Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/nobody-has-a-personality-anymore

by drankl • 1 year ago

551 478 1 year ago

freyaindia.co.uk

tmseidman• 1 year ago

I always feel like these "We do this new horrible thing that's taking over" articles are always blown out of proportion- sure, _some_ people talk that way, maybe it's even trending to talk that way for a significant group of people, but it's not true of everyone, all the time. To me, this trend seems largely confined to youth culture and social media.

I also found it ironic that part of the OP's argument was that nobody has personality anymore, they just have problems to solve, and this article seemed to be doing the same thing, but for culture at large; reducing it to a problem to be solved.

idontwantthis• 1 year ago

Yeah, this is seriously WTF. OP please read a book or go stare at clouds. "We" are not anything.

colechristensen5• 1 year ago

In other news "there's a whole new way young people are annoying! more at 11"

arduinomancer2• 1 year ago

I find it entertaining and view it more as a writing device

The author obviously adds some exaggeration to get the point across

I don’t think they actually think everyone does this

Arainach• 1 year ago

There are some interested points hidden in a of projection from the author here.

We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent.

....says who? Who talks like this? I've been fortunate enough to travel a fair bit in the last year and I haven't found any city or country where this is the case.

This advice is cliche at this point but go touch grass. Get off the internet and talk to an actual human, because most actual humans don't talk the way this article says they do.

If everything around you is using therapist talk maybe you're hanging around too many therapists. That certainly happens with people who hang around exclusively with, say, software engineers.

ludicity3• 1 year ago

It's good advice. I have met people who talk like the post mentions, but the reality is that they just spend way too much time on Instagram and TikTok.

Not like me, I'm on Hackernews, and would never integrate stupid stuff into an important representation of my personality. Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!

jowea2• 1 year ago

As an vim and arch user...

Nah never mind I use NixOS too.

frollogaston• 1 year ago

Agreed. And about the HN thing, when I worked for a software startup in SF, it became a joke on our team how often strangers ask "what's your stack" instead of talking about the weather. Python 2 vs 3 was the talk of the town for a while.

brogdan• 1 year ago

I’d fucking love a post about NixOS config over this shit any day of the week. Lay it on us fella.

klabb3• 1 year ago

Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!

Only if you have a personal blog in Times New Roman, with an RSS feed, all diagrams in ascii art, no JS, and especially no scroll-jacking, high contrast font (ideally black on white), and keep in mind that we will find out if you’re not self-hosting your email, in which case you’ll have to profusely apologize.

munificent2• 1 year ago

I live in Seattle and have two teenaged kids.

Every sentence of this article resonated very strongly with me and accurately describes much of the culture surrounding me and my family.

cmckn• 1 year ago

Seattle is brimming with “new money”. I think the article is describing a sort of quasi intellectualism that is common in circles of people who are more educated than some, and paid more than most.

ianbicking• 1 year ago

Yes, the author is deciding How People Really Are by looking online, when the distortions of online discourse are also what she is complaining about.

On the other hand, most interactions I have with people are devoid of this kind of involved emotional inquiry. There is neither the non-psychological characterization of people ("he wears his heart on his sleeve") nor the psychological characterization ("he is anxiously attached"). I talk about these things with some of my family, some of my friends. Never with acquaintances. That is: in normal (not online) life people don't generally talk about having ADHD until they've reached a significant level of trust; and ADHD is about the easiest thing to talk about compared to any other issue.

Maybe this an artifact of the more reserved WASPish circles I run in. We're all very polite. We don't give each other nicknames. We don't gossip. We avoid making assumptions about a person's character. I don't think this serves us particularly well... and maybe therapy talk is our way of getting past this, couching these ideas in acceptably academic language. But without that language (and even with that language) we mostly just don't talk about it.

culopatin• 1 year ago

Not to discredit you, but I see it around me. One of my best friends is getting tired of his girlfriend always being “so introspective” and described what she does and journals about as what the author mentioned

mouse_• 1 year ago

Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

Could this be because modern women have far more social expectations placed on them than boomer men did, and are thus struggling generally speaking more than boomer men had to?

wat100008• 1 year ago

Given how the Boomer men have turned out, maybe recognizing flaws within yourself is not such a bad idea.

setr• 1 year ago

I think the question is notable though — there’s having the challenge, and then there’s considering it as part of your identity. Personally I wouldn’t; my various issues are just things I’ve got going on, but I don’t think of myself in those terms. Maybe a cause for parts of my “identity”, but not actually a part of it

colechristensen5• 1 year ago

Could this be because modern women have far more social expectations placed on them than boomer men did, and are thus struggling generally speaking more than boomer men had to?

No. "Mental health" concepts have just become prominent in the mythos of young women. Everybody has their struggles and competing over who has the most is not a productive area of discussion. Contemporary young women really like talking about mental health and have their own culturally shared version of psychology diagnosis and treatment. It's not necessarily any better or worse than any previous as psychology has always had a tough time with rigor.

steve_taylor2• 1 year ago

It's definitely a fashion. I sympathise with those who legitimately have these conditions and are dismissed as attention-seeking.

jowea2• 1 year ago

Interesting article. It reminds me of TVTropes. It's the most systematizing (as opposed to holistically) way of looking at media, decompose it into parts (tropes) that are shared with other media. It feels like approaching the ultimate in the Western scientific orderly systematizing thought.

Anyway here's the relevant trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MeasuringTheMari...

aiisjustanif2• 1 year ago

This came to mind for me as well, if anything I think “Measuring The Marigolds” is in slight opposition to the article and supplements it.

When the article got to using a pros-cons list for having kids, that’s where I found the "put away your calculator and enjoy the beautiful sunrise" moment. You can systematically think about things and still have a personality especially for something as important as having a child. :)

I think a lot of this boils down to that not everything is black and white in life and it sucks to think that way, like assigning labels and using therapy speak this way. Which I very much agree with the original article on.

nemo• 1 year ago

I'm suspicious of the use of "we" here since I don't feel like I'm a part of this discourse. Also:

Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful

In the past from, say, 30-40 years ago, if you failed to arrive at appointments and meetings on time you probably weren't labeled "lovably forgetful," and you probably would face punishments for having certain personality traits. We're changing in how we understand those kinds of differences now, and it's not all for the better, but in general the discourse now is better than how things were in the past when neurodiverse folks tended to receive a lot of punishment, invective, bullying, and ostracism.

I've been autistic my whole life, but I'm from the older set where there was no understanding of such things, we used to get bullied a lot, sometimes quite violently, and social ostracism was typical then for folks on the spectrum. I'd be thoughtful about romanticizing the past or get taken in by the false feelings of nostalgia - it's wrong to imagine people used to deal with the neurodiverse in glowing light and thoughtful acceptance, no one ever said I was "lovably forgetful."

Azek• 1 year ago

Mirroring this, I have ADHD and experienced a lot of harsh judgment as a kid for my behavior at home, and in school. And the resulting shame from that judgement stuck with me for a long time, I was even diagnosed early but didn't accept the label until adulthood, and didn't work through the reality of my differences, and remedy the shame until recently. The label of ADHD helped me immensely, to connect with others and to understand and be sympathetic to myself.

If labels make you uncomfortable maybe that aversion itself is something worth holding and looking at.

bbminner• 1 year ago

As another example, I was treated horribly by a ex-spouce for years, and for some reason I didn't leave, and only covered up for my spouce's bad behavior. Retrospectively it was destructive, but in the moment it felt like the right thing to do (in a very roundabout way). I don't want this to happen again, so I'm trying to understand and catch behaviors that got me there in the first place.

But if we drop the false nostalgia and think of about the overall "we think too much and feel too little" sentiment - i can relate to that.

iambateman• 1 year ago

As a child, my dad’s brother fell out of a bunk bed and got a traumatic brain injury that would kill him 15 years later.

My dad experienced real trauma but was told to bottle it up. After 30 years, he finally went to counseling and it was transformational for him.

By contrast, I had some mean fifth grade classmates who still live in my head in uncomfortable social situations…

Did my dad have trauma and need to put a “label” on it? Yep. Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...

As a society, we’re responding to the fact that a lot of our family and friends are living with the weight of a past which haunts them or psychological challenges which deeply affects their ability to relate to the world.

I think it’s ok to be overweight on therapy-talk. Kind of like how a little too much inflation is ok after a long period of zero inflation…

But I do think we should let younger people have more time before they get labeled/diagnosed. There’s a lot of 15 year olds who are just kinda weird…

DHPersonal• 1 year ago

Isn’t the point of labeling something as a “trauma” to be a signifier for the moment or behavior that affected you greatly and not something that meets an arbitrary level of awfulness, especially by way of comparison? Your father lost a brother, which is definitely certainly traumatic, but my grandfather lost a son. Does that equate to a greater trauma, therefore nullifying your father’s loss? I would say no! Comparing traumas means in my mind that nobody can ever heal because someone else will always have experienced something that was in some way worse.

borski3• 1 year ago

Not all bad things are trauma. According to the APA: “Any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning. Traumatic events include those caused by human behavior (e.g., rape, war, industrial accidents) as well as by nature (e.g., earthquakes) and often challenge an individual’s view of the world as a just, safe, and predictable place. Any serious physical injury, such as a widespread burn or a blow to the head.”

It’s not useful to compare trauma, but not all negative things that happen are trauma.

And perhaps more importantly, not all trauma causes PTSD, which is a defined set of symptoms later in life.

bigDinosaur2• 1 year ago

How does a TBI kill someone 15 years later? Do you mean that it caused a suicide or was it a physiological sequela?

Fluorescence2• 1 year ago

It can mean they suffered serious health problems for 15 years until a particularly bad seizure or some such took them. TBI can cause long-term conditions like epilepsy, physical disability, organ dysfunction, sleep problems etc.

I was very struck reading about about a mass-shooting "survivor" dying 20 years later and it being considered a murder. It sounded wrong but when reading the account of the terrible health problems they suffered every day until their death, I was left in no doubt it was not just murder but a far crueler one than those that died on the day.

Fluorescence2• 1 year ago

Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...

You might be selling yourself or others short with that notion of trauma that excludes what sounds like bullying.

I personally don't find traumatic impact to be determined by the severity of the event. If anything, it feels like I am built for the "big stuff" like family tragedy and during such events, where others have fallen to pieces, I can step up, I am more focussed and capable than normal. A stoic acceptance of such events comes naturally, it's life, it happens and I know I am needed.

In contrast, small events: rejection, failure, embarrassment, conflict etc. can be paralysing, debilitating, brain-breaking poison that I can't escape with out great suffering and effort.

The cases that cause me effort are expressly where the impact is irrational. Natural grief, sadness at misfortune etc. heal with time but irrational impact is where an inconsequential grit of sand has seized the entire gearbox and only grow without attention.

kshahkshah• 1 year ago

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything.

To explain everything shallowly by looking for direct cause and effect and not a multitudes of causes and effects. That complexity is too much to think through comfortably whilst living within it and having an unreliable experience of the self, especially in the younger years. Labeling causes with an easy broad moniker provides temporary comfort, relieving the individual of the burden of deeper reflection.

colechristensen5• 1 year ago

They're trying to explain everything but what they're actually doing is labelling everything with dubious labels and then putting social pressure on people to act like their labels. Under the guise of acceptance they're alienating everybody from each other by trying to put everybody into a bucket. It's best to notice this kind of thing but not put too much energy into refuting it because it's just not where conversations or attention should be, this kind of thought should wither in obscurity instead of seeking some kind of victory over it.

mosquitobiten2• 1 year ago

Haven't we been doing exactly what you say since like forever? Aren't "asshole" or "creep" or "nice" just labels coined a long time ago that already distort someones actual behavior or some situation between 2 people? Or used for being mocked or commended? I say at least in current times the new generations are expanding that vocabulary in trying to be more precise but the people that are more of a following type keep defaulting to exclusionary behavior.

_benton2• 1 year ago

Fascinating article. It's think the author's experiences are fairly context-dependant, with where you live, the political leanings of your social circle, your online community etc. But I have noticed an increase in the pathologizing of normal human behaviours and traits. Maybe not all character flaws should be fixed.

supportengineer• 1 year ago

You mention a resistance to pathologizing normal human behaviors. That could stem from early experiences where you were perhaps judged or misunderstood for simply being yourself by caregivers, teachers, or peers. If, as a child, you were expected to conform tightly to rules or suppress emotions, you might now feel protective of traits that others try to label or correct. Therapy can be a space where that defensiveness is explored gently, not to shame you, but to give voice to the younger parts of yourself that may have gone unheard.

dgfitz2• 1 year ago

Having gone through therapy for 10 years, nah. Having someone tell you what you already know isn’t helpful, unless you have a need to feel heard. Most people just know the bottom line.

I still go to therapy. It isn’t helpful.

barry-cotter• 1 year ago

That was hilarious. Perfect, absolutely pitch perfect, therapy brain. You are a gifted satirist. I love how you end on the part that’s most important to the character of the therapy worshipper, the defence of the core of their identity, that therapy is an unalloyed good.

_benton2• 1 year ago

Hahahaha this got me. My sarcasm/satire detectors are clearly malfunctioning today...

8n4vidtmkvmk• 1 year ago

This response sounds kind of effed up in the context of the article. I don't think everyone needs therapy, especially not if they're happy. Leave them be.

mmoza• 1 year ago

I was exactly the child you describe. I was frequently punished for speaking out, did not express my emotions since anything was met with rage and cruelty, and I still suffer from the consequences today.

Therapy is the second worst thing in my life to happen to me. There were the tens of therapists who put me down or told me my life experience didn't constitute "real trauma". By remaining in the therapy system for so long, years and years, and chasing support I could not actually be offered, all I received was a slew of new trauma (of once again having my lived experience denied) and a hole in my savings. Not kidding, I could have set all that money on fire and have turned out better than I did.

But far more damaging than that was how I was pushed into seeking out labels and spurious diagnoses that only covered up the true causes of my shame - my caretakers and the medical system that acted as their apologia. The idea sold to me (indeed sold, with thousands of dollars of uninsured medical practices) was that with an ADD or other diagnosis under my wing, I could start "really" healing, that the "true" causes to my dysfunction were finally in front of me after being lost for so long.

I now disagree. I was goaded into believing I was a product of unfortunate circumstances instead of malicious incompetence or the just plain abuse and neglect I really did suffer. I was bucketed into the same labels everyone else uses to navigate their problems without regard to their appropriatness and was told it was ME and MY condition that was the beginning and end of the problem. Instead of providing a cohesive narrative, that only served to alienate me further.

We need to stop treating symptoms as labels to be celebrated. Therapy-speak needs to be societally ostracized and die out. My label was the consolation prize to the unfairness and abject cruelty I was subjected to in life. Nothing could be more insulting to the fiber of my being. I am now just myself. I refuse to be medicalized any longer.

rtpg3• 1 year ago

I think "normal" is the tough part.

I dislike the "you don't have adhd, you live in capitalism" meme in general, but there is a big difficulty in knowing how much you might be overloading yourself, trying to get to an unattainable normal because your actual material conditions are not normal.

If you're working 60 hour weeks for most people there's not much saving you from having a very messy life! But your peers might all also be in that environment, and you will see people who navigate that somewhat successfully.

Of course you could be working much less and simply "be lazy" and suffer downstream of that. You might be two mindset changes away from being a lot less stressed.

Or you might have a medical condition that makes certain things harder! Or you might not.

At the end of the day there are medical conditions that exist and are fairly scientifically proven to exist in some form and have treatment. And plenty of people who spend time saying that stuff doesn't exist, so there's vocal pushback against that which rubs some people the wrong way.

But there's also just human introspection (which is part of how we grow). The new thing is that this introspection often happens more in the open, a lot of times with the whole world watching.

Even 20 years ago you might talk with other people around the world but it would at least be in more closed spaces.

Gigachad• 1 year ago

To some extent I think it’s valid though. The inability to want to sit in a chair and reorganise spreadsheets for 8 hours straight isn’t a disability, it’s a natural response of your brain telling you that this activity sucks and you should get up and move.

Combined with the change in society where most active jobs are being replaced with sitting down at a computer.

api• 1 year ago

ADD / ADHD denial is a pet peeve of mine because I know people with it who have experienced before and after treatment. It’s absolutely real. It’s not a consequence of “capitalism” or screens or anything else circumstantial.

Why is it everywhere now? Because we diagnose and treat it. In the old days what did we do with ADD kids? Hit them. What did we do with ADD adults? Call them stupid and lazy.

tootie• 1 year ago

I am leery to discount anyone's mental health struggles because often enough they are very real. But it can be galling to see very functional people blame the smallest imperfection on a condition many people find debilitating. ADHD and Autism are prevalent ones now, but it also is almost a cliche to call yourself OCD for a bit finicky. I think there's also an element of blaming your shortcomings in life on an incurable condition so it's not your own fault.

stanislavb2• 1 year ago

I'd say - everybody has a personality which is not who they really are. The personality is "simply" the response and defence mehanism of the ego of trauma inflicted during the early formatory years during childhood. It's really interesting what an automatic-machine a person is. Unaware that he is acting machanically in most cases. Source - the Enneagram and Gurdjieff.

satisfice3• 1 year ago

We all have a personality and it IS who we “really are.” We also all have the ability to construct personalities that misrepresent our inner lives. Doing so creates a certain kind of stress and relieves other kinds of stresses.

Over the course of our childhoods we experiment with personality, and discover the elements that allow us to have stable and satisfying dealings with the world. We may cultivate several different personalities— each of them the real us in some respect.

Of course there are many elements of personality that are autonomic or otherwise habitual. That doesn’t mean personality is somehow not real.

A con artist or an actor can don a fake personality, but all that means is they are telling a kind of systemic lie to the world. This requires a lot of energy to maintain. Your real personality is that which minimizes required energy.

stanislavb2• 1 year ago

Are you the clothes you wear? No you are not. In a similar manner - your personality is what you show to the world. A construct based as a response to some trauma (or something else very influential, but usually trauma) inflicted on you as a child. i.e. your personality is the clothes your real self wears. It doesn't mean it's not part of you - it is.

brookst• 1 year ago

We are what we pretend to be — Kurt Vonnegut

Paracompact3• 1 year ago

So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Aeglaecia7• 1 year ago

i disagree , while most people do exist in a provisional life (to the uninitiated please search this term of mr. jung's) , this does not discount the possibility of evolving further

montagg• 1 year ago

Someone needs to play Metal Gear Solid 2.

kylehotchkiss• 1 year ago

The screwtape letters for 2025: how to completely freeze a generation from having any impact. Oof. This hit hard.

colechristensen5• 1 year ago

Eh. There are a loud social-media savvy cohort of mostly young, mostly female, mostly suburban American people and this is the lens they see the world through and they have a disproportionate representation in the available media to consume. The people that don't think this way which is the vast majority of people just don't talk about these things too much and don't accept the premise of the people who do... but don't disagree with them because those people are exhausting.

People who aren't that interested in talking about themselves just have other interests and don't want to engage in the shallow philosophy of psychology of the social media gen-z class.

derbOac• 1 year ago

... So we're supposed to see ourselves as static objects, unable to change or without causes of our behavior?

It won't be long before we see our genes as something that happened to us. At some point there will be questions about why our parents didn't change them, or why the government lets some change or select their genes but not others.

I guess this essay rubbed me the wrong way. Where they see — I'm not sure what it is they see, maybe embracing responsibility or self-actualization — I see people wanting to improve themselves, understand.

Personality is labeling, it's just labeling without explanation or goal.

armchairhacker• 1 year ago

IIRC a "disorder" is a personality trait that is extremely strong; specifically, strong enough to significantly negatively affect one's life and relationships without medication or therapy (real therapy, not "talk to someone" therapy).

For example, sometimes people talk about lowercase "t" and capital "T" trauma. Lowercase "t" is when something affects you enough that recognizing it elicits an emotion, e.g. some people fell uneasy when smelling saline because they associate it with getting shots when they were young. Uppercase "T" is when the emotion is overpowering, e.g. soldiers who wake up screaming or experience lifelike flashbacks when they see military equipment, or people who can't visit a location without panicking because it reminds them of a negative experience. Only uppercase "T" is diagnosed PTSD, although that doesn't mean lowercase "t" is never a problem, it's just not life-altering and can be worked around without medication or therapy.

We have regular adjectives for the manageable "lowercase" version of disorders. "Obsessive" for OCD, "antsy" or "trouble focusing" for ADHD, "strange" or "peculiar" for Autism. I do think someone can be "manic" or "depressed" without having diagnosed Bipolar or Depression. Unfortunately, language is defined by how it's used in practice, so if most people call themselves "ADHD" when they don't have real diagnosed ADHD, you'll have to use their meaning to understand them, and eventually it'll become the norm; but you can speak and write the non-disorder adjective to help counter it. Worst case, we still have "diagnosed X" to distinguish from "X" (unless people start using it like "literally" to mean figuratively...)

ryandv• 1 year ago

Labels are incredibly simplistic and reductive. Try to compress the entire written works of Shakespeare into a single word. You can, though it would not do his command of the language justice.

Moreover there is the problem of ensuring that when two parties exchange a single label, that label maps to the same referent or construct in the mind of both parties; otherwise you end up in a situation where two people use the same word to refer to different things, yet still think they are both talking about the same thing. Confusion at this layer leads to Tower of Babel-esque effects.

Language is powerful; in a Sapir-Whorfian kind of way, it determines the primitives out of which we compose larger, more complex ideas, but more importantly it also provides a serialization format that allows us to record thoughts and revisit them at a future time. Such thoughts can also include thoughts on ourselves, who we have been, and where we are going; the collection of such thoughts is one's narrative, and "narratization" [0], the process of creating that story of who we are, is an essential characteristic of human consciousness [0].

Subversion of the language we use to describe the self, and the media through which those languages are recorded, is thus altering the life narratives of large groups of people. "Therapy-speak," or overly medicalized language that originates from a fundamentally materialist worldview, does not treat of the existence of a rich inner psychological (i.e. "metaphysical") life, much less offer the terminology to describe it adequately. This therapy-speak gets recorded in our social media as a hyperreal [1] depiction of ourselves, and as one media scholar put it, "we become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." We create this therapized narrative of ourselves, and thereafter this therapized narrative shapes us. The therapy narrative becomes the totality of our self-concept, and, lacking any language to describe the inner life, dispenses with the inner life entirely. Now there is only the label and the physical matter of fact, qualia be damned.

The inner life, after all, is not scientific; it is not an objective phenomenon, nor can the qualia of everyday conscious experience really be adequately quantified in a way that truly captures its character. Science never intended to treat of such matters of the psyche, or the mind, or the soul, whichever of the three terms you would choose to describe the one subject under discussion. Traditionally, such questions would have fallen to spirituality and mysticism; and, I have a suspicion that the sudden interest in "identities" of all stripes is really a resurrection of the old language of souls and psyche into a more modern, secularized context, as a pushback against overly fundamentalist materialist worldviews that do not admit of the existence of any part of the human outside the biological facts of its genetics and chromosomes.

Modern psychology has lost touch with the rich storehouse of symbolic and mystical language used to describe matters of psyche for aeons: that of gods, and demons, and spirits.

[0] Jaynes 1976

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

ants_everywhere• 1 year ago

This has been a common trope since at least the 90s among conservatives.

The author's other post is fanning the "porn addiction" moral panic, and they're subscribed to someone who says that atheism is bad and only Christians can save the world.

None of this really matters to their argument of course, but it does give you a sense of their motivation.

Their argument, of course, is nonsense and is far outside the consensus of research psychologists and medicine.

msy• 1 year ago

Strongly agree, this feels very close to gee-shucks-weren't-things-better-in-the-olden-days regressive history-revisionist trad content.

hresvelgr• 1 year ago

The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.

deanCommie2• 1 year ago

except they weren't really "support systems"

i mean they were, if you got lucky.

If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that they did and just simply passed it forward or didn't talk about it.

i don't know what the ratios are but a LOT of people fell through the cracks.

it's just that the birth rate was high enough to continue the population growth, and there were socially acceptable ways to ignore the inconvenient problems (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)

it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.

now the stigma is gone and we're finding EXPLICIT paths to treatment, tolerance, and embracement of mental health, neuroatypical brains, spectrums, etc. Is there overpathologizing? Maybe? Hard to know! The stigmas still aren't gone. Go read the comments on any video providing tips on how to parent children on the spectrum and see neurotypicals freaking out about how soft the current generation is.

the western world seems to have peaked in tolerance in the 2010s, and is now backsliding into authoritarianism and fascism. that's trying to recreate a lot of those original support systems (by destroying the new ones). It's a bold plan, let's see how it happens.

EMIRELADERO• 1 year ago

I agree with everything you said except for the last paragraph.

The people who, according to your theory, want to reverse the tolerance trend and slide towards fascism/authoritarianism didn't pop out today. They existed and lived in society in the 2010s too. So, from a logical standpoint, what changed?

MichaelZuo• 1 year ago

Isn’t the first half a tautology?

By definition roughly half the population in any society must belong to a below average family and/or below average communities.

And it seems pretty likely that those with below average capacities at handling, processing, reflecting, etc., on these issues would be concentrated there.

WorkerBee28474• 1 year ago

it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.

I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.

typewithrhythm3• 1 year ago

There is substantially more going on than "tolerance vs intolerance". We have a huge influx not just because of changing diagnosis standards, but also because the financial benefit for getting a diagnosis has also expanded.

The views of people you are trying to label as fascist are more accurately described as individualism vs welfare state.

drewcoo• 1 year ago

It's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis

I claim the DSM-5 is why. We changed diagnostic criteria then we diagnosed. People who used to be "normal" were suddenly "undiagnosed until late in life." But the people themselves hadn't changed much, just the diagnostic criteria.

achierius• 1 year ago

It worked for the large majority. It now no longer works for that large majority, and practically also does not work well for the rest. We have in this sense regressed, thanks to the social liquidation of capitalism.

navane3• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure current highly interconnected society elicts more spectrum behavior then back when 90% of the populace was just digging soil for grains.

Aurornis7• 1 year ago

I don’t see these as opposing ends of a spectrum. I think they’re largely independent variables.

Anecdotally, the people I know who have become most immersed in therapy speak are also the most socially connected. The therapy speak and associated language have become tools for establishing themselves within their social support system, communicating cries for help, and even trying to use therapy terms to shield themselves from accountability for their actions by transforming it into a therapy session.

Paracompact3• 1 year ago

I agree, though possibly for different reasons. Those support systems may or may not be weaker than they were in generations past, but they are certainly more likely to say "I can't help you, go get professional help" than in the past.

In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression, the "help" out there is criminal. It is not a disease we have a cure for, in fact it's not clear to me it's even a disease in most sufferers, but a healthy and rational response to societal decay. I do not believe some disorders will ever be satisfactorily explained by individual-centric medicine, in the same way history will never be satisfactorily explained by great man theory.

KolibriFly3• 1 year ago

Yeah, calling depression a "disorder" sometimes misses the point entirely when despair is a logical response to how things are

spicyusername• 1 year ago

One thing that makes me nervous about a culture that is so quick to forward people to therapists, is that therapy is not some ironclad medical practice, like you might imagine heart surgery to be.

Therapy, and psychology in general, is one of the weakest areas of science, still based mostly on mysticism, large personalities, and weak statistical correlations. And that is assuming you even can get a "good" therapist, and not some schmuck who just happened to nab the degree.

I would go so far as to say that 90%+ of problems that are served in therapy sessions are better served by the regular participants in an intimate social network, friends and family, than some "expert" who is incentivized, knowingly or not, to send you into the pharmaceutical pipeline or, as this article describes, hand you a bunch of random labels you can forever use to psychologically handicap yourself with.

theusus2• 1 year ago

is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely.

I disagree! There was never a good support system at all. We used to just man up and live with it. Now that stress is reaching it's new heights. We can't cope with it.

jazzyjackson2• 1 year ago

I'm very curious as to how you come to the conclusion that 'stress' has increased. I don't suppose it's that the world is more stressful, WWII, cold war, a thousand famines throughout history, what makes us so stressed that we can't cope in some way that we used to be able to cope?

dpkirchner• 1 year ago

It was also possible to buy afford a house and a small family on a job that doesn't require much training or special skills. It's easier to deal with (often meaning "ignore") undiagnosed mental issues with your own roof over your head.

ryuker163• 1 year ago

Your leaving out that people with mental and even physical issues often were outcasts for revealing them to their family, friends, and community in the past.

Some of that supoort wasnt present.

metalman• 1 year ago

out on the fringe there is lots of personalities as they say, the difference between bieng eccentric and crazy is a million bucks, or comunities with lots of recent imigrants, low density rural areas, people with improbable jobs, pilots and doctors who worked war zones, free divers working on barges for $19.50/hr, smoke jumpers, musicians and movie people, folks working the front lines in not for profits dealing with homeless and people with aids, serial entrepenours, et cetera but then ,I guess, maybe I move around more than most people........but as for the mass of people following "the plan", ya they are a bit extra tweeky and way too easily spooked, way too much into there "feelings", and "comfort zones", "saftey", and "processes".......plus they are stuck in environments where they are subject to people who are outworking and over achiveing the fuck out of everything and bringung out the worst passive agressive shit in people, that they then get to feel guilty about. it's a shit show alright

parpfish• 1 year ago

Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.

But there are a few things we can learn from this:

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.

- most mental disorders are an issue of degree and not something qualitatively different from a typical experience. People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.

zug_zug5• 1 year ago

It's interesting because there are two diametrically opposed ways to interpret what you said

One is - everybody thinks they have disorders, so just ignore that feeling it'll mess with you.

The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more

Retric10• 1 year ago

Disorders are labels for things which significantly negatively impact people’s lives. Thinking of them in terms of a spectrum generally means stretching a label past the point of meaning.

gg82• 1 year ago

The other idea is that people who go into the field are screwed up themselves... and are trying to work out how to treat/understand themselves.

orn688• 1 year ago

In my experience the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's helpful to neither completely ignore nor ruminate over one's traits, but just _be aware_ of them.

It's been very helpful for me to pay attention to and think about how my own personality compares to others'. For example, I tend to be a people-pleaser, but I used to think that everyone was just as people-pleasing as me, which only reinforced the people-pleasing because I didn't feel right putting my own needs first when everyone else was already sacrificing their own needs (or so I assumed).

At the same time, medicalizing these things paints them as "abnormal" disorders that need to be "cured", overlooking any of the positives these traits bring. When it comes to my people-pleasing, I like it about myself that I care about others. As long as I recognize that it sometimes comes at my own expense, I can begin to make more conscious decisions about when to allow the people-pleasing to flow versus when to try to subdue it.

rf153• 1 year ago

there's a third: everyone wants to feel special and also takes any excuse to not have to work on their flawed habits

jaredklewis• 1 year ago

The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more

What if the first part of this is true (we all have a smattering of disorders), but thinking about them more just makes things worse?

esperent2• 1 year ago

everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more

I think this is subtly incorrect. I would phrase it this way:

everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do... And they think that makes them different and therefore deserving of special treatment.

We all live on continuums of mental health, and reflecting on that is important. But it's unrelated to what's happening here, there's not much reflection, just self labelling and demanding special treatment based on these labels.

Someone strongly on the autism spectrum absolutely needs special treatment, some just a little, some a lot.

But somebody who watches a TikTok about autism and recognizes, or thinks they recognize, similar behaviors in themselves, does not need it (except in the few cases where it is actually undiagnosed autism, of course, but that's a very small minority).

Aurornis7• 1 year ago

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.

This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok.

There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Many young people lean into this and label everything as a defensive tactic.

A while ago, one of the trends was “time blindness”. People who were chronically late, missed meetings, or failed to manage their time would see TikToks about “time blindness” as if it was a medical condition, and self-diagnose as having that.

It was bizarre to suddenly have people missing scheduled events and then casually informing me that they had time blindness, as if that made it okay. Once they had a label for a condition, they felt like they had a license to escape accountability.

The most frustrating part was that the people who self-diagnosed as having “time blindness” universally got worse at being on time. Once they had transformed the personal problem into a labeled condition, they didn’t feel as obligated to do anything about it.

Brian_K_White• 1 year ago

Oh you have time blindness? How unfortunate! That's just like my check-writing blindness I just got.

dsubburam• 1 year ago

This parallels the debate about free will and determinism. If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?

Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can: "Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1]

i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too.

If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual.

[1] https://philarchive.org/archive/HOBFWA

Walf16• 1 year ago

I'm sure there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition, but you do realise time blindness is a real issue, right?

https://www.simplypsychology.org/adhd-time-blindness.html

I don't watch TikTok videos, I don't use Instagram, but I have been plagued by these symptoms my entire life, and don't really care about others opinions on it. You probably don't have it if those symptoms don't resonate with you, but there are plenty of people who genuinely struggle, and there's likely some overlap with those who have undiagnosed ADHD.

imetatroll• 1 year ago

This is simultaneously funny and sad. I wonder when alcoholism will get a front row seat during zoom meetings (or even IRL meetings). "Can't help it hick I'm an alcoholic".

I think a lot of societal change these days can be summarized by the idea that self-labeling is seen as transforming something into "everyone else's problem".

BiteCode_dev• 1 year ago

I think after a few expressions of time blindness, they'll discover that their contracts have continuity deficiency and their career vertical expression challenges.

The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.

zombot2• 1 year ago

Some young people in that phase of their lives where they grow into being responsible for themselves start missing the times when they were not responsible and try to extend those times with any pretext they can come up with. It's quite human but should of course not be encouraged.

dataflow• 1 year ago

Can't you just tell them to give you a doctor's note and then you'll figure out how to accommodate?

TheOtherHobbes• 1 year ago

This has been the worst thing about my experiences on Threads. A lot of people make what they - and the US mainstream, apparently - defines as a heterodox personality their entire sense of self. So almost everyone is some combination of queer, "neurospicy", a witch, "creative", and so on.

This often seems to come with some assumption of moral superiority.

But under the label many of them are absolutely mainstream people. Their posts aren't genuine spontaneous comments - they're calibrated and calculated as a marketing exercise for "engagement" and to promote a product, course, Insta lifestyle, and so on.

I realise it's tough out there and everyone has to hustle. But there really aren't many who acknowledge the gulf between the vocabulary of rebellion from the reality of "Please buy my course on how to be anticapitalist." (Actual example - not made up.)

If I looked I imagine I'd find a mirror image of hustle conformity and superiority culture on far right boards, only more so.

It's all quite weirdly Social Media™.

Edit: to add, I'm not criticising specific subgroups. I'm very aware the US is a dangerous place and being certain kinds of person significantly decreases your life expectancy.

It's more how social media has somehow distorted the online experience of those subgroups away from straightforward human exchange into commercial opportunity without people being aware of it.

debesyla• 1 year ago

And long before the internet there was horoscope signs that, somehow, still manage to stick around.

mystified5016• 1 year ago

This was a huge trend on Tumblr like ten years ago. The millennials got bit bad by this and I guess genz inherited it.

Or maybe this is just how young people think when given access to this type of information.

Treehouse16• 1 year ago

Time blindness is a real thing. However, I know it triggers peope snd it allows them to complain about people being late. "Time blindness" is about temporal processing, and I have it. I only mention the condition when people ask me questions about when something happened, because people think everyone is the same, I have to explain that I can't perceive time. It's real, etc. So exhausting, but they keep complaining about something they don't have. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.191...

mapt• 1 year ago

There is a pervasive feeling in our complex postindustrial society that one thing we are lacking is a little fucking slack, the sort of thing that might be unavoidably extended on a very regular basis in the primeval human tribe/clan. We get it where we can.

Turning employment and education into an up-or-out pressure cooker that thinks nothing of, for example, firing the bottom performing 10% of people every year, or failing a student who's fifteen minutes late to a final exam, is not what we are built, cognitively/socially/culturally, to tolerate. These people are taking a norm that we DO make a formal attempt to force tolerance on, disability, and trying to extend it to get the system to treat them more like a human being and less like a competitor.

Let's take a more consensus trend: ADHD.

ADHD barely existed as a recognized social phenomenon until the 1990's.

I didn’t realize how much of a psychiatrist’s time was spent gatekeeping Adderall.
The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
(it’s because his colleagues are all on Adderall already – but telling him that will just make things worse)
He goes on to give me his story about how he’s at risk of getting fired from his Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers position, and at this rate he’s never going to get the promotion to Vice President Of Staring At Giant Spreadsheets, so do I think I can give him some Adderall to help him through?
Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

https://youtu.be/xErFsi5AdQ0?si=x0OWNLy07fUr3Cry&t=702

nelox• 1 year ago

Precisely. I would posit that many of those are no different from those who start studying psychology formally struggle with statistics because it requires a shift from intuitive, qualitative thinking to rigorous, quantitative analysis, which can be challenging for those without prior exposure. Psychology curricula often include courses in statistical methods or research design, which demand skills in mathematical reasoning, data interpretation, and abstract concepts like probability distributions or hypothesis testing. These topics can feel alien to students drawn to psychology for its focus on human behaviour and emotions rather than numbers.

stevenAthompson6• 1 year ago

The author's concerns would mostly all be ameliorated by logging out of TikTok and never logging back in. They seem to think that "TikTok" and "Society" are synonyms. They are not.

Tokumei-no-hito4• 1 year ago

you seem unaware that over 60% (150M) of the US uses tiktok and around 70% of that (100M) are 18-30. it's unclear on the < 18 numbers but likely a significant number.

i don't think it's unreasonable, particularly when she qualifies gen-z, to conflate tiktok and society.

it's really out of hand. the brain rot, beyond just the psych labeling she touches on, is crazy.

bombcar• 1 year ago

It exists outside of TikTok (and Tumblr before it). It may not be as noticeable or strong, but it’s there.

Especially with children and teenagers - which is why labeling them early can be so bad (or good, if used sparingly).

paganel• 1 year ago

It has definitely slipped into real life, amongst us, persons who don't use TikTok. And I've recently heard therapy talk related to relationships/love coming from a close person who I know for certain that doesn't use TikTok, and she's also in her mid to late-30s (so no zoomer).

poulpy123• 1 year ago

Tiktok seems to have between 1 and 2 billion users. It's not just something for the terminally online

jjani• 1 year ago

But there are a few things we can learn from this:
- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.

This is almost the opposite of what we can learn about this, and the article does a great job at pointing that out. It's a very recent social phenomenon. Yes, that contradicts your abnornal psych class, but think about it. 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)? In elementary, middle and high schools, at the workplace, in other majors? IME absolutely not, very much the opposite. The only ones who did so were the diagnosed, and then only mentioned it when very relevant. Let alone 100 years ago. Let alone the massive differences between different regions/cultures in desire for uniqueness, both historical and uniqueness.

This is a massive sociocultural phenomenon, absolutely not something inherent to the human psyche. Almost no one is born this way (strong desire to make themselves feel unique).

NoPicklez4• 1 year ago

I don't think its necessarily untrue.

20 years ago you didn't open your phone to see videos by anyone that called themselves a therapist or psychologist say you might have ADHD if you have these xyz common signs. Or if you struggle to have difficult conversations with your partner you might have grown up in a chaotic household.

All very loose, quick and ambiguous explanations that do not provide any balance.

If someone sees it and goes "Oh gosh that loosely explains why I do xyz" they will take it, because is confirming something or its providing an answer to something they deem they struggle with that they didn't have any answer for before.

It's part of the human psyche to try and understand and answer things and we have a confirmation bias that limits our ability to think of both sides of the coin, not just the one that's constantly popping up on our mobile phones from so called therapists.

esperent2• 1 year ago

20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic

The labels people use follow trends. Labelling (self or others) as autistic or on the spectrum is relatively new, but there have been trends for other disorders in the past. Neurotic, depressed, anal retentive, even phrenology - people worrying that the shape of their cheekbones mean they must be genetically stupid, or applying that to others. We have evidence of such trends going back 100 years at least, and probably more.

For sure, social media has amplified and homogenized things, as it does. But it's not a new phenomenon.

aoki• 1 year ago

20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)?

The “Aspie programmer” meme has been around since the turn of the century (at least)

https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/

I’m pretty sure people made reference to it when I was at Cal in the 90s but I can’t prove it. (The prevalence of social awkwardness, eye contact avoidance, hyper-interests, etc.). I don’t think it was as much about people wanting to feel special as trying to find explanations for the overall environment.

fzeroracer• 1 year ago

Let alone 100 years ago. Let alone the massive differences between different regions/cultures in desire for uniqueness, both historical and uniqueness.

100 years ago we used to often arbitrarily decide what mental conditions people have and then proceed to extract out parts of their brain to try and fix it to disastrous effects.

corimaith• 1 year ago

They're doing it now because it gives them power and social status now.

The same story has been repeated dozens of times; An individual is bullied/ostracized for some hobby or characteristic, years later they find the same bullies now going all in said hobbies and characteristics.

watwut5• 1 year ago

20 years ago, in our math and tech focused university, people were literally pretending to have lower social skills then they had. People would do weird things on purpose and brag about social mishaps. Because lower social skills were associated with being genius and everyone wanted to be seen as a genius.

Obviously, if your deficit appears only when it is socially advantageous and disappears when disadvantageous, it is something else. But it was a thing.

m463• 1 year ago

I remember someone telling me a story of a horoscope type thing that was handed out to people in class after ascertaining their birthdate. People were asked to comment and thought things were accurate... until the professor had everyone compare their horoscopes. Theire identical horoscopes.

muzani• 1 year ago

My parents did psychology and they always warned us about this.

Bayesianism helps but isn't taught well enough in school. Basically, we fail to handle the false positive and false negatives into the calculation, and this happens a lot with psychologists as well. This is really the point where people say untrained 'professionals' are dangerous - they can't evaluate that inaccuracy of the diagnosis itself.

This is the best explanation I've seen so far: https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-...

pramodbiligiri• 1 year ago

That's a good one. Some people might like the "odds" based version of Bayes' theorem: https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-bayes-the...

EGreg2• 1 year ago

The word “disorder” is loaded, but it is interesting to also look through the lens of the Social Theory of Disability. For the rise in diagnoses for autism, ADD, gender dysphoria, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia etc.

Just as we now view the historical labeling of women as suffering from “hysteria” as a systemic failure, not a personal pathology, we should interrogate whether current diagnostic regimes will look just as crude and institutionally convenient in 50 years

Many social and health-related challenges we label today as “disorders” may in fact be downstream responses to structural issues in how society is organized — education, labor, healthcare, media, food, and housing. It’s worth asking: what if we’re pathologizing reactions to a sick system?

Generations identifying as trans:

  Gen Z: 2.8%
  Millennials: 1.0%
  Gen X: 0.3%
  Baby Boomers: 0.2%
  Silent Generation: <= 0.05%

A lot of it has to do not with the label itself but with the industry. Where someone in the past would be called a “tomboy” or “femboy” today they would have a different diagnosis, the DSM-5 would be consulted, etc.

Similarly with ADHD if a kid would have been called “rambunctious”, today they might be labeled as having a “disorder” and medicated with literal amphetamines, instead of for instance reforming public schools. (To be clear, I am talking not about exteme/acute cases but overdiagnosis of relatively mild cases.)

We can look at other examples (eg Finland’s schools where children can climb trees and have much lower ADHD diagnosis rate) as one way to compare.

Or in the past, anorexia and eating disorders were a form of body dysmorphia, and some such images were actually promoted by industries such as fashion modeling or ballet performance. And when I say promoted - I mean also heavily enforced within the industry itself.

Industry in USA works with government, together. For example the factory farms (overusing antibiotics, abusing animals) and ag-gag orders, criminalizing whistleblowing and exposing them. Or monsanto and intellectual property enforcement. Or pistachio farmers in CA and water shortages. Or bottling companies and clothing companies putting out metric tons of plastics and microplastics, while regular people are told they can’t have a straw or a bag, and must recycle (itself revealed to be mostly a govt+industrial scam, shipped to China etc.)

This is across the board. Obesity and diabetes are a major epidemic in USA but instead of questioning high fructose corn syrup, highly processed starches and sugars in everything, people are told they can fix things themselves with diet and exercise. Actually it has been shown that obesity and disabetes in mothers is correlated with autism in their children. It has been shown that there was a serious correlation between obesity, diabetes and covid morbidity but the latter was taken extremely seriously but the former is not.

Same with plastic recycling, etc. or going vegan. Or buying free range. Or whataver. The individual is kept distracted.

In USA medicating things downstream is the default. One in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. Teenage girls have the highest levels of “sadness” (most outlets don’t want to say depression) etc.

Of course when it comes to depression and gender dysphoria we get extra political sensitivity due to activism around those issues. Of the usual character: the INDIVIDUAL is the one that has to make all the downstream adjustments and cope with the SYSTEMIC upstream issues, which are not questioned much. The individual is even told to embrace their label and tell others it is great (eg “big is beautiful” for obesity, celebrating the result instead of reforming the system).

Until AI takes the jobs, the social compact has become: both parents have had to work for corporations, to afford the expenses that could previously be paid by one “breadwinner” in the family working for corporations. And they stick their kids in public schools and elderly parents into nursing homes. And then medicate them if they don’t like it, because the DSM 5, school administrators or nursing homes staff say that this is the best way. Everyone is afraid to speak up against the system, they would rather perpetuate it and cover their own ass.

There was a time when people derided USSR people for drinking a lot to cope with the failures of their economic system. But now with men on opiates, women on antidepressants, high rates of teen suicide ideation, elderly and kids being medicated — perhaps we should rethink our own economic system. There are a lot of “problems” that people are experiencing and it may be from upstream systemic causes. But they are kept distracted by govt and corporations with the idea that they can fix it by their individual actions, which include recycling, dieting, and placing a label on themselves that the industry then helpfully gives them medications to manage it.

seethedeaduu9• 1 year ago

Generations identifying as trans:

Is this surprising? 20 years ago in many parts of the world the only way to survive as a trans person was through prostitution. You would be forced to live as an outcast, far away from "normal people". There were barely any legal protections, you could often not change your legal sex, finding any information about what this is or its treatments (not a fetish, something that millions experience, can't be "converted away", hormones exist, etc) was nearly impossible. Most people would see you as a freak.

A lot of it has to do not with the label itself but with the industry. Where someone in the past would be called a “tomboy” or “femboy” today they would have a different diagnosis, the DSM-5 would be consulted, etc.

This is not true. Trans people don't go to a doctor and ask them if they are trans. Rather trans people generally arrive at the realization of what they are by themselves, usually before seeking any professional help about it. The DSM is not consulted (and if it is, it's done post-facto by someone acting as a gatekeeper and trying to fill boxes).

Many people who called themselves femboys in the past ended up transitioning after becoming more informed about the whole topic and realizing that transitioning their sex and living as their true self is an option rather than something they had to do in secret.

const_cast8• 1 year ago

I think comparing LGBTQ+ identifications with mental illness is dangerous. Not too long ago we were quick to lump homosexuality in with these, despite the fact homosexuality is more of a state of being evidenced by real-life actions people willingly take. That being, sex with the same sex.

Transgender people often suffer gender dysphoria. You're correct that it's possible that gender dysphoria might be a downstream effect of society. Namely, we are an extremely gender-segregated society. There's truly only one way to be a man, although there are multiple ways to be a woman. People feel forced and confined to a very small subset of behavior and self-expression.

Existing between genders is, unfortunately, untenable. Society is just not built for that. But existing as the opposite gender seems to be perfectly doable. I'm not saying that it's that simple and all transgender people would disappear if we live in a society with no gender roles or expectations, but certainly they heavily feel the pressure of those gender roles and expectations.

ryuker163• 1 year ago

Double blind testing has been done on this so none of what your essay is saying has not been tested or studied.

Putting adhd or depressed people in a paradise situation does not make them not adhd or depressed.

Ive lived in a few different countries. Societies that dont label or believe in psychology just outcast the mentally ill as weirdos and encourage them to drink away their troubles.

rikroots2• 1 year ago

When I first discovered that I suffered from a "new" condition called Prosopagnosia - by means of an online "Are you face blind?" test - everything about my life suddenly fell into place. It was a liberating self-diagnosis which gave me permission to admit that it was some small malformations in my brain that were the cause of my troubles, not some selfish malformations in my personality and social skills.

Of course a self-diagnosis is not enough. I discovered my condition while it was still in the early stages of research. I signed up to be a guinea pig for researchers, and got paid a handsome £20/hour to undertake various tests (including brain scans - I still have a 3d image of my brain stored in a box somewhere) to help people better understand the underlying causes of the condition. It was fun for a while, until some of the tests got more disturbing. I also got to learn about the coping strategies I had already developed, and how to use them in better ways to help lessen the impact of the condition on my social interactions.

vladms3• 1 year ago

Glad it somehow worked out for you. I find it very sad though that you felt somehow "guilty" (based on "selfish malformations in my personality and social skills"), which I would see as a toxic society pressure.

Not sure how, since as long as I can remember I thought all people are different, so it's just about finding some that you like and that can also accept you. I don't want to force my quirks and preferences on others, but they don't get to do that either. Of course that can mean some periods and/or situations when you are not part of "the group", but looking back, although it did not feel cool all the time, that was mostly beneficial, got to know more people and do more stuff while looking for people I like.

throwaway2037• 1 year ago

    > now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.

As I understand, this is mostly affecting young women who are much more mimetic than young men. Is this also affecting men at (nearly?) the same rates? I don't see a lot of short form video content from men talking about their emotional issues. However, there is virtually unlimited content from women.

To be clear about my comment: I am not trying to be anti-women here, just point out a trend that I see.

KolibriFly3• 1 year ago

The problem now is that the internet flattens that nuance

satoru42• 1 year ago

This explains why the MBTI shit is so popular these days.

uncircle• 1 year ago

According to Google, any physical symptom is indicative of cancer.

According to social media, any personality quirk is indicative of ADHD.

I am diagnosed ADHD from a qualified professional, took medication, found it a great help, and I’ve come around to believe it’s all bullshit. Yeah, you have ADHD symptoms, yeah it’s disrupting your life, yeah you cannot find concentration and motivation. No, you’re not special. You’re not genetically born with pre-frontal cortex deficiencies. It’s, simply enough, an epidemic of massive proportions. We’ve created a society of distracted, gratified, unsocialised lazy squirrels all but interacting with the world through a piece of magic glass; what do you expect?

ryuker163• 1 year ago

I was diagnosed adhd well before mobile phones. Also, mri scans show adhd so yes, it is a prefrontal cortex deficiency.

Let me give you some old man advice. Untreated adhd feels sutble to the person but its not subtle to everyone around you. You think your calm but come off like a zany, pacing autistic person or incredibly anxious. Alcohol and drugs can make you even more spazzy or impulsive.

Dont believe me? Go ask friends and coworkers how you come off. Your going to be shocked, trust me.

Every adhd person i met who told me what you just said was a spazzy mess or incredibly rigid/disciplined/control freak to counter act the adhd.

They were rarely away how much of a spazz we come off as even with treatment.

seethedeaduu9• 1 year ago

The "tiktok self diagnosis" thing is more like a moral panic. It is not really an attempt to feel unique and healthcare professionals would do a lot of good to their patients if they understood this.

msgodel• 1 year ago

At least as of one decade ago psych professors still give that warning. I remember being warned not to do that in psych 102. It's always bothered me a little that everyone seems to completely ignore it.

docmars• 1 year ago

I think this is exacerbated by the acute rise in real autism cases (not self-diagnosed) going from 1 in 10,000 clear to 1 in 31 cases in children, in the span of 50 years.

As people learn there's something gravely wrong with how they interact with others, struggle with social situations, etc. — and they validate that by observing enough "normal" people interacting or watch enough Hollywood entertainment depicting perfectly rehearsed conversations — in desperation, they seek a remedy in everything from personality systems ("everything must be labeled and explained") to psychiatric treatment just to cope with the lack of frequent, validating, normal interactions; and in many cases, aren't improving because of how isolated their lives have become.

This is something I've observed in my own life and in friends who share similar challenges.

watwut5• 1 year ago

if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.

Where do you see uniqueness? If anything, it seems to me that people are making themselves not unique, but more of "someone who is part of large group of same like individuals".

account42• 1 year ago

People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.

This is part of the cause of the current situation though - that putting labels on yourself gets you more empathy than you would have gotten as a "normal" person.

LoveMortuus• 1 year ago

I always saw these labels as limitations, like if you say that you're a vegan, you can't eat all the other stuff.

It was because of that point of view that I always avoided labeling myself or my behaviour, because (in my mind) I did not want to be limited.

But I guess I'm the odd one.

zug_zug5• 1 year ago

1. Weird title

2. Personally, I think the being more knowledgeable about (and conversant in) common psychological issues is great. Much better if we have a label for "depression" rather than just thinking "The world and everything is awful and I'm the only one who feels this way." Same for anxiety, attachment, all of that.

3. If young girls happen to co-opt it in a way you find self-absorbed, get over it, stop trying to police it and make a fake moral panic over it. It's no worse than astrology or whatever other loose avenue of self-exploration would be otherwise happening.

It to me sounds like the author fundamentally misunderstands the whole thing, this just is soaking in boomer energy. That is -- the premise that recognizing these trends is somehow shaming/bad and it's "better" if we all use loosely-defined unscientific terms like "nice-person" rather than looking at and challenging our overly intense and dysfunctional people-pleasing or whatever.

The way gen-z uses these terms, is that they aren't some hardcore disorder, but as a common parlance for real and addressable things to change about oneself (e.g. that talking on the phone can be uncomfortable, or making an appointment is stressful). Like gen-z may say "Oh I have insecure attachment" and they just mean "Sometimes I'm afraid to reach out for fear of rejection" and that's a healthy thing to talk about, even if the term they used is used a different way in the DSM.

NoPicklez4• 1 year ago

This is a really good article.

There is a lot of this content out there about mental health and there is a lot of it that tries to explain everything people do. Much of the issue I see is that it is taken to extremes and is very much driven by algorithms pushing particular pieces of content. And if it is ambiguous enough it will reach a larger audience, a beneficial sign for the account posting it.

There's no room for nuance that perhaps the person who is generous both has qualities of a people pleaser but is a generous person because once upon a time they did a generous thing and it made their life happier. Where it becomes a mental health issue is when it starts to reduce the quality of your life and your relationships significantly.

The bigger issue is that each of these things seem to be labelled as problems and how they can be solved, not managed nor be normal human behaviors. At the extremes, yes perhaps they need to be managed to a higher degree, but everything else is still what makes up peoples lives.

I myself am swarmed with reels about anxious/avoidant attachment reels with any random man/women and their dog trying to talk ambiguously about human behaviors and providing an explanation for them.

For young people sitting on TikTok and Instagram late at night being bombarded with mental health related reels trying to explain your behavior and other peoples behavior you like or don't like. It's best to give that type of content a break.

djoldman2• 1 year ago

The part that seems to be lost in all this is that there's really no purpose to learning/exploring/explaining unless it points to action.

Knowing you have ADHD, childhood trauma, attachment issues, etc. is useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action or if you don't intend to take action.

Unless you just enjoy the learning for the learnings sake, seek to learn so as to plan and execute.

borski3• 1 year ago

Knowing you have ADHD, childhood trauma, attachment issues, etc. is useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action or if you don't intend to take action.

That’s not actually true, and misses the point.

Knowing you have ADHD, alone, helps you stop blaming yourself and hating yourself for those things that are caused by the ADHD. It doesn’t excuse it, but understanding that those things aren’t moral failures are a huge deal to those who actually struggle with ADHD.

Moreover, most people with actual undiagnosed ADHD have spent their entire lifetime building coping mechanisms to manage it. Recognizing those does help build others in the future, even if just knowing changes nothing right then.

Loughla• 1 year ago

I understand what you're saying, but experience has taught me that many many many people use whatever the thing is (trauma, ADHD, whatever) as an excuse to act however they want whenever they want. It becomes a crutch, or a security blanket to let them just be okay with wallowing in the negativity and externalizing every problem.

There has to be a happy medium. I have some neuro issues, and yet I understand that while I may not be able to control the issues themselves, only me is responsible for my own actions. That is lacking in many folks who share my diagnoses. We dropped the ball somewhere and I don't know where, to be honest.

automatoney• 1 year ago

Your comment made me realize that maybe we're just going through the transition to a collectively better understanding of people. Right now we sort of have to pass through the clinical diagnosis/therapy terms in order to recognize something as not being a moral failure/making someone less valuable as a person. And then the next step we're building to is maybe like acceptance of people's differences without needing to make reference to diagnostic labels. Kind of like what's happened with queerness: past - fluid, undefined, marginalized; present - labels, understanding, less marginalization; future - moving beyond the need for labels in order for people to accept and understand.

vladms3• 1 year ago

For me, having people consider "moral failures" aspects of their personality is the root of the problem. We should not have that except for the most horrible things (murder, etc.). Still, after living in a couple of different countries, it is definitely not done to the same extent everywhere. We probably should all pay more attention not to impose random sets on "standards" on others.

scotty794• 1 year ago

useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action

Knowledge almost always results in some for of action.

Fore example if I know I have schizoid personality, I don't need to stress out about getting to know people just in case I might at some point start needing human contact. Because I know I won't.

everdrive• 1 year ago

The crowd which is hyper-focused on their "trauma" probably doesn't realize that this is scratching the very same itch as astrology.

hiddencost• 1 year ago

Or maybe your community sucks.

Aeglaecia7• 1 year ago

absolutely , now let us question why community is being actively deprioritized and destroyed by the system

morsecodist• 1 year ago

I somewhat agree that there is a problem but there is a glimmer of hope. As these medical terms are used more in everyday speech they lose their medical connotations and just become new words for personality traits. A lot of people who casually describe things as ADHD are using it more as an adjective than a diagnosis. We have had medical terms make it into this usage before: moron, hysterical, humourous (we're going all the way back to the four humours).

cowboyscott• 1 year ago

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

This is the rejection of science applied to a less common target.

throwaway0665• 1 year ago

It's the rejection of pseudoscience.

pdabbadabba• 1 year ago

What science is being rejected?

Aeglaecia7• 1 year ago

psychiatry is at best informed guesswork , mental conditions are merely labelled groupings of symptoms , the negative effects of psych drugs outweigh positives in a significant proportion of cases , people existed for thousands of years with functional coping mechanisms that were thrown in the bin to make someone else rich and the populace was brainwashed to think it was their fault

DavidPiper2• 1 year ago

I think it's a rejection of categorisation and labeling as a form of (self-)determinism, not a rejection of science.

arduinomancer2• 1 year ago

That does not follow

It’s possible to apply systems, frameworks, or categorizations that are actually wrong or overstated

positron26• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the "How did you take that picture?" Reddit meme. Who is the observer when we conceptualize of ourselves as deconstructed beings? Occasional self-awareness and reflection can be insightful, but when will you get back into the cockpit and fly the plane?

90's culture had so much more emphasis on being legitimate (and its many self-defeating imitations). Being legitimate is something that cannot be attempted. Only self-evidence can ever be cool. Only existing as the actualized output and never its abstracted model inputs can be genuine. Through that lens, one's own dignity demands not deconstructing. You should observe and react to what you learn, but whatever fractures are incurred must come back together and be owned. Otherwise you are pretending not to be the person in the cockpit, not the person flying the plane. It's a lack of responsibility. You will not do or do not. You will "try" because you are not in control. You will never be cool.

The engineer wants to isolate pieces of the system. Play the game again to study the situation, learn the pattern, and overcome the error. This is where it applies that no man crosses the same river twice. When people say, "life has no reset button" it does not simply mean that there are consequences but also that that every moment always remains, flowing incessantly, regardless of how it is scrutinized and analyzed to fit into a maze of dots and figures. We cannot own things by going backward in time to try again. Winning the game after many iterations is never cool. The losses must be owned or the pilot is merely creating a lie that they themselves understand while holding a result out to others as evidence of their coolness. It is trying too hard. It is illegitimacy, and its self-knowledge will seek to pull back the curtains on itself so that the pilot will not betray the plane.

Living intentionally constructed is a thought that must itself be forgotten. The idea is a map. Supposed externalized awareness of the being who rides in the skull cannot exist. It is a construction, and once the construction is used, it must be discarded as a map that was used to achieve some perspective. We can remember things far away. We can catalog and connect patterns over time, but the ALU cannot look at itself as lines in memory. The ALU lacks any self-description from which to feign deconstructed awareness beyond control bits that are necessarily less information than the registers, program, and data under computation. It all must vanish to a fixed-point un-calculation.

It's an aesthetic with some jagged edges. You'll always move forward based on what you believe because there can be nothing else, and if you are wrong, you will be wrong. You must own it. There are no outs besides simply admitting mistakes. But what is the opposite of dissociated? Is it worth it to live in your skin? Is it worth it to forget the distances that do not exist between yourself and the controls?

kelseyfrog2• 1 year ago

Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

There's a lot of boomer men writing in all caps whose special interest is either trains or WW2 who, if were in their 20s today, would easily be categorized as autistic. Older men, for most of their lives, lacked both language and social permission to think of themselves in those terms.

The entire construct of "disorder" is defined by what a given society is willing to accommodate or tolerate at a given moment. Thus, the problem with the article is that it assumes that we live in a homogeneous social landscape. We don't, so things that negatively impact someone life ie: the definition of a disorder, are age dependent. The threshold for "impairment" is not a universal biological constant; it’s a moving, socially negotiated boundary. Diagnostic categories themselves are historical artifacts, trailing behind the societies that create them.

The failure to recognize this is assuming an objective social reality, that frankly, never existed and never will exist. It only serves to reinforce existing, unexamined, contingencies of a specific time and place.

GuB-422• 1 year ago

I think what (may have) changed is that we now have "acceptable" labels. ADHD is fine, autism is fine, alcoholism, schizophrenia, not great, pedophilia, very very bad, even if you have never acted on a child.

I don't remember past "acceptable" pathologies, or what was considered a pathology back then, it included being gay. It you have a pathology, then you are mad, and if you are mad, then you lose your rights, at best, you are considered like a child, at worst, you end up in a place worse than prison.

Now, if you are diagnosed with an "acceptable" pathology, you actually get some advantages, people are expected to tolerate your quirks and you get full freedom like normal people, you may even get some welfare benefits as you are considered disabled.

To summarize:

Before: You are diagnosed as autistic, you end up in an asylum and lose your freedoms. No one wants that, so you avoid the label, it is just a personality trait.

Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits and people find it cute on social media. You want the label.

bevr13372• 1 year ago

Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits

I wish I lived in this reality. It sounds like a utopia over there.

GuB-422• 1 year ago

It is not utopia, it is my country, France. And while public healthcare looks better than in the US, it is absolutely not a utopia, from understaffing, bureaucracy and fraud, it is not without problems, even putting aside how much it costs in taxes.

But the idea is: in current society, for some pathologies / personality traits, you are better off with the label than without the label, so people will seek the label rather than avoid it, they would be crazy not to...

benreesman2• 1 year ago

Just earlier this evening I had not one but two commenters issue replies to the effect that successful deception in the public sphere, business and politics, is a marker of high intelligence. And that's just a depressingly direct example of what really seems to be a profoundly entrenched worldview "coming out of the closet" in the last decade or so especially.

The thing is, when you can't talk about seriously antisocial behavior with massively bad consequences for large numbers of people, when the real bad guys seem out of reach, all that angst has to go somewhere. And so everything is a disease or toxic behavior in the small, the family member or coworker has is a narcissist or a toxic personality, but like grinding everyone into poverty and pushing the world into avoidable war is just, how the world works.

If you put the small change shit in the swear jar where its always gone, nor you're asking very different questions about why things seem bad for everyone.

Tijdreiziger4• 1 year ago

but like grinding everyone into poverty and pushing the world into avoidable war is just, how the world works.

Even the Romans went to war and held slaves, so that seems true enough to me.

benreesman2• 1 year ago

It's true that the fortunes of humanity go through better and worse seasons, but the fact that it's been winter before doesn't make me any less eager for spring.

xivzgrev• 1 year ago

We know more now. We can better tease out causes of symptoms.

For example, generosity is not the same as people pleasing. They can look the same, but one is born of love and one is born of fear.

We generally want to help people experience more love and less suffering. Give, not to please people, but to please yourself.

bravetraveler• 1 year ago

Believe to know more. As someone who has managed to live comfortably in the margins... I have never been more miserable than recently. What changed? This unsolicited assistance.

I was a perfectly fine and productive remote worker before the pandemic. Now, every bit of energy I have goes towards "no, really, I'm alright" and the leagues of hustlers.

bevr13372• 1 year ago

And maybe that isn’t as crazy as we have been led to believe, maybe that isn’t so reckless, maybe there’s something human in that.

I'm quite certain the author is a Starfleet captain. So few things make me as excited to be human.

protocolture3• 1 year ago

[flagged]

Tokumei-no-hito4• 1 year ago

when the taxonomy is weaponized then we have lost something. taxonomy that is used in earnest to improve and adapt is fine. when it used to promote victimization that begets the control of other people it's a net negative.

Aeglaecia7• 1 year ago

[flagged]

protocolture3• 1 year ago

[flagged]

maxbendick• 1 year ago

Love this article. If you'd like a book that works deeply through the topic of commodified humanity, Minima Moralia by Adorno is painfully pertinent here.

vitro• 1 year ago

Sometimes I think about what I've read in a book about Japan.

Something along the lines that Japanese people are analog while Westerners are digital.

We try to explain everything, every emotion, feeling, how things are. But sometimes talking about things strips them of their mystery, of the unknowns. We talk too much and get entangled in meanings and what was formless and fluid before suddenly becomes defined and limited.

willjp• 1 year ago

Lol, I don’t think so, at least not outside branding and corporate circles.

It can still be endearing to have quirks, but I think there is still value in awareness of yourself and your patterns.

NetRunnerSu• 1 year ago

Welcome to Net://Anchor, you fools. There’s no escape.

https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/net-anchor-has-arri...

didibus• 1 year ago

I feel this is another misplaced conception based on the Golden Age Fallacy.

stego-tech• 1 year ago

I’m reluctant to blame therapy-speak and diagnoses of legitimate mental health disorders for the lack of personality in a lot of folks.

Instead, I lay blame at several altars of the modern world:

* Late stage Capitalism desperately trying to source novelty and products by convincing everyone they’re a “brand” to be marketed and sold to others

* Social media algorithms forcing people into bubbles for the sake of advertising revenue and data harvesting

* An “awakening” of modern mental health awareness (especially post-pandemic) that’s both (likely) engaging in overdiagnosing while also laying groundwork to understand people for who they are, rather than trying to shove them into neat little boxes of compliance

* The internet and free exchange of information enabling a lot of disparate researchers and experts to realize that these issues aren’t unique to a single cohort, but are likely environmental in nature to some significant degree

Add it all together, and you’ve got the current “label” era of personalities - shorthand for how you’d like others to see you and explain your quirks or eccentricities, but of questionable health if not accompanied by actual therapy (pharmaceutical, medical, behavioral, or otherwise).

t0lo• 1 year ago

LOL speak for yourself- if you're American maybe. Rest of the world, not so much. I deeply resent these articles which claim to speak for everyone but irresponsibly push destructive narratives like this. Like a least have a discussion before shilling your depressing viewpoint as the truth.

Aeglaecia7• 1 year ago

the west exhibits these traits moreso than other cultures , the west also has a pervasive influence on other cultures , the topic at hand is an incredibly important issue and focusing on the american god complex instead of the perversion of our souls contributes to the problem by distracting from it

NoPicklez4• 1 year ago

Well no, I'm Australian and I agree with the post.

Also, on the same coin who are you to say the rest of the world is no different, or is.

Perhaps the better response is simply that people shouldn't draw broad conclusions, as neither I or you can do that for anyone, including on behalf of the rest of the world outside of the US.

65• 1 year ago

I have a different perspective on this. I've always been interested in reading about the science of left handedness, because I am one. It's interesting to see how my brain is literally wired differently than others. How motivation and language processing are in different hemispheres of my brain compared to righties. But I never thought something was "wrong" with me, I just thought it was interesting.

Those who actually have diagnosed afflictions like autism and ADHD may also be interested in their brain wiring.

I think the trend comes from completely normal people who want to find an excuse to be a victim, which means they can defer responsibility of their lives to their "mental disorders," which of course has the effect of making highly insufferable people.

specproc• 1 year ago

I can think of nothing more likely to damage one's attention span than a variable intermittent reward loop on short form video.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

Haha it’s just the quest for uniqueness in a socially acceptable way combined with a desire to be protected by victimhood.

It’s pretty funny to see but it’s just kids being kids. The majority grow out of it and the truly mentally ill develop this Munchausen form.

Hopefully I’ve developed good tools to deal with it by the time my kids are older. The victim form is hard to break out of once you’re in.

The worst is there’s nothing to learn from these people. It’s like trying to learn sprinting from a guy who keeps yelling “As a peg leg, as a peg leg, …”

Useless. But it’s fine, I’ll pay your Medicaid.

julienmarie• 1 year ago

I appreciate the spirit behind this article, and yes, something real has been lost in how we relate to ourselves. But it doesn’t go far enough. The problem isn’t merely that we’ve traded quirky personalities for medical labels. The deeper, subtler tragedy is believing that identity itself is something fixed, stable, and real.

Identity is a seductive illusion. It promises meaning, coherence, and comfort. Yet beneath this comfort lies a quiet tyranny. Once we define ourselves, we imprison ourselves. The fixed “I” we cling to doesn’t stand scrutiny, not scientifically, not philosophically, not psychologically.

Consider neuroscience. The self, the stable “I,” is nowhere to be found in the brain. What scientists find instead are fleeting processes, overlapping patterns, temporary states. Neuroscientist Anil Seth, in his book “Being You,” argues convincingly that the self is a kind of ongoing hallucination—a comforting fiction the mind generates moment by moment. There’s no stable core beneath it, only fragments, constantly rearranging.

Philosophy has long understood this. David Hume, centuries ago, searched for the self within consciousness and found only sensations, perceptions, shifting sands. Nietzsche echoed this idea, mocking the notion of a stable self as merely a trick of language, a grammar-born illusion. Ludwig Wittgenstein, too, dismantled the belief in private inner truths. For him, meaning emerges not from introspection, but from the shared dance of language and action. To think there’s a stable self hidden deep inside is to misunderstand how language, thought, and reality interact.

Freud, despite the distortions of modern therapy, never saw us as coherent beings either. For him, the human psyche was a theater of conflict, desires clashing beneath consciousness, forever hidden from full awareness. Freud’s contribution wasn’t mechanizing the mind, but revealing its profound contradictions. Unlike later theorists such as Lacan, who mistakenly reduced humans to mere patterns of meaning—Freud knew that beneath our carefully narrated lives lay irrationality and mystery, impossible to tame fully by analysis.

Yet today’s therapeutic-industrial complex tries precisely that. Therapy, once an exploration of human depth, now resembles a dating app business model. Platforms like BetterHelp and Talkspace profit not by curing distress, but by prolonging it. You pay, endlessly, to decode yourself. Success for them isn’t resolution, but endless self-inventory, endless labeling.

This is where the concept of “mental health” itself becomes subtly oppressive. It implies an ideal state, a normal range, a standard we should measure ourselves against. Ian Hacking described this phenomenon as the “looping effect”: labels shape behaviors, behaviors reinforce labels, and individuals get trapped in a feedback loop of self-pathology. When identity becomes a medical diagnosis, we surrender our autonomy, our ambiguity, and ultimately our freedom.

Trauma, too, has morphed into social currency. It’s become the dominant metaphor for interpreting every aspect of life: attraction, friendships, career choices. James Davies, author of “Cracked,” highlights how the psychiatric model strips our lives of meaning, reducing complexity to clinical symptoms. But not every strong feeling is a wound; not every quirk a disorder. Of course, painful things do happen—sad things, terrible things—but we speak as if these things always happen to us, placing ourselves at the center of a chain of causality and consequence. In reality, events simply happen. There is no inherent meaning, no cosmic intention. How we weave these accidents into our personal story is entirely our decision. How we let them shape or influence us is our choice alone. It is precisely here, in this decision, that our ultimate freedom lies.

Here’s the core of the matter, the radical truth that’s rarely stated plainly: there is no fixed identity to discover, no true self hidden deep inside. Identity is a myth we invent because life feels safer if we pretend there’s something stable beneath the chaos. But life resists stability. We are never fully known—not even to ourselves. The moment we accept this, the instant we let go of trying to pin ourselves down, we become free to live.

Happiness is not the reward of endless self-exploration. It’s not a puzzle we solve or a mystery we decode. Happiness is a decision, a leap, an act of rebellion against the tyranny of labels, against the logic of suffering. We don’t find happiness by understanding every trauma or categorizing every impulse, but by letting go, by accepting uncertainty, by choosing desire, will, and joy despite everything. This is what Kierkegaard called the leap of faith—not into religious belief necessarily, but into life itself.

Ultimately, identity is not something we have. It is something we do, something we perform, something we constantly recreate. The human condition is not static being but perpetual becoming. Nietzsche said it best: we must become who we are. And in doing so, we reject the cage of identity entirely. We are not diagnoses, symptoms, or personalities. We are simply alive, driven by desire, moved by joy, ever-changing and never fully defined.

Yet this does not mean giving up on growth or self-improvement—quite the opposite. It is precisely because we are not limited by a static identity that we can truly act, improve, evolve. But nobody can do this for us. Nobody can save us from ourselves, not a therapist, not a romantic partner. The responsibility for our existence and happiness lies entirely in our hands.

By letting go of identity, we open ourselves up to genuine change. Free from the suffocating need for recognition, our relationships become richer and more authentic. Most relationships are neurotic precisely because they are driven by demands for validation rather than true acceptance. When we stop begging for recognition, when we let go of the myth of identity, we allow ourselves, and others, to exist in all our beautiful complexity. Relationships cease to be transactions of self-worth and become genuine encounters: open, curious, generous.

In the end, perhaps the bravest act is not endlessly “working on ourselves,” but simply living—boldly, messily, without apology or explanation.

d--b• 1 year ago

The overdiagnosis and therapy talk is real, and is causing way too many people (most of them children) to take brain-altering pills on a daily basis.

I find the article to lack nuance, but it is time that this hazardous trend stops, and if it needs to go through social media shaming for some people to realize this sucks, then I am all for it.

My 6-year-old is a pain in the ass (got thrown out of 2 schools already). His psychologist says he has a hard time controlling his emotions. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who suggested he has some form of mental illness (OD, ADHD, ASD, we’ve heard it all). Thankfully, here in France, both his psychologist and his teacher are really wary of the trend, and are very careful not to put a mental health label on a kid who doesn’t have any other problem than being a pain to adults.

See the main problem is the question of suffering. People would say: but your kid suffers from being a pain to adults. Wouldn’t you want to help your kid not suffer?

Well yes sure, but the suffering is society-induced. It’s not that his personality is a medical problem, it’s that he doesn’t fit within the expectations. If he’d been born the son of a monarch, it would be accepted that he talked back to adults and throw tantrums, and he wouldn’t feel like shit. And I am not trying to say my kid should be allowed to yell at his teacher, but all of that setting isn’t natural - as in primates don’t go to kindergarten - so who’s to say what’s normal?

It is the same for what the person describes in the article. We live in a society where people do suffer from not meeting society’s expectations. The suffering is real, and so the diagnostic is often oozing.

But when 10% of children are diagnosed with ADHD and given amphetamines so that they can get through the day, we should probably ask whether it’s not the society that’s sick.

slicktux• 1 year ago

“The gray race shrivels trapped inside the world it creates it's black and white” -Bad Religion The Gray Race

ARandomerDude• 1 year ago

Move out of the city, at least 30 minutes past the last bumper-to-bumper traffic area. Wait 2 years. All this will seem not just foreign but very strange, as in how do people possibly subject themselves to this sort of nonsense?

PeterStuer• 1 year ago

“mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”

Because there's now a payoff for those. Those girls proudly display a whole slew of these on their 'bio' because the societal framework they live in 'scores' them on their 'oppression/victim' status.

narrator• 1 year ago

I knew a gal who grew up in a perfect family with everything she could ever want so she had to invent a victim status and write a book about it magnifying non-problems into protected class level oppression status in order to fit into the woke crowd. Grievance entrepreneurship.

martindbp• 1 year ago

Isn't this almost a requirement for getting into some prestigious American universities via selection based on a personal essay? You can't just be like "I had a great childhood in an upper middle-class family with parents who loved me and supported me".

whatevsmate• 1 year ago

This is the answer.

Otherwise-comfortable people searching for anything in the “matrix of oppression” to cling to. Because for the past decade and a half that’s been the easiest way to insert yourself into the attention economy.

sometimes_all• 1 year ago

When I was young, unsure about myself, and frequently derided when I stated my preference for quiet evenings instead of going out and meeting people, I grasped at the notion of "introversion" the moment I found it. It made my feelings and preferences legitimate during a time when I perceived that people were telling me that I was wrong for being that way.

Now, more than two decades later, after a bit more life experience, I cringe when someone labels me as an introvert - they aren't wrong per se, but they also unload a bunch of assumptions attached to that label on to me, 90% of which are inaccurate/unrelated/tangential.

A good friend of mine told me that labels are useful, but warned me to not make them my entire identity. He turned out to be right.

blueflow2• 1 year ago

You opened up how you feel about a thing and your parents derided you for it. Did it change you? No, but it surely made you feel like shit. This is a social deficit in your parents, and asserting yourself as "introverted" is the workaround.

BobaFloutist• 1 year ago

It's funny how op was primarily complaining about how annoying it is to have a load of assumptions dumped on them and you read their post, assumed the derision they described came from their parents, and made it about that rather than the point they were trying to express.

southernplaces7• 1 year ago

Speak for yourself, It's not impossible to uncaringly live your own life of your own choices, quirks and characteristics without agreeing that you're somehow "disordered", and pigeonhole yourself into idiotically cheap social media and pop culture labels of X or Y. Just refuse to participate in the herd-guiding on something so basic as personal tendencies and flaws.

It's a shame that too many young people do the opposite and have bought so widely into a therapy culture of tagging so much of the complex human world into little boxes of psychological disorder (founded on some very, very shaky evidence and clinical understanding) to cause further internal trauma. This itself has become a bizarre and sickly fad but not an inescapable one.

camillomiller• 1 year ago

We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent.

While I agree about the over-labeling (which is a way to be sortable by algorithms that need to push or penalize our social media presence) I wouldn’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. There is a difference between being generous and being a people-pleaser, and it’s an important one to know for people with this trait. Years ago you would have never thought of this as a (mild) neurosis, but it can totally be. Being aware of it can help immensely in leading a more fulfilling life. This is true for all the other examples mentioned.

That said, the piece should just be: social media has polluted and ruined mental health awareness in the same exact way it has ruined and polluted so many other aspects of the public discourse.

NoPicklez4• 1 year ago

I agree with this and you hit the nail on the head with the last point.

The big issues is the prevalence of so called therapists and psychologists putting these labels on social media in such an ambiguous way that draws users.

Our kids should have mental health professionals talking to them about their struggles and helping them identify these things. Not 100s of instagram or tiktok reels algorithmically sent to us every night.

Seattle3503• 1 year ago

Clicking around, the last the article the author published accuses porn of causing mass trauma. Does she want us to use these labels liberally or not?

wiseowise• 1 year ago

The more I disconnect from the internet, the more insane social network dwellers look to me.

DavidPiper2• 1 year ago

Something I noticed a few years back. If you click just ONE post/video/reel/advert that is even remotely related to ADHD on any platform with an algorithmic feed, where you have previously never clicked before... It will feed you content implying that that particular neurodivergence both applies to you and is the source of all your problems, for MONTHS, even if you never click another one.

The only other thing I've seen that behaves this way in the algorithm is far right-wing clickbait. Everything else just disappears after a few days if the algorithm detects you've lost interest.

augment_me• 1 year ago

I feel like the author is, funnily enough given the context, lumping in self-understanding and self-reflection of any kind into a single category. A tool (analysis) that is used to grant you agency is equated to an identity kit (a label) that removes your agency and puts you in the box that the author describes.

You can have great self-understanding and self-realization about your childhood, your parents opinions and personality without letting it define your life.

You should not blame the analysis itself, but blame the projection of your personality to the result of it, which it encouraged by platforms that make money of it, like TikTok or BetterHelp. It can be fun to do an MBTI or Big 5 test to see common patterns in oneself, it does not mean that you have to structure your personality around the outcome.

To me, it sounds like the author is vouching for being unthinkingly driven by biology, tradition, and impulse in a society where most of this is also commercialized. Your govt wants you to have children to supply pensions, your impulses are driven by the advertisements that you have been bombarded with during the day, there is extreme prodding towards certain kinds of sexual looks or behaviors that influence what people find attractive. You are as much of a product when you follow the impulses than when you dont, the only thing is that with self-reflection you have a small change to question and think about why you want a certain thing.

I personally think that people living by the authors suggested way of living in a western societal moment of individualism have a maximum chance to regret their life at the end of it, doing everything "default" that society and tradition has taught you is "natural and human" instead of living the journey on your own terms and doing what you actually like.

jongjong• 1 year ago

The genius of social media is that they propagated some labels and then they let people do the hard work of adjusting their personalities and belief systems to more closely adhere to those labels. Likely driven by mimetic desire for status and recognition. Adherence to well known labels provides instant recognition and validation.

Then when it came to 'targeted advertising', social media advertisers could just target the labels and reach a huge amount of people because those people had already fine-tuned and optimized themselves to be receptive to that kind of messaging.

Their personalities were homogenized to the point that the focus groups ended up being representative of the real people behind the labels.

giingyui2• 1 year ago

It’s surprising that this article doesn’t mention LGBT or disabilities at all. The same effect extends to those two. And, in the same vein, it’s females “buying” it.

“…between 19% and 22% of women aged 18 to 25 identify as bi.” https://nypost.com/2023/04/18/gen-z-women-identify-as-bisexu...

kristjank2• 1 year ago

Oooh, boy. Almost no-one wants to talk about it because it's considered harmful (or even taboo) to blame being gay and especially being trans on social contagion and similar phenomena.

If you point out that a controversial phenomenon is very dependent on social elements, you also invite discussions whether something should be fine-tuned in our society to influence it, which turns into a political issue.

watwut5• 1 year ago

Why would it be unrealistic for 20% of women to like women too at least somewhat? It is not stigmatized anymore. And statistically, males are more more dangerous partly due to strength and partly due to ideologies they sign up for. So, a woman a little attracted to other woman has more motivation to admit it.

The phenomenon of men having sex relationships with other men in male only environments (jail, army) existed before. They reverted to heterosexual relationships when they left the environment and would not call themselves "bi". It is opposite side of it - clearly having something out of same sex relation did not made them bi, because it would be shameful.

giingyui2• 1 year ago

What happens in prison and the army is not generally consensual.

rexpop• 1 year ago

Only assholes* use "female" as a noun.

"Female" is primarily a scientific or biological term that refers to sex, not gender. When used as a noun for humans, it reduces women to their reproductive capabilities and strips away their individuality and humanity, making them seem less than fully human or equivalent to animals. For example, "female" can refer to any species, while "woman" specifically refers to human beings.

Here it's clearly being used in a derogatory, dismissive sense.

* and Ferengi

akimbostrawman2• 1 year ago

Only assholes put words and motives into other peoples mouths to strawman there arguments.

You are clearly the only one who is being derogatory and dismissive

KolibriFly3• 1 year ago

How fast we went from "you're unique" to "you're a diagnostic checklist."

kristjank2• 1 year ago

I often see a generalized notion where refusing to be a person doing a bad thing instead transforms into being a person with doing-bad-thing-syndrome, which then distills to doing-bad-thing-syndrome-sufferer. It removes agency, but also accountability, so it's a good way to coast through life with learned helplessness

zombot2• 1 year ago

Adding insult to injury, we also have now the "humans are just bad biological AIs" wave of thinking. Hooray.

sublinear• 1 year ago

For the love of god please touch grass! Nobody outside your chronically online circle lives like this!

freehorse2• 1 year ago

We live in increasingly complex societies with more and more demanding social dynamics. In the past, it was all much simpler, though at certain costs, that the article fails to mention or romanticises. Not all quirks were celebrated or "funny" and not all people survived to tell beautiful stories.

Moreover, a lot of things were simpler in ways that are becoming less and less ok. People now can divorce; marriage is not even need to start a family. Navigating relationship dynamics was simpler in the sense that there were (more or less) specific roles each gender should abide. Many marriages were arranged, especially if "it was taking you time", thus you did not have to figure out dating yourself.

I don't think that therapeutic discourse is a good strategy. Medicalising personhoods and relationships is bad, but going back to a (romanticised) past cannot be a solution at all. Raising to a higher consiousness would be an actual, good solution, but that takes time. It is uncertain if we have that with the speed that things move nowadays.

aiisjustanif2• 1 year ago

Raising to a higher consiousness would be an actual, good solution, but that takes time.

Time as in evolution?

dave9000• 1 year ago

"dig deep enough and you will disappear"

cess11• 1 year ago

Kind of old news with a new headline.

Some people have made free lecture series on the topic, like this:

https://rickroderick.org/300-guide-the-self-under-siege-1993...

scotty794• 1 year ago

There are no normal people. Only undiagnosed ones.

This is an old observation. The only change was that we started to attempt to diagnose and some people find it useful, some harmful and annoying.

akimbostrawman2• 1 year ago

Big pharma approves this message

NalNezumi• 1 year ago

This is the same mental mechanism that makes me hate (pseudoscience) personality tests. Many of my friends that use them fall for similar trap of "labeling" themselves.

When those labels aren't informative or accurate at all, it ends up becoming a chain rather than liberation. "Oh Im MBTI-4acronym, according to that personality test, I'm an introvert so I should skip this public event!".

We are inherently complex and multi-label, even with the worst simplifications. That's confusing and frightening to many, so we seek an "oracle", authority, that can tell us who we are. Problem arise when those are false prophecies.

And they are almost always false. (to varying degrees) Social media mental diagnosis is exactly the same. And crucially they're very wrong over time [1]. So it end up as a shackle to stunt their growth. It completely stops the trail&error process, exposure, and creates a self reinforcing cycle so the label becomes deeply rooted as an identity. There's really no substitute for "trying out yourself to see what works for you, and make sure your trials are set up so you can learn something from it" when it comes to self discovery.

I wish psychology was a bit more scrutinized field. The amount of popscience garbage they give out, and how many people use these model to judge and limit themselves in their life is so sad to see. Probably one of the primary reasons I would keep social media far away from kids (if I had any).

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309...

jlengrand• 1 year ago

I'm a bit dual about this thing. I see it around social media and in people talking. I got diagnosed almost two years ago, and it has been a relief in a way because it finally explained a lot of the struggles I had, helped being less blameful about myself and learn physiological keys around how I am and why. At the same time, I really don't think it would have helped me knowing this much earlier in my childhood, and sometimes the tentation to use this as an "excuse" is strong like described in the article.

I wouldn't wish an earlier diagnostic to my kids, and try to approach things with an empathic approach instead.

ViolentMoon• 1 year ago

Unfortunately (but given the slant of all her other articles, most likely intentionally), the author suffers from one major oversight:

The absence of labels is just as much of a marketing gimmick as their presence. Even anti-identitarianism will be weaponized. Even nothing is something. Eliminate all the labels and concepts and redundancies, and you are yet left with a "natural, unspoken, normal default" state of being.

And as it turns out, there are plenty of forces out there willing to exploit that appeal towards the "the unspoken", for either financial or political gain. The question remains, then: who or what gets to determine this unspoken part of life?

xtiansimon• 1 year ago

Saying the quiet thing out loud with social media and truthy articles, seems to track with the diminishing publishing industry?

andersource• 1 year ago

Is there a diagnosis for the tendency to collect diagnostic labels and use them to absolve oneself of responsibility?

On further thought, not sure if this would solve the problem or exacerbate it...

rorylaitila• 1 year ago

Psychology (professional and layman) has helped me immensely, but I also recognized it can be a trap. I had a therapist for a couple months help me through an intense depression, but I could also feel when it was becoming naval gazing, so then I stopped.

Psychology is a means to an end. But some people are attempting to make it an end. I do feel a cathartic release to get a 'diagnosis', but this catharsis is transient. There is infinite sub-categorizations to achieve infinite catharsis, but each further division, brings diminishing returns.

I hope that this trend is going to burn itself out. There is no promised land in medical psychology as popularly experienced. It can be used as a scaffold to leap into a higher self-awareness, but then it must be left aside.

archsurface• 1 year ago

If you're getting downvoted you still have a personality.

thelettuce• 1 year ago

To those with a bit more age and life experience than myself, I ask if you have noticed a rise in "categorical thinking" over time. To clarify, I mean thought processes that are mostly surface level and focus on attributing qualities or conclusions to things based on observable characteristics. Sort of "they display x so they must be y which means z"

etruong42• 1 year ago

Could this be an evolution of astrology? Or an evolution of the underlying attraction to astrology? This need to label things (libra vs scorpio vs etc) and the assignment of character traits and behaviors to these labels? This need to push for explanations beyond our control? And perhaps these psychological labels are even _more_ attractive since they have the veneer of science and rationality behind it.

CHUCKEESH• 1 year ago

[flagged]

tomhow• 1 year ago

We've banned this and related accounts. Please don't wast your time with spam like this on HN.

wirelessRice• 1 year ago

I think the author makes a good point. The more you label things, the more things become a race to the bottom so to speak with the lowest common denominator

If you go about life labelling yourself as ADHD or OCD, you are disavowing other richer parts of you and just saying you are this person with this symptom, and that denotion starts reinforcing that belief system when people associate you with that label

I think its best we didnt label things and just appreciate the beauty of things as they are - the good the bad the ugly

Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

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