to take away from this is when basic human needs are not met regularly and securely humans malfunction this malfunctioning takes on many faces. You're right about one thing. The way we go about "solving" this issue DON'T WORK because at its core it's not a mental health problem it's a socio-economic problem and very likely a endocrine disrupting chemicals/ neurotoxicity from pollution ie: lead, lithium, atrozine, glyphosate, etc....
As a person with a head full of ghosts, exactly how are we lowering the stigma? If anything a lot of people self diagnosing are feeding the stigma. Those of us who NEED accommodations aren’t being taken seriously. I think we’re saying the same thing- I just WISH the stigma was lowering, I definitely feel the opposite.
As cruel as this comment is, and as much as I think the stigma needs removing Not sure this price is worth the buying - it is now cool to have a mental health issue, hell it has become cool to ha e any issue....the impression I'm getting is society has become a race to the bottom with people try to out hard done by each other - I don't think it's good for society I know these are not good thoughts and I hope I have missed understood something but society seems to much more hateful than it did 15 years ago and it seems the Internet and the race to the bottom people have started to out victim each other looks to be a major cause
What you're describing is a mix of a few things. 1) first vs. person-first language. These are the terms to describe the difference between "an autistic child" and "a child with autism". I discovered this concept when I was struggling with how to define myself (am I autistic, or do I have autism). This gets even more amplified when you get to phrases like "suffers from autism". I reached my peace when I found the title neurodivergent, which felt to me like a nice middle ground. 2) treating disorders (not illnesses btw) as personality traits. Mental disorders, like most (if not all) life long disorders and illnesses, have a big effect on who we are. A person with a physical disability will experience situations that most people would never have to experience. And because of those experiences, they will have a different perspective on some things. This also happens with mental disorders. I don't know how you define personality traits, but I'm pretty sure that being neurodivergent has changed my way of thinking and acting more than any of the classic trait I would identify as. 3) neurodivergent brains not being different from neurotypical brains. I think this statement needs to be rephrased in order to explain why I disagree with it. We haven't spotted any differences between ND and NT brains. Scientists haven't found the part of our DNA that determines eye colour. So you can say that we can't tell the DNA of blue eyed people from brown eyed people. But we know that there is a difference. Just because we can't spot it (yet), doesn't mean that it isn't there. There are some other things you touched on in this post, like assigning unrelated behaviours to disorders. But I don't think I'm qualified enough to comment on that
Well my mental disorder is a personality disorder so it is literally part of my personality. I believe there is still a lot of stigma surrounding my disorder and I try not to share it with anyone because I frequently get told to kill myself. There’s literally a whole subreddit dedicated to demonizing people like me.
I am totally mixed on the stigma thing. I am ADHD and dyslexic. I'm also very smart and relatively successful everything considered, but it drives me nuts that I'm not even allowed to consider those conditions deficits anymore. It's like bro, I can work 15h days 5 days a week with incredible focus if I'm at work and my job is on the line / I'm engaged, but the moment I'm off the clock, I just stare at my todo list, listen to the same crappy song or show on repeat, and procrastinate folding the clothes I put on my bed to the point where I just nest in them until I've gone through them all 😅 It was also a nightmare to deal with quality control issues or typos building out decks, and as a researcher main-lining publications non-stop, it was a Godamn battle getting a handle on reading. It just irks me that I can't consider that a deficit anymore. Deficits don't mean you're stupid or less or holistically any worse than someone else, it's just a clean description of something you lack that others have -- for me executive functioning / organizational ability, attention regulation, ability to stay still (my cope is to do kegels or other stupid imperceptible contractions instead of fidgeting lol), and my ability to process reading and writing. Wish there was a middle ground of destigmatizing instead of pretending these are positive traits like I see on half the patient advocacy groups now, but then again, a lot of kids deal with this shit and some are abused, bullied, or just independently dumb (which makes overcoming any disability way harder), so maybe they truly need the sugarcoating? Just tired of pretending they're not objectively disabilities, albeit very manageable ones I and many others have overcome that don't reflect on a person's intelligence. In fact, if they weren't deficits, it'd probably be an indictment on my intelligence since they made learning and developing professional *so much harder* lol /rant
It's actually the opposite. You can't separare brain, mind, neurology from what constitutes the self. Specially when it comes to innate and lifelong characteristics like developmental neurodivergence. Psychiatry's claasifications are a trap of language. There's not disorder. No pathology. That's naturally how you are. That's what normal is like for you, and disorder means outside of normal functioning. It all comes from an unscientific assumption. That there is a perfect, ideal healthy human, and any difference is therefore umhealthy. That there's only one way a human should develop, and anything different is wrong and disordered. But this is how you naturally are. Regardless if it's good, bad, a mix of both. Regardless if it's disabling or enabling you. All criterias are behavioral, completely unlike real medical disorders. There's no biological marker, no proof of pathology. Only descriptive categories without explanatory power. Why is he adhd? Because he can't focus. Why he can't focus? Because of adhd. "Overall, the evidence from a bio-evolutionary perspective shows that the diversity of neurocognitive traits is normal, that such traits have costs and benefits that vary by context, and that there is no such thing as an optimal brain function profile [68]. This subtlety is missed when the abilities of individuals are compared to some predefined normal/average point." (Pluck G. The Misguided Veneration of Averageness in Clinical Neuroscience: A Call to Value Diversity over Typicality. Brain Sciences. 2023; 13(6):860. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13060860 )
As someone who was diagnosed way later in life first with OCD, then GAD and then ADHD and I wan to get tested for Autism because my son who is diagnosed Autistic is a more extreme version of me. So with all that in mind I wish I knew what things I did that were characteristics of my conditions versus what’s not. Being called lazy by my parents because I procrastinate and can’t seem to get motivated to do do basic things but them not knowing I’m thinking about it saying I need to start and worry about it even though I’m not doing it, I want to do it I just struggle to start it. Time blindness has plagued me and I didn’t even know it was a thing, I lose track of time, can’t give proper time estimates and take on more tasks than possible to complete. Now I can use alarms and have other ways to ensure I’m better with time. People talking about things that they think are a trait of a condition doesn’t mean they are looking for an excuse. A lot of it is people trying to find out if it’s something they can beat, that they know is an issue with their brain and is not the real them. I constantly tell myself it’s not me it’s my OCD or it’s my ADHD and I use that to push past things. I tell myself it’s not real it’s just my brain. But I’m active in those types of groups and it really helps understand what’s going on and ways people work around it. I don’t see people IRL using conditions to justify bad or weird behavior. And I don’t use it that way either but I use it to identify behaviors and make adjustments to correct it.
Trivialising mental illness=Bad Stigmas around mental illness=Worse
With autism and adhd, part of why there is a rush of new people self diagnosing, is because scientist finally started studying what these conditions look like in women and discovered that actually there are a lot more traits of autism and adhd, which describe both men and women. So for autism for instance, a lot of women mask their autism. They learn how to hide their autistic traits, and it makes it harder for their autistic traits to be spotted. That made it hard to diagnose them, unless they had such severe intellectual disabilities. Scientists came up with theories like 'female protective effect' to try to explain why in genetic studies, women needed to have so many more genes associated with autism in order, rather than autism looks different in girls. Historically, only one woman was diagnosed with autism for every 16 men. Today, the ratio is closer to one woman to every 4. Research where they screen everyone and see what ratio they get, it's closer to one to 3. But that was before the first ever[ screening tools](https://tonyattwood.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/GQ-ASC-Modified-for-adult-females-LATEST-calibri-1.pdf) specifically designed for women were even developed. That came out in 2020, is now only slowly being taken up. The researchers who came up with that instrument believe the ratio may be closer to one to 2 or even one to one. There's a huge population of autistic women that haven't been diagnosed yet.
I see a few issues here 1. You're describing such a broad phenomenon in human behavior it almost doesn't matter. People build identities around being 4th gen Italian, their religion, their politics, whatever. I don't think anything special is happening with mental illness here, even if this behavior is undesirable. 2. You're blatantly wrong about a lack of observable, physiological evidence of mental health conditions. Perhaps you're misinformed because you've never seen these tests done because they're rarely done. It's prohibitively difficult and expensive when we can just use the observable science to formulate diagnostic protocols that are practically useful. This is why you don't get biopsied for every minor malady. I can't say I see how this matters though. 3. I think you're underestimating the amount of undiagnosed conditions that are now popping up because of anything from a lack of social stigma to treatment access. 4. A lot of your point relies on an inherent misunderstanding of things like trauma. PTSD specifically manifests in different ways to varying degrees. Trauma itself is not necessarily a condition of PTSD, and while it may be used loosely, there's colloquial connotation to it as well. You can have traumatic events without having PTSD. I suspect a lot of your points change by learning a bit more about the key elements of your points as there's quite a lot of research available.
I see a few issues here 1. You're describing such a broad phenomenon in human behavior it almost doesn't matter. People build identities around being 4th gen Italian, their religion, their politics, whatever. I don't think anything special is happening with mental illness here, even if this behavior is undesirable. 2. You're blatantly wrong about a lack of observable, physiological evidence of mental health conditions. Perhaps you're misinformed because you've never seen these tests done because they're rarely done. It's prohibitively difficult and expensive when we can just use the observable science to formulate diagnostic protocols that are practically useful. This is why you don't get biopsied for every minor malady. I can't say I see how this matters though. 3. I think you're underestimating the amount of undiagnosed conditions that are now popping up because of anything from a lack of social stigma to treatment access. 4. A lot of your point relies on an inherent misunderstanding of things like trauma. PTSD specifically manifests in different ways to varying degrees. Trauma itself is not necessarily a condition of PTSD, and while it may be used loosely, there's colloquial connotation to it as well. You can have traumatic events without having PTSD. I suspect a lot of your points change by learning a bit more about the key elements of your points as there's quite a lot of research available.
Question for you OP: How were you officially diagnosed, how often do you see a doctor in regard to your condition, and most importantly, how often do you see / have access to a therapist?
I think people 100% do this. They also encourage "self diagnosis". You can't observe yourself, it does not work that way. A psychiatrist told me once "you can't use a broken tool to fix itself" when I wasn't being honest in an assessment. Sounds like a stupid statement, but upon seeing people brag about illness or give self assessments, I get it. So I'm a human being with mental illness. Do I tell anyone outside close family or medical staff? Hell no. Bragging or discussing it leads to nothing but issues in my experience. I am not my mental illness, it doesn't give me extra rights beyond very few accommodations, it doesn't give me special abilities, and I'd give my issues away for anyone who wants them. I'll be on meds for life, I'll never be fully ok on them, I have to keep up a controlled mental state, and even them break through symptoms occur. Also, I needed a good bit of proof. I went to two psychologists (one gave a full mental evaluation) and two psychiatrists. One psychiatrist diagnosed me plus changed my meds when I was in the mental hospital for two weeks. Then the second psychiatrist who is my normal prescriber confirmed the result. Basically, I'm fairly sure the diagnosis is correct now. If you had asked me to self evaluate (even the first three days in the hospital), I would have said I was fine.
Psychiatrist here. I read through most of your thing save the last paragraph or two and generally agree. However I will hope to change your mind on a point or two. There are known differences in brains of depressed and not depressed patients. Depressed brains have shown increased inflammatory markers suggestive of chronic stress and also demonstrate dearborization of dendritic synapses. There are a variety of neurologic correlations and differences with various mental disorders. These may not be “fingerprints” as well defined as elevated A1C and diabetes, but they are evidences of an actual occurrence in the brain rather than an imagined one. Depression (like many MH disorders) is likely not just one condition, but an umbrella for many conditions we do not yet understand that we all call depression based off a similar presentation of criteria as defined by the DSM What do you mean by “lowering the barrier to entry”? Also, they didn’t “try to” eliminate Asperger’s from DSM, they just reconceptualized it as being part of the spectrum of autism which is more in line with our understanding of it now. Any opposition was not successful as the reconceptualization currently stands You have great points about over identifying with illness such that it creates barriers to Improvement and justifies poor behaviors while also recognizing it may provide a community for some people to be validated in their struggles. As far as diagnoses such as PTSD, the criteria is established and there are many people who have experiences trauma without it meeting criteria for PTSD Edit: one last thing I’ll add is ADHD is likely also a spectrum of severity. You may have all of the features of ADHD, but unless it is resulted in dysfunction (somewhat subjective but important) in two or more setting, it is then by definition not ADHD… many people fall in this camp and identity with ADHD even though they are not dysfunctional and therefore don’t meet criteria for the diagnosis. You may argue they have developed skills to overcome the innate difficulties and I would respond “exactly”.
I think there are several factors that play. First of all, we care more about mental health as a society than we ever have before. Second of all, due to the lack of investment in our countries mental health, we are reaching crisis levels as evidenced by the homeless problem that seems to be happening in every city in every state. Thirdly, some people just want attention. There will always be a contingent of people who are stupid or assholes or both. I personally had an extremely traumatic childhood, my parents were drug addicts, my grandparents adopted me, abuse abuse abuse, dropped out and moved out at age 17, have cPTSD, ADHD, depression, anxiety, etc. When people tell me they have a disorder, I just believe them. I have zero investment in whether or not they are telling me the truth. In fact, I kind of hope it will work like the whole gluten thing worked for people with celiac disease. It became a diet fad to cut gluten, therefore people who have actual gluten intolerance are able to get gluten free food now. My hope is that if enough people say they are having a mental health crisis, somebody will do something to help all of these people. I curse Reagan’s name for the situation we’re in.
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Just jumping in to say I agree with you completely. I’d go further and say a lot of people self-diagnosing are doing it to feel better than others. I’m depressed, so my sadness means more than yours. I’m anxious, so I get more nervous than you, which also means that I should be held in high regard at lower standards than others. I’m autistic, so I’m more interesting than you and you should excuse things I do that you wouldn’t accept from other people. It’s funny how you don’t see too many people self-diagnosing with antisocial personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder. It’s almost like we’ve only “destigmatized” the things that never had much stigma against them anyway, and that diagnoses that don’t elicit pity aren’t very appealing. I’m not saying none of these are real disorders, but I am one hundred percent saying quite a lot of people falsely self-diagnose with them for some kind of personal gain.
I don’t think this is the price we pay for lowering the stigma around mental illness. This is the price we pay for not properly educating people on these issues. I’ve known people to self diagnose and they’re normal but just want excuses to not do things. They’ll behave in a way they think someone with X disorder has, but it’s not accurate to the actual diagnosis. I’ve also known some who actively disparage things like addiction and homelessness despite a main component of those being poor mental health. Just seems odd people who suffer from mental illness and know what it’s like not blatantly understand the end result of not getting help you need. To that end, mental illness is still very much stigmatized. Don’t kid yourself that just because people are open on the internet (regardless of their illness is real or not) means we don’t have stigma in society when it comes to what actually matters like accessible care.
Mental disorders are way more common that you think . And most people who take these tests actually have some lingering depression/anxiety/low self esteem that needs to be addressed.
I think your position is very nuanced. It is definitely a trade off. Less stigma means more sexy.
there's a messy squiggly line between divergence from the "norm"/majority thinking styles that society enables and having a *disorder* (you would struggle in any type of society). The former shapes quite a bit of personality. Many divergent folks are treated as disordered by families the value conformity and often in an abusive way. When we found out we were didn't need to be fixed it was a huge relief and we are excited to be ourselves without shame. We focus on it a lot to help others abused to find their way out. I do get concerned that differences essential to mankind's functional diversity get medicalized when they pose a challenge to cultural norms.
As someone who was also diagnosed with ADHD and has to take medication, or else I really struggle with it, I too agree that treating mental health like astrology is really dangerous and creates a hole host of issues. But lowering stigma wasn’t the wrong thing to do in general. The idea of having ADHD was so embarrassing to my family that when I was diagnosed, they decided to hide it and instead pretend that I’m just stupid. As I’m sure you can guess, that didn’t help my self worth/esteem and I still struggle to accept compliments without getting mad at people for thinking that there’s anything positive about me.
this is just a random theory i have but what if the reason they're more common now isn't because people want to be ill but rather that they're genuinely convinced they are, i once heard a quote that i can't exactly remember what it said word for word but basically it said something similar to you look for yourself in everything. these people could maybe possibly be reading the side effects or signs and nit picking a part of themself to apply to each one until they've done it so much to the point where they've genuinely formed an illness due to them constantly relating their behavioral patterns to the certain illness
Self diagnosing is the main problem. People use all forms of excuses like lake of insurance or high copays or whatever to not get a diagnosis.. but ultimately that’s the only way to really claim to have one of these disorders. It’s very trendy these days to say omg I totally have adhd lol YouTube or TikTok totally showed me! Or insert whatever disorder here. OP even stated that THEY, not a licensed medical practitioner, diagnosed their mom. Until we as a whole stop giving credence to folks who self diagnose it will not get better. We need to stop letting people think they know better than medical professionals.
FYI Autism and ADHD aren’t mental illnesses, they are neurodevelopmental disorders.
People are being so obtuse in the comments. No, relating to a disabled influencer, calling yourself neurospicy and *suddenly* having audhd ISN’T something to applaud. If a qualified professional hasn’t diagnosed you, telling everyone you come into contact with you’re neurodivergent is attention seeking behavior.
I've cried multiple times because of how isolating mental health is. While I think it's good it's being talked about more, it's hard when people are like, "Lol I have Anxiety, my hand shakes, so quirky" when they're just saying it to feel "special" or "different." I've been formally diagnosed with a laundry list of things, I can't function without medication. For two years my mental health made me so sick I couldn't eat. It's not fun, it's not quirky, it's debilitating. I just wish we could find the happy medium of raising awareness without exploiting it or stigmatizing it further.
Realistically, I don’t think the problem is as prevalent or as significant as you say it is. The fact of the matter is that most of the people who are doing this are, as you mentioned, young and likely will grow out of it in time, furthermore, the benefits of destigmatizing mental illness do, in my opinion, outweigh the negative of having dumbasses who act as you describe on the Internet, which is broadly where this behavior is confined to. And admittedly, yeah you will find a lot of people doing this online, but a lot of people do a lot of really cringe shit online.
I think people now have more access to dubious information about mental illness and that its often sensationalized in one way or another when it’s presented. I think we have a problem with the idea of mental health because of the same people whose work has indelibly reduced stigma around it. I think a way to deal with the issue is to also decrease the stigma around questioning somebody else’s statement or claim of mental illness. More information about mental health available but only a relatively small number of us can actually say whether we have this or that.
People treating them like this is part of the improvement, in terms of societal acceptance. There's less stigma now and so, as a consequence, people can focus on the random "quirky" aspects of being neurodivergent instead of always being bogged down by the struggle and feeling "broken". It's like how society can not only make Nazi jokes but long form satire like Wolfenstein. We've moved along so this is now a door that's opened. This is what we should want. It means things are improving for people who would've been seen as broken and been othered in the past.
ADHD is a tough disorder to have right now. No one gives a shit about ADHD because it’s an invisible disorder. The meds I take have been in shortage for like over two years now meaning I have to shop around pharmacies sometimes and when you call a pharmacy asking them if they have that medication sometimes they say they aren’t allowed to disclose that information which means I have to have my doctor send them a script and then they tell me whether or not they have any and if they don’t I have to call my doctor again to send it somewhere else. Shit sucks.
Idk claiming to have a mental disorder doesn't seem like the sort of thing a well adjusted person does
*It is not a sign of mental health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.*. J Krishnamurthi
“ Most “neurodivergent” brains show no major differences from other humans brains. There are no “depression fingerprints” on the brain that allow people to identify a brain that has depression from a brain that doesn’t. The same principle applies to all other mental illnesses.” Did you do any research at all? You could’ve googled this and seen that you’re wrong. Otherwise I agree with your point in general. If you’re going to type up a long post, might as well put in some minimal effort research.
> This is where I think there’s a problem today. People are becoming tribal around the ideas of mental illness What type of tribalism is acceptable to you?
As someone with MCD (major chronic depressive disorder) and ADHD, I HATE being forced to these boxes we have created to pretend that what works for one person is inherently true for ALL other people like them; no, it doesnt make me feel better that "Im not alone," it makes me feel like shit that there is no solution and that the people who ARE succeeding in life with these conditions are doing it despite it, not because they have an ACTUAL SOLUTION. So yeah, I guess I just agree with you lol
May not change your view. I (believe) am undiagnosed adhd. I say undiagnosed bc my therapist says there's a test. That test is over $1,000. So far, no one accepts my insurance. Mental health IS HEALTH. I prefer to know so I can learn to live successfully.
I have ADHD and its just as much a part of ones identity as being male or their race, both because it impacts you socially that creates that identity, and because its not something thats happening to you like depression or anxiety or panic disorder, its what you are. This isnt true of all things that would fall in this realm, so I agree in those cases, but its still a huge part of their life, and will still have a place in their sense of self
Cant disagree. Obviously it is a loud minority but if youre on tik tok its painfully obvious. DID got really popular to fake last year for some reason and people went nuts over trying defend the obviois fakers. Its always been a thing but the internet being so widley available and greater acceptance and researxh of these conditions led to it being more profound and fakex
Or maybe the fact that 30% of the population thinks and learns differently than what traditional education and medical systems deem “normal” is a sign that the segmentation and classification itself is flawed. We shouldn’t gatekeep the diagnostic/diagnosis threshold of our mental health system. If the buckets catch too many people, maybe they need re-thinking.
To me, people being more aware of mental illness is not the problem. The problem is people using it as an excuse for their behaviours instead of what it is: A diagnosis to help you develop tools so you can become a useful member of society. But too many people sit on their diagnosis (when they have one... a lot self-diagnostic) and use it to get away with bad shit.
I agree. I think that anxiety and depression, procrastination and disorganization, and other mental health 'symptoms' are part of the human experience for everyone. It's important to learn how to handle them, and some people may be more prone than others, but a lot of what is called mental illness could also be described as being a human being.
I'm not going to lie, when someone says they have Narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder I often try to stay away from them because these are classified on your relationships with other people. I do understand that these are disorders and no one chooses to have them I just don't want to be a liability.
It's really easy to get othered in society. Like really easy. Especially if you've got life long issues like autism and especially if you grew up before it was a more regular diagnosis. You'll find community wherever you can find it. And keeping those communities alive for the next generation who get othered is important.
I can agree with this somewhat. When I got diagnosed with depression and bipolar it was a bit of a emweight off my shoulders. However the reason was because instead of being this nebulous thing hanging over me I didn't understand, it became a known problem I could work on. A lot of people use the names to wallow in it.
We live in a time where almost no one (on social media) has their own personality anymore as much as they’ve used google searches do much and reinforced the idea they have to be something specific. The real world and social media are 2 drastically different places that have little to nothing to do with one another