TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)
wsj.com
wsj.com
Edit: I’ve also learned to accept things about me that I can’t change. For example, I have a better outcome if I plan to be distracted rather than trying to fight my way through distraction.
That being said, I'm in no way implying that the internet can't contain useful information.
Personally, I suspect that people who incorrectly self-diagnose are desperate and grasping at straws. They misdiagnose themselves because proper diagnostics are really hard to get in for.
However, I would be willing to bet that people who misdiagnose themselves with DID still have some other underlying mental health condition that they are misunderstanding.
I remember talking with one guy who was genuinely sad when his psychiatrist told him she might need to revisit his autism diagnosis and she thinks there might actually be some other class of diagnoses that fit his condition better. You would think she told him he had cancer or something. It helped him a lot to know that there was a box he could fit into and not having a box was distressing for him. It had him feeling unmoored and unstable.
Now after reevaluating she did end up settling back on autism and his relief was palpable.
Having a label gives you context to understand what is happening. It gives you a path forward with your treatment. It gives you access to documentation, support groups, and a community who are dealing with the same things.
Changing a diagnosis means you likely lose all of these and have to start over.
Then there is medication that can significantly change how your mind works. I likely have long-lasting damage to my nervous system from the anti-psychotic I need to function.
If you think you might have ADHD go see someone who specialises in it and get it checked out. I was certain that I had it when I was 20, but my local doctor told me I was "trying to get out of work". Top bloke. Nearly 20 years later I'm vindicated with a diagnosis. Get it checked out!
https://old.reddit.com/r/adhdmeme/top/?sort=top&t=all
The socks one was a childhood fight in our family constantly. I hated certain socks and my siblings loved them. I can remember my dad berating me in a walmart parking lot about my sock preferences and still associate walmart with parental shame to this day. The way the inner sewn lining on the toes got occasionally stuck on my toenails when walking. They still gives me the creeps and heeby-jeebies, just these little mind grabbing zings with every 'wrong' step.
On the latter point, these kids are acting out these disabilities with such sincerity and 24/7 consistency that they effectively are disabled for all practical purposes, it's just that the diagnosis might be different than the one they self-diagnose themselves with. I think the TikTok videos are a symptom, what's the cause?
Why don't you think TikTok videos specifically (and social media generally) are not a cause? At this point, we know the addictive and viral effects of social media, especially as it pertains to teenagers and kids (and especially teenage girls).
I'm disabled (I have MS), and the one benefit to it is that I have a 'get out of social expectations free' button I can push if things get too difficult. If I'm not feeling well, it's acceptable for me to cancel plans, call off work, make sub-optimal decisions (putting my health above my earning capacity, etc.).
In short, disabled people are allowed to be fallible, have needs, and make mistakes. I think that the kids feel under too much pressure and want a release valve for it. An invisible disability gives them a 'this is too hard, I need out' button. Disabled people are also given some empathy, and that is at a major premium right now.
He does the opposite, and uses it against me all the time. "I have MS, and I can do this, so you'll be at the race with me right?"
It usually works :)
I'm not sure what the answer to that is.
We celebrate failure and not success. As a simple example no one gets praised for not being an addict, but we keep hearing about the stunningly brave addicts who became barely functioning members of society.
I was listening to a cbc program about autism on adults the other day. One person being interviewed stated she "identified as autistic". She had done some online test that said she had 70 out of 100 autism traits or something.
I was incredulous. Are these people for real?
There's people who are more like this for more ideological reasons. Some people feel doctors underdiagnose the poor, women, and minorities, and consequently, don't know why they should be obligated to fight an uphill battle to get diagnosed from a system not treating people like them correctly.
In any case, a fair amount of these "I identify as autistic after taking an online quiz" types actually are autistic. So my policy is to give any such person the benefit of the doubt, at least at first.
Psychology is not engineering. They're not diagnosing based on log files or material stress reports. They're using precisely the same criteria and weighting as these silly online tests do.
These days, you linger on an auto-playing video too long (that is quite possibly intentionally engineered to bait you in) and suddenly the algorithm gets a lock on you and absolutely rams more of that shit down your throat.
It's not even just propaganda either. The exact same cycle is what's at play here with preying on children's weaknesses. Mental health, body image, etc. etc. can all be weaponised the same way. And kids are espeically susceptable to it given the age they tend to start getting on social media is precisely also the age where they feel most socially awkward and trying to find their identity in the world.
Every pissed off goth kid I knew in the 90s had a copy of the Anarchist cook book on a 1.44mb floppy disk.
We probably burned more than our fair share of holes in our backyards, but it wasn't access to information that was limiting us doing harm to our peers. If anything I think it was having a group of like-minded people to burn holes in your backyard with that ultimately allowed us all to feel less alienated. We may have felt individually ostracized, but found camaraderie in trying to put out the homemade napalm fire in the back yard before someone's parents got back or the neighbors called the fire department.
I get more worried about teens today because I no longer see packs of kids getting in trouble together. The only kids I know that ended up in real trouble where the ones that eventually got alienated from that pack as well.
My broader point is that you can replace that scenario with just about any subgroup with an extremist representation and it holds. Incels are a prime example. QAnon too. The list goes on. The people who end up extreme in those viewpoints don't start there, they get taken on a journey to there though lots of very marginal successive influences.
A social media algorithm is purpose-built to achieve that because it turns out that is the exact same pattern as 'you hovered over a cute cat video once, so we guess you like cats, so we're going tto bombard you with cute cat vids to drive up your engagement'.
There's a world of difference between bonding with friend over how stupid and mean other kids are, blowing up your back yard together and laughing about it that night and the tiktok world of just getting angry over a constant stream of other alienated people screaming into the void.
Without the companionship you never really get catharsis, just an endless cycle of building up rage and furthering your own sense of alienation.
That used to be called talking to friends. If anything social media is less dangerous because the _really_ illegal stuff is not something they can show.
Clockwork Orange, the Destructors and Kids were a lot less fiction than people would like to believe today.
Spending time physically around other people fires off a lot of nice neurotransmitters, even for people who are introverted and who would rather not be spending a lot of time around other people.
One figures COVID lock downs would have hammered this point into the global consciousness.
Of course too isolated of a group and things get super weird and everything can quickly go off the rails.
TikTok is different, and that has nothing to do with China or whatever other cultural/political topic. It is the amalgamation that results many years of optimising user interaction and dependence on social networks as an advertising platform. While in some aspects it is just a repackaged version of what has been there before, we shouldn't just dismiss the previous attempts as harmless, just because their dosage was less.
Yes, people have been saying "beware the influence of technology on children" for decades, maybe centuries. That doesn't prove that the warnings are false. And even if the past warnings were false for past technology, that doesn't prove that the current warnings are false for current technology.
"People have been saying that forever" is not a rebuttal of "TikTok is bad for kids". It's not even close. It's basically DH2 on Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Some kids did this and didn't grow up, because someone in their online community committed suicide and that prompted them to do the same.
This is a real problem. It's been a problem since the 90s, yes, but it's getting worse.
I'm not saying these things don't exist, but much of it seems very difficult to falsify -- which needs to be the gold standard of determining these sort of things; e.g. "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"
It's quite straightforward, albeit involved (as in technically easy, but takes time) to falsify. You have to work with a licensed medical professional who will evaluate traits, strengths, and difficulties, and to what extent they impact functioning as a person in society. Basically, are they "well-adjusted"? If they make it through school, college and adulthood without a ton of struggling, therapy, possibly meds, you can almost certainly rule out neurodivergence (at the very least, it won't be clinically significant )
This is a radically behaviorist interpretation.
A common criticism of the diagnostics for ADHD (and Autism, for that matter) is that it ignores the person’s internal experience.
I was formally diagnosed with ADHD in 2017. I’d been visibly quite successful in that time, but at the expense of my own mental health because I was fighting a constant uphill battle. ADHD was a set of shackles I didn’t even know I had.
Just not happy or healthy or as successful as I could have been.
That is precisely what I mean. You were not naturally "well-adjusted", you just learned to adjust and adapt over time.
It wasn't the best choice of words but I can't edit.
We're just reacting to what appears to be agreement with that approach, even if unintentional.
Agreed. I'm addressing precisely the point in GP comment "neurodiversity is not a falsifiable diagnosis", which is something I feel quite strongly about. Other issues in this complex space that I think also are worth being discussed but I am not trying to get into in this thread:
- overdiagnosis of ADHD/ASD
- underdiagnosis of ADHD/ASD in certain subgroups (especially women/NB, minority, and underprivileged groups)
- ADHD/ASD are/are not on the same spectrum
- drug-seeking behavior for access to stimulant meds
- overmedication, undermedication, and incorrect diagnosis leading to iatrogenic harm (eg giving antipsychotics to a "bipolar" individual whose "bipolar" is realdy emotional lability due to ADHD/ASD
Each one of those topics I could talk about at length. They are related, but distinct.
> If they make it through school, college and adulthood without a ton of struggling
You wrote:
> but at the expense of my own mental health because I was fighting a constant uphill battle.
Gp wrote:
> "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"
I'm using "well-adjusted" here to mean like, naturally well-adjusted - you are able to complete life activities without constantly having to learn strategies and fight the good fight just to do what comes much more freely to neurotypicals.
I.e. being able to socialize well doesn't disqualify you from ASD, because masking is a thing.
A proper licensed professional will ask the right kind of questions to ascertain this. If you are successful but feel like if you stop struggling for a moment, that's a strong indicator.
IMHO, yes, but actually, no? ADHD is marked by executive dysregulation. An immature brain (they say the brain does not mature until the 20s) also shows poor executive control. However, ADHD is detectable as certain processing difficulties within an age cohort.
Similarly, I don't think it's a lack of coping mechanisms. It's very heritable, even controlling for upbringing/habits (I'm adopted by very obviously non-ADHD and disciplined parents - I did not pick up basically any of their coping skills naturally and had to develop my own).
I think it's almost entirely congenital - between genes and gestation, your neurodivergency die is cast at birth (unless acquired via brain injury).
> This was because he had developed a set of very successful coping strategies to make up for his lack of executive function.
I think this takes a special set of conditions, and/or a mild case of it. Some people do learn to cope. I would contend even these folks have indicators of stress/mental health problems, even if non-obvious. Or they just drew the best possible ADHD hand in terms of life events.
This is so easy to game. People read the diagnostic criteria online and echo it back to their doctor for a prescription. Their proof of needing adjustment can be little more than pointing to their grades and attributing their less than stellar academic performance to the list of ADHD symptoms they memorized online. EZ way to get yourself a stimulant subscription. This was particularly common during the pandemic when you could do it entirely online without actually meeting a doctor in person. I saw a lot of people explicitly advocating this sort of deception to get stimulant prescriptions; all described it as very easily done.
I tend to think those drugs should be legal OTC, so part of me thinks "so what?" But the problem is that right now it isn't legal OTC, so the system is giving a leg up to anybody willing to lie to a doctor, while honest people have to make do with lesser PEDs like caffeine.
You can fake chronic back pain, migraines, suicidal tendencies, and so on. That doesn't make any of them any less real.
ADHD may be real, but doctors seem to have a hard time distinguishing people who actually have it from people who just want the drugs and know what to tell the doctor because they watched a bunch of instructional videos about this sort of deception on tiktok.
The 'test' for ADHD boils down to "evaluat[ing] traits, strengths, and difficulties, and to what extent they impact functioning as a person in society. Basically, are they "well-adjusted"?" It's not as though the evaluation is some chemical analysis in a lab, anybody so inclined can be coached to pass this evaluation by telling their doctor the right things.
And morphine is as big - if not bigger - problem than amphetamines.
It’s hard to make it past these hurdles and aren’t on other controlled substances, you are still rolling the dice of getting blacklisted in their systems if you ever get caught selling or testing positive for weed or opioids, etc.
> "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"
You are talking about the opposite detection criteria, false positive vs true negative. I was speaking to "neurodivergence is not falsifiable". You are speaking to "one can fake neurodivergence, esp. to get prescriptions", which, of course, that is definitely a thing.
Of course, if you fake to the doctor that you don't have symptoms, well duh, of course they won't diagnose you. That also has nothing to do with falsifiability. You won't get a correct diagnosis by lying - doctors aren't psychics.
At its very most reduced form, falsifying neurodivergence as a hypothesis means basically demonstrating a single counter-example exists. Can we find someone who made it through high school, learned good study habits on their own, did average to well in college, held down a job, paid the bills, folded their close, made friends and raised a family, all without counseling, special classes, medication, self-medication, masking, hyper-extending themselves (beyond just "working hard"), or burning themselves out just to make ends meet? I think so. Neurodivergence, ADHD, and ASD are falsifiable diagnoses - a true negative result can be obtained.
was a terrible choice of words on my part, but I can't edit now. What I mean here by "well-adjusted" has nothing to do with "appears functional from the outside". I mean "they appear functional and actually are and didn't have to contort themselves to do so".
Does the patient self-medicate with nonmedical stimulants/stimulation? (caffeine, nicotine, other drugs, adrenaline junkie)? Did they have to struggle and claw to overcome executive issues and get some semblance of normalcy? Did they find a particular niche/trade where they can be successful? Do they succeed on the outside but feel burned out constantly inside? Those are not the folks I'm talking about. I'm saying folks who didn't need to go way out of their way to adapt in order to achieve an outward sense of normalcy.
My father is one of the least-ADHD people I know. His life wasn't easy by any means (grew up very poor, had to work his way through high school and college), but also he didn't have any of the kind of turmoil growing up that I see in myself and each and every neurodivergent person I know.
You get diagnosed with it if you tick enough of the boxes of behaviours/dysfunctions associated with it - you can fall short of a diagnosis by one behaviour and still be in a very similar condition to a diagnosed person, or tick enough boxes but fall short based on the diagnosing physicians judgement of severity.
The interesting thing is that despite the condition being composed of a wide gamut of seemingly unrelated behaviour, ~90% of people with ADHD respond extremely well to the same treatment - stimulant medication. We also observed notable neurological similarities in aggregate among people with the condition, but not enough to have much utility as a diagnostic tool.
But doesn't everyone respond extremely well to stimulants? They're some of the most common recreational drugs and neurotypical people seek them out for performance enhancement on cognitive tasks.
Not really - despite their popularity (as you say, heavily sought after), studies have shown that there really isn't a significant cognitive boost for neurotypical folks that take these stimulants[1]. While they have a significant effect for those with ADHD because their brain is not providing the chemicals properly, and these drugs enable that. They aren't boosting cognitive abilities for those with ADHD, they are fixing a problem so that folks with ADHD can think and focus properly.
Didn't spend a ton of time looking up the sources I've read this in, but here is one:
[1] - https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4787/6/3/58
> Studies support that stimulants enhance attention, memory, self-regulation and executive function in individuals with ADHD. Recent research, however, has found that many college students without ADHD report misusing prescription stimulants, primarily to enhance their cognitive abilities.
> ...
> Overall, the present findings indicate dissociation between the effects of Adderall on activation and neurocognition, and more importantly, contrary to common belief, Adderall had little impact on neurocognitive performance in healthy college students.
Anyway thanks for the info, definitely upends an assumption I'd had for years.
The Germans didn't ply their soldiers with speed in WWII because it improved their reflexes or their tactics - they did it so a soldier could fight when his brain would otherwise be mush from not sleeping in days. Anyone can benefit from just having more usable hours in a day.
Honestly I'd say it's the opposite. Stimulants barely touch the sides with me, even the non-prescribed types a younger version of me may or may not have dabbled in were pretty ineffective.
I had read about how stimulants don't do much for the average person and that much of it is placebo. I know they do a lot for me -- well, Modafinil/Armodafinil does, I haven't tried any other because I'm so happy with these.
I feel lucky I have something that works, I don't mind not having a diagnosis. It'd make sourcing them easier and free, but at $2 a pill and with the multiplier effect it has on my productivity, that doesn't even register.
I hope you've found other ways to improve your experience.
Decent pay it was as well, cleared a bunch of the debt I'm lugging around. ADHD tax haha, it is what it is.
Waiting on an appointment to review the meds
It used to be kind of like that for me, though me feeling guilty to let people down usually made me fight to barely make it. It's day and night now, I just sit down in the morning and get to work. It helps that they let me hunt squirrels as long as I make enough progress on the main topics, but even things where the work is super boring you just need to put the hours in is now just "okay, works for me" where it would have been a week of agonizing start, work 30 minutes, pause for 3 hours. I've been more productive in the past two years than I have been in the ten years before that.
The only side-effect is that I feel like I perceive lights and noises as annoying at a lower threshold. I've had that before as well so I'm pretty used to blacking out any LEDs, but it seems to have been increased. Don't know whether that would lessen if I took a break because I haven't for more than a few days.
May I ask about the dosage?
I'm taking 150mg (currently Waklert, but they're all generics) a day, right after getting up.
I’ve also heard that some people with ADHD sleep better on stimulants, which definitely isn’t the case for everyone else.
I wish lmao. I'm on meds and while I can see a difference between non-meds and now I could easily go back to bed after they kick in and sleep the entire day away. Still doing the dosage dance with the doc.
Someone who didn't need them would likely be a little hyper if not bouncing off the walls depending on the dosage.
I definitely get a noticeable feeling of calm/steadiness/"settling" as my stimulants kick in, and yes it would be very easy to go back to bed at that point. My understand is that this is not a typical part of the stimulants experience for people without adhd.
But by "responds well" I meant that they improve focus, energy, motivation, and mood even in non-adhd people, not that they have the same effects. Other comments have addressed that this is at least somewhat a misconception on my part though.
Apologies for the misread too
Possibly related - my PCP gave me a genetic test and it showed that I have some gene configuration that essentially makes me immune to the effects of caffeine. Which makes sense, because I have to drink a boatload to feel anything from it.
This is constantly presented as some sort of ultimate validation of these disorders and every time I read it I'm absolutely baffled. Stimulants used in ADHD medication improve focus and productivity for almost everyone, the fact that they also do it for people with chronic focus/attention issues should be surprising to no one... They're literally performance enhancing drugs.
The most unusual aspect of stimulant treatment for ADHD is for the hyperactive and combined types - stimulants reduce hyperactivity and impulsive behaviour, and people with ADHD on low dose stimulants are less likely to engage in reckless behaviour or develop problems with substance abuse - not things you'd ever say about stimulants and the average person.
You certainly don't get too many neurotypical people finding they can finally nap once they're on low-dose amphetamines.
Kept sending me back to sleep if anything, first day I was on them I had a 16 hour nap.
tl;dr - everyone's probably just doing the best they can.
You can't conclusively prove or disprove that I have ADHD. I may describe my experiences in a way that aligns with such a diagnosis, but for all you can tell I may be a P-zombie merely acting as though I experience things. For what you're able to measure, I may not even have an experience.
You can ask your question without them and it will feel a whole lot less patronizing.
Now, ask yourself -- in a forum that's supposed to be about discussion and answering questions, why do you think it's very important to police how I use punctuation?
Compare:
"I'm skeptical about the prevalence of autism in teens."
"I'm skeptical about the prevalence of "autism" in teens."
The first absolutely conveys your skepticism, but doesn't come with an implied sneer.
I don't know, maybe this feedback isn't useful or you reject it, that's fine too. I just figured you may want to know that the way folks might interpret the quotes might be heavier than you intended.
It's a way to acknowledge that folks with autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, depression, OCD, or other conditions are not neurotypical - they are neurodivergent.
I've rarely met someone who would say they are neurodiverse without a specific underlying condition.
It's a way of creating a category or set without needing to share one's diagnosis. Think of it like saying, "I'm European" vs "I'm Italian".
One problem is that there's a pop culture understanding of ADHD and there's the medical version. Because ADHD is poorly understood and is diagnosed by ticking boxes, I get the feeling that some people just say what they need to say to get the diagnosis/meds/whatever. (I am unmedicated and have been my entire adult life. I felt a bit like a zombie on Adderall, and my heart was constantly racing.)
On the other hand, I do think there's probably a better, deeper explanation that has eluded the professionals. I suspect that ADHD has something to do with a lack of free play for young children. When kids are able to free play, they invent their own games and set their own boundaries and learn to regulate themselves; this does not happen when they are under adults' direction. As a consequence, we see that the US has extremely high ADHD rates in children, whereas in other countries, especially ones where early education consists almost entirely of free play, especially outdoors, is encouraged, the rates are quite low.[0] Further, within the US, we see that children born in August seem to have a higher chance of an ADHD diagnosis than those born in September.[1]
I suspect that the disorder is "real," but with a very strong "nurture" component. In the US over the past 60 years or so, children's lives have become increasingly directed by adults, from time spent in school to time spent in sports or clubs organized by adults to time spent at home doing homework. At the same time, Americans have become increasingly hostile to the idea of children's free play. "Where is that kid's adult?" is something I hear from other parents when I take my kids to the playground.
If I could summarize my own experience, I would say I have trouble self-regulating along the spectrum of being bored or interested in a topic. If I'm bored, or think I will be, I have almost an anxious response; if I'm interested, I may get lost in the task or topic till a phone call from my wife breaks me out of it. For what it's worth, when I'm healthy, I can rarely sleep more than 6 1/2 hours per night.
[0]https://academic.oup.com/shm/article/30/4/767/2919401
[1]https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/could-being-born-in-augu...
I suspect it's this latter group that social media diagnosis appeals to most - if you're not doing as well as you (or your parents) would like then normally you just have to feel stupid/worthless. These (self) diagnosis provide a level of explanation (and therefore comfort).
I self-diagnosed myself with mild ADD many years ago and even self-medicated (which in terms of productivity worked well). But meeting people with severe ADHD made me reconsider my alleged issues - sure, I can't concentrate for as long as I'd like but these people couldn't sit still for 15 seconds.
> By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?
Easy: is the severity of the ADHD and Autistic traits you exhibit low enough that they do not impair your ability to function on a day-to-day basis in society? If not, you don't have ADHD or Autism.
What does not impaired look like compared to impaired?
- Struggling to focus on something for minutes or hours, vs. being unable to concentrate on a task.
- Occasionally struggling with overcoming mental hurdles to perform a task vs frequently being incapable - yes, literally incapable, no matter the reward or punishment - of performing a task.
- Focusing on a task you enjoy while still being aware of the state of your body - keeping reasonably hydrated, fed, and use of the facilities - vs. not being aware.
- Occasionally forgetting words - like "watch" - or names, vs frequently.
- An occasionally compromised working memory (typically with an outside trigger like alcohol or lack of sleep), compared to a permanently compromised working memory. Compromised being able to store 4 items in your short term memory when the average for the populace is 7.
- Occasionally forgetting that items and people exist if they are not in your direct sight, versus constantly forgetting, where constantly means remembering is the exception instead of the norm.
One final note - ADHD is not some new disorder unique to the TikTok generation. ADHD has been formally recognized and studied as far back as 1902 by Sir George Frederick Still.
Easy: define "function on a day-to-day basis in society"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...
So the issue isn't so much falsifiability per see but instead the whether you trust the judgement of people who decide what is "normal" or "not normal".
And whether something is clinically useful isn't the standard for defining a condition, because ability to successfully treat a disease isn't a standard in deciding whether something is a disease and because therapy isn't limited to people who have diseases. (Unless professionals are now calling marital problems a disease?)
Lot's of things have negative impacts that aren't considered medical conditions, on the other hand Elan Musk says he has Aspergers. Nobody seems to doubt it. This shows that someone can climb to the top of the social world but still be told they have a disease supposedly associated with "significant negative impact" on social skills.
Narcissists, sociopaths regularly climb up while being impaired and causing damage everyone around. People with OCD or hypochondriac too. Bipolar people the same. That does not make those non existent either.
To me the claim that Musk has Aspergers is like being told an Olympic marathon runner has a leg disability.
Asperger is not something that excludes you from success.
OCD and being bipolar have much graver consequences on your life and success.
It's not the social world. It's the social media world. Big difference.
Michael Jackson was the greatest in his field too, was on all covers and people would faint when they saw him, but was also a social reclusive.
Big phenomenons like this are more an indication of the amount of money being spent in promotion than the social skills of the person being promoted.
Social skills you see them at the micro level , not at the macro level. That is after the halo effect of all the paid for publicity (plus all the abomination that is modern day social media) vanishes.
Once the halo effect vanishes everybody nopes the hell out of Musk life, including his confidantes, children and wives. So he has significant negative impact on social skills.
I think someone can be a bad spouse without necessarily suffering from a social skill disorder. And someone suffering from a social skill disorder can be a good spouse, so I don't know that divorce really tells us much.
It's not about manipulation and more riding an already existing wave. The tsunami of environmentalism, green everything etc.
Real bona fide manipulation is all about convincing people that YOU are the solution to each and every of their problem.
It entails jokes, touching people, pointing at people, blowing kisses, smiling a lot, playing an instrument. Most of all it has to be speeches, delivered from a stage.
Think Obama, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Reagan, Trump...
I can't take Musk seriously because he cannot speak properly. When you are a leader you cannot hide behind the bird app forever. At some point you have to go out there and hold hold the crowd in your palm like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin used to do. That to me is social skill.
As for doubting Elon Musk's claims: I generally don't raise doubts about someone claiming a diagnosis. I know from personal experience how shitty it feels to have the veracity of your suffering questioned like that. And in Musk's case, I have no issue believing he has some interpersonal issues, and asperger's(autism spectrum disorder in DSM-V) could explain that, so I don't see any reason to doubt him in this case.
And again, it's pretty presumptuous to act like we know the whole story with Musk's Aspergers. I don't acutely pay attention to his personal life, and I don't see any reason to make the assumption that the only symptoms he has are ones that have been visible in the media(like the $420 tweet and the "pedo guy" thing). Aspergers is a very real disorder, I've multiple friends with it. People with aspergers can be highly intelligent and successful at what they do, yet feel completely miserable and become increasingly depressed because they struggle to connect with other people, which gets lonely.
The fact of the matter is it is not possible to prove someone is neurotypical or not neurotypical. There is no scientific study that can tell you whether Musk's personal problems are "significant" enough to justify the diagnosis of Aspergers.
I don't know anything about Musk's personal life, but he's clearly suffering a lot less than individual on the autism spectrum who have trouble with basic day to day activities like keeping a job or navigating a normal work related conversation.
Unless neurotypical people are definitionally free from loneliness, depression and social isolation the last sentence of your comment seems like a red herring.
Generally by having a full workup with a psychiatrist. They will do various interviews. Possibly might have to interview parents and teachers in pediatric cases or in adult cases where ADHD was not diagnosed in childhood(childhood onset is a diagnostic requirement for adult ADHD).
In more difficult cases a neuropsychologist might be consulted and can perform various neurological tests to more thoroughly rule out other disorder. There's some promising work on blood biomarkers and brain imaging but nothing in clinical use yet afaik.
What would be the diagnosis for adult-onset ADHD symptoms without a childhood history of those symptoms?
It's probably also possible that childhood ADHD could have been "hiding" in childhood, if say your childhood environment was very ADHD-compatible it might not have been enough of a problem to be detected then, but become a problem in adulthood as your environment and responsibilites change. Probably you could make an argument for a diagnosis of adult ADHD in a case like that if there's at least a family history of ADHD.
So with Autism, probably the most common disqualifier in practice is that the disorder requires childhood presentation and a lot of people don't know this. So somebody will come in, say "oh I wasn't autistic at all as a child, but I felt very autistic as a teenager, so I asked a doctor, and he said I wasn't autistic". People will respond with "oh, doctors don't know anything about autism, they underdiagnose minorities and women all the time, that proves it" and "oh, women actually don't present as autistic in childhood, they can just be masking, but that doesn't mean they aren't actually autistic". This happens EVERY time, especially if a woman is involved, and means that you can't falsify the idea that somebody was autistic in childhood.
I have been banned once for saying that disabled people should doubt other peoples disabilities (on the grounds of preventing exploitation and misallocation of resources), I got told that I was spreading ableist myths that disabled people are responsible for other disabled people lacking resources, that I was reinforcing the ableist myth that disabled people are just exploiting non-disabled people (of course, disabled people do just as much for the able as the able do for them, and thus there is no advantage to faking disability), that it was inappropriate to talk about doubting disabilities on an autism community, and that they wished I had a number of painful disabilities that I couldn't receive pain medication for because I wasn't believed.
It is possible to show symptoms as a child, not get diagnosed as a child, and get diagnosed as an adult. I have zero issue with that. Here's the exact phrasing of the criteria https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html
>Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period (but may not become fully manifest until social demands exceed limited capacities, or may be masked by learned strategies in later life).
There's nothing in the diagnosis that says you need to be diagnosed as a child. I adamantly do not believe that's required for a diagnosis in any way shape or form.
Does the psychiatrist conclude the patient doesn't meet the criteria, or does the psychiatrist conclude the patient wasn't self aware enough in childhood to know if they exhibited symptoms so a diagnosis is warranted?
A diagnosis for treatment purposes does not entitle you to government assistance. People are only entitled to government assistance if they meet a "legal" standard about the severity of the illness.
Isn't that called differential diagnosis?
For me they were essentially post-diagnosing childhood ADHD. Not much of my present existence was relevant other than the effects it had on my life now (whether I need meds or not). Sure I could have lied but it would have been a hell of a lie to build and keep straight across my appointments.
I was also asked if I'd heard of ADHD from TikTok.. not sure what the result would have been if I had.
People have been talking like this since at least the 90's and always claiming it's a new, recent, thing.
Plus, before it got the name ADD (and after, ADHD), it was studied by the names "Hyperactive child syndrome", "Hyperkinetic reaction of childhood", and a few others.
This has been recognized and studied for over a century.
Another thing TikTok does is provide a venue for sharing stories - "you're not alone" - and sharing coping mechanisms. Good things.
In the actual test, you had to watch a square flash on the screen at random intervals and click a clicker if it flashed on the bottom. That's it. It took an hour. Afterward, you get your results based on mistakes and reaction time over time. The data and statistics associated with it are really interesting, too.
[0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-tuberculos...
Just because you can't doesn't mean you're right.
Or maybe it wasn't a common thing for friend groups to do and mine was strange. We didn't have the WSJ to tell us.
This reminds me of the "otherkin" fad that occurred primarily on Tumblr about a decade ago[1]. It was where teenagers believed themselves to not be humans but rather other creatures like dragons, bears, and so on. I remember reading about one girl who argued with her mother over whether or not she needed to eat diamonds because she was a dragon.
0. https://old.reddit.com/r/SystemsCringe/comments/w95q5q/alter...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin
Edit: Corrected a typo. Added more explanation of how I discovered that sub. It seems some are misinterpreting it as a judgment.
I also suspect that systems cringe might not be the best source for understanding plural folks... It might be worth trying to understand before casting aspersions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Mode...
But now after clicking these links I’m reminded why I stay on the surface of the internet.
It has nothing to do with... whatever this TikTok/Social Media thing is.
Kinda wonder if Marvin Minsky had something useful to say on this? I recall he wrote a book on how the mind is socially organized
That, in turn, is made more difficult by clinical perceptions of MPD: many psychiatrists are openly skeptical that it’s a “real” disorder, meaning that they’re less likely in turn to be empathetic towards a prospective patient who claims (perhaps incorrectly, but perhaps not!) that they have MPD.
"Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a <i>rare condition</i> in which two or more distinct identities, or personality states, are present in—and alternately take control of—an individual."[0]
0. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/dissociative-i...
One of the problems is that the kids themselves are so awash in information and misinformation about this stuff, including awareness of how things are defined in the DSM-V, that they can muddy up your attempts at evaluating them.
It's kind of like if you take enough personality tests, like the MBTI, you eventually just sort of know how each question is being evaluated and you can, consciously or unconsciously, start optimizing your responses around the result that lines up with your narrative about yourself but isn't necessarily the most honest set of answers.
My view of it, for my own personal reflection, is to first define identity. I opt to have two prongs to it, rooted in game theory: executive identity & motivational identity. Given a decision matrix executive identity is the actor being able to choose. Motivational identity is what determines the pay off values of the outcomes
It's possible to have conflicting motivation, which ends up debating itself until it's decided by your executive identity. In various contexts these motivations will overtake each other on executive identity, causing one to behave rather differently
There's a range on how cohesive these behave for people, for some it can be distinct enough to feel like a different person
you wear one mask with one group, another with a different group. Wouldnt say multiple identities though.
But yeah, the mutual reinforcement is a BIG problem.
You're just establishing that for a given persona there is a spectrum from 'Mask' to 'Identity' and insisting that there is an arbitrary threshold.
For a moment, embrace a worldview that there is no singular, core Identity -- in fact all personas are masks to some degree. An Identity may be a mask you're particularly dedicated to wearing, but it's still a mask. The rest of these "systems" people's perspective follows from this point and emphasizes certain experiences -- that you may suppress -- over others that you may hold on a pedestal.
I think the mask analogy is a good one, it feels to me that regardless of what "mask" I'm wearing, I'm still the same, singular person underneath it in all situations. I am only one person, even if I only choose to show selective parts of my personality at different times.
Is there stability to who you are? This question can also be asked of nations, of language… And this debate dates back to Plato.
I think that's debatable, and further, a lot of that coherence is a personal/cultural choice and not something inherent to consciousness. At a minimum, you might admit the existence of biases like anchoring -- maybe you'll more heavily weight your child's desires while playing with them versus when your in the middle of work a day later (maybe vice versa!) -- but such things might be a hint of how these other perspectives work.
Otherkin is not a fad, and it's not confined to Tumblr; it's been around for decades, all over the net and real-life society. There's considerable overlap between otherkin and furry; otherkin is basically furry for fictional species.
Anyway, furry/otherkin and plural people read and post here to Hackernews all the time -- often as experts in their professional field. One of the most consistent producers of high-quality content featured here, Xe Iaso, appears to be both. Mind your manners.
Reactions like the GP are why we prefer to be more tactical about plurality in public. We've found it's better to be seen as an expert in your field AND THEN be more safe with talking about plurality topics than it is to be a vocal example of being plural and then having to fight uphill to be seen as an expert in things. Stigma is a bitch and a half to deal with.
We'd like to think that our writing and advocacy helps destignatize our form of existence in some way, but we have no way to track that other than the occasional kind comment. Maybe this job will be the one where we are more honest and open about plurality, but we've also found that it's an ultimate relationship strength test like coming out as transgender to people (I'm pretty sure it's why my brother refuses to talk to me). We don't want to lose more people, so we have defaulted to this quietly, but accurately describing how we experience reality thing and not emphasizing it too much. The blog is a team effort ;)
Interestingly enough, I've found that plural people tend to understand distributed systems problems at a much more intuitive level than others. It's to the point that if I was ever building out an SRE team to handle distributed systems problems, I'd probably try and hire as many plural people as I can and make them accommodated to the best of my ability so that we can leverage that innate talent in ways that were previously undoable. Maybe some day I'll get my wish, but not any time soon it seems.
Personally I'd say that otherkin and furry have overlaps but are not fundamentally the same thing. Think of it as the difference between being a fan of baseball games and aspiring to be a baseball player. They are in similar veins (both baseball related), but they are wholly separate things. Being furry and being otherkin are similarly different. I can ask around for a resource if you want, if you want to reach out privately please email me at xeiaso dot net.
I'd second the suggestion to avoid hate groups like /r/systemscringe, nothing good can come of it but continuing the cycle of needless hate. I'd like to think that people on this website are rational and can overcome the innate tribalistic feelings that those hate groups capitalize on, but I can wish in one hand and spit in the other then see which one fills up faster.
"Furries run the internets", and as a result the tech side of the furry fandom gives you a vast professional networking opportunity that you could never really get anywhere else. It makes fiscal sense to be a furry if you value having a large professional reach.
Unfortunately we have.
>And don't hang around /r/SystemsCringe; it's a hate sub.
Stop. Stop right there. Laughing at the deranged lunacy of this stupid subculture is NOT HATE. Stop diluting the word "hate" to mean "any slight that goes against my narrative or the narratives of those I ally with." There are real hate groups out there spreading their filth and getting people killed. By diluting the seriousness of hatred, you're inadvertently giving them power. STOP. IT.
>Otherkin is not a fad
Yes it is. It's a fad like emo and goth, with tons of overlap.
>and it's not confined to Tumblr
Unfortunately.
> been around for decades, all over the net and real-life society.
So has emo and goth at this rate. You're proving my point.
>There's considerable overlap between otherkin and furry; otherkin is basically furry for fictional species.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SystemsCringe/comments/ov4bsc/this/
>Anyway, furry/otherkin and plural people read and post here to Hackernews all the time
Chronically online people are online. Shocked I tell you!
>often as experts in their professional field. One of the most consistent producers of...
And often experts in our field are like me: tired of the attention seeking shenanigans like the "system" losers that we have to deal with and manage day to day. Every day chronically online socially awkward people will find some community of invented nonsense to differentiate themselves and play the victim. Nothing like a persecution fetish mixed with fantasy.
If you think that fora dedicated to laughing at what you call deranged subcultures are not spreading hate and getting people killed, you haven't been paying attention. One of the greatest contributors to the emulation community is dead because of Kiwi Farms, and they're not the only one.
It's hate. Get it out of your system. Or you may well find yourself quite unwelcome. Remember, furries run the internet.
I don't think, I know it's not. Using this illogic, subreddits and forums dedicated to cringing over Qanon, Trumpers, white people, antivaxxers, etc. are hate.
>One of the greatest contributors to the emulation community is dead because of Kiwi Farms, and they're not the only one.
Oh, you mean the deranged asshole that tried to extort the mods of KiwiFarms with their suicide and then proceeded to fake their suicide after the emu world got tired of his shit? This is the worst example you could cook up, and it's the one you cooked up LOL!
>It's hate.
It's not, it's simply pointing out the deranged nonsense, just like all those forums and subreddits dedicated to Qanon Trumpets are simply pointing put deranged nonsense.
>Or you may well find yourself quite unwelcome.
If leftists find me unwelcoming then that means I'm doing the right things.
>Remember, furries run the internet.
Remember, furries crap JavaShit into containers. The Internet is ran by white and Asian techbros.
I know plenty of plural systems. They're just people who happen to also be people. Nothing exceptional one way or another. They're rocket scientists, sysops, janitors, baristas, etc. Just like anyone else.
That community is called tulpas and the subreddit bears the same name.
By one token you could seemingly accurately describe the discussion there as unchaperoned children and teens actively trying to become mentally ill through meditation and self-talk.
On the other hand, I remember when I was a kid we used to talk about how maybe if we wished hard enough we could become more powerful like the characters in Dragonball Z. And I remember a web forum where kids talked about how maybe Digimon was real and there was a parallel universe where Digimon existed and how the forumbase could merge that world with our own if they wished hard enough.
So maybe kids have always been quite out there and it just looks more alarming when you are an adult.
Adolescents tend to engage in community-seeking behavior to a great extent, and if they're not finding it in their schools or local community, they'll almost certainly look to find it online.
+ Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1 at line 1392: bad argument #1 to 'pairs' (table expected, got nil).
That's new to me. I didn't know wikipedia had adopted lua for its templates.
For example, all infoboxes use this module.
I went through the first two years of a psychology degree alternately diagnosing myself with every mental illness under the sun, despite me knowing deep down that it wasn't really the case. The thing that stopped it dead was watching clinical videos of people who really did have serious mental illness. I wonder if the same would work for some of these people, presuming they're being suggestible.
I remember in particular one video of a man with bipolar disorder in a manic phase, who was in his mid-20s when the video was filmed during the late 80s, and who was convinced that he'd been the Rolling Stones tour manager in the 1960s. There was nothing anyone could say to convince him otherwise, and he had all sorts of explanations for the mismatch in dates. We were laughing a bit because it was so clearly delusional, when the lecturer pause the video and said something like "yeah, it's kinda funny, but I remember getting a call from a friend who asked my clinical opinion about the fact he thought that the adverts for a bank on TV were telling everyone he was gay." We got pretty quiet after that.
It chimes with the trivialisation of terms like OCD, which are use very filppantly, but anyone who's seen a clinical video of someone with full-blown OCD, which can be completely crippling, wouldn't use it so lightly.
Us boys certainly had our fair share of weird and destructive online communities, but not like this I am sure.
It is quite sad. I personally know that being diagnosed with depression when you have ADHD instead is debilitating. It feels like nothing will fix you. But then with an ADHD diagnosis it was much easier to be present in the world.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180523-how-gender-bias-...
If it’s as high as 80,000 per year, that would be about the same as U.S. automobile and gun-related deaths combined.
(this is a fact, and was proven with things like the anorexia epidemic)
This is true in the broadest possible sense. It's why teenagers rebel against all social norms. The teenage mind mind is particularly geared toward identity discovery and without it, young adult minds would be simple inputs of their parents.
Besides that, nearly all big ideas are infectious. Language, gender, religion, politics, economics, &c are all incredibly infection ideas. You can look here and see any number of idea transmission vectors eager to transmit and propagate their strain of mental virus.
I'd encourage you to do some reading on childhood identity development (Marcia 1980). It seems as though you're advocating for identity foreclosure, by way of inoculating the teenage mind. But, you have to keep in mind that there are no anti-bodies here. It's virii all the way down.
One antibody could be questions about "time" that adults ask and teens do not. Teens haven't lived long enough to know that a dark feeling that feels like forever could just be one moment in their lives. I think my parents helped me avoid parasitic beliefs in my adolescence by asking me good questions.
It really boils down to the basic cultural tendency for men to simply not trust what women are saying on nearly any subject. There's no way you could know what's wrong with you, there's no way you could understand math, there's no way you can tell me how to patch drywall, etc.
It's probably how we're built to some extent.
Bullying still exists tho.
Of course sometimes a small minority of people are insane and decide to maim and murder people. But I don't think "zero tolerance" environments are good at suppressing that. These policies are ineffectual against psychological/social bullying; how do you prove anything about a maliciously planted word-of-mouth rumor? That stuff goes unpunished, and that sort of bullying does more long-term damage than a typical schoolyard fight. Those festering social wounds probably drive more people to homicidal insanity than anything else.
So, what I'm hearing is, we need to bring back dueling.
I think LGBTQ curious kids probably tend to be especially vulnerable since the internet is such an important gateway for so many of them to seek out answers to the questions they're starting to have about their own identity and self-conception. But the logic of the curation model isn't a "natural" or "organic" friend group so they're really being jerked around by these things at a very impressionable and vulnerable age.
and that community has left zero ability to criticize or question that, since its a unilateral choice
does that make me Queer or Pansexual for dating/hooking up with a completely feminine cisgender woman who calls herself nonbinary or using they pronouns alongside she/her
I would definitely consider this a fad, even as “allyship” to actually nonbinary or even trans people its borderline offensive to pretend to relate if there are no consequences for doing so for the cisgender person compared to the persons being attacked and invalidated and fearing for their lives
The fad reminds me of high school girls being into “yaoi” which is just manga with gay guys
They don't. Nothing harmful can come out of reading a book.
> DnD leads to Satanism
It can't, ever. No subculture can wander so close to satanism that would lead their elements to coopt it.
> TV rots brains
It doesn't. There's no way of consuming TV that has a negative impact on people.
> movies lead to illiteracy
They don't. Having the choice of a movie never prevented anyone from having to practice spending time learning to consume literature.
> books lead to dangerous thought
They don't. Nothing dangerous can be transmited in print.
Well done, everything is harmless.
> Well done, everything is harmless.
I would start to worry only if I had them during the day while awake.
He was asked if he was shown proof that would change his mind could he and he said he couldn't, because his entire identity was built around this belief. If he changed his mind he would lose everything.
This is one of the dangerous things about echo chambers and micro communities produced by social media, it gives people a global identity even if their identity is based on nonsense.
As you say, same thing happens in other forms. A viral tiktok dance format seems similar to a viral image board macro or a viral twitter text format. How is tiktok different and why the effect would be stronger on tiktok?
The problem with TikTok is that you have little control over what you see. All it takes is for you to stumble across an ADHD related post, engage with it and you're more likely to then see those types of posts again and again.
Anyone can have a voice on TikTok like other social media apps and ADHD in many social media circles seems to be an attention seeking type of content that makes people think "oh maybe I have it too". It's very similar to the classic scenario of people self diagnosing themselves with cancer, because they've googled it and believe they have some of the signs/symptoms.
I'm not saying that ADHD isn't real, but it is a type of diagnosis that is open to ambiguity unless appropriately diagnosed.
Does this have a lasting impact or do the kids simply move on with no negative changes to their lives?
I remember thinking a lot of dumb stuff as a teenager. Just because I thought it doesn't mean it was bad that I did.
I also see a parallel with HN and developers with impostor syndrome. Before HN, and even before Slashdot, I was a good developer. I wrote some impressive C, C++, and Java code that went into some serious projects. But now, thanks to HN, I know that I'm a below-average developer. Perhaps I'm not, but it sure feels that way because of what I see presented and discussed here.
If I had grown up with HN, I might not have done some of the things I did; rather I might have given up and chosen a career which I didn't feel inadequate at. This is how I imagine kids today feel with all the stuff they have access to. I mean heck, you can even go to youtube and see 10 year olds making amazing creations out of just about any material you can think of. How does that feel when you're still trying to cut straight lines on paper?
You could say that someone who performs a dance well and gains positive attention from an audience is expressing capitalism. The idea that putting work plus talent to get appreciation (in monetary or other forms) is not necessarily bad.
I think what we currently experience as capitalism is a skewed, min/max version which loses sight of the main value and focuses too much on simple financial return.
It certainly matters.
So they're exploring their sexuality, and you think this is wrong? I remember questioning my sexuality as a teenager... in the 90's, long before the internet functionally existed for me.
> imagining wrong things ... biological, empirical nonsense
Oh. Nevermind. You've already decided to cast normal behavior and questions as immoral, so I'll never change your mind.
I may or may not have, but that aside "wrong" as I used it here clearly means "factually wrong", not "morally wrong".
I'm not disputing that there are legitimate cases.
Simply saying the sheer spike in it from one generation to the next should make any rational person smell the rotten tuna.
I even have 1st hand experience with it: My teenie brother who thought for about 1-2 years he was trans and even considered biological sex change but as he matured a little realized that nah he's just gay.
Fact is kids and teens are actually dumb and don't know a lot about human psychology and physiology. They don't understand for example that simply being a little on the feminine side as a man or vice versa doesn't make you trans. And it ruins lives - primarily their own!
We should not act, as adults and parents, like we don't know better than them at least in 99% of the cases.
Much lower than it probably is. Most people, by my estimate, aren't perfect 0 or 6 on the Kinsey scale [0]. The majority of people are somewhere between 1 and 5. It's still a bimodal distribution but I'd estimate most people aren't purely gay or straight.
Sexuality is similar to mental illness in my opinion (STAY WITH ME!), most people have sub-clinical cases of lots of mental illnesses, maybe a facet or two due to maladaption because of being a human (sexually wise: having a fetish, having a 'thing' for secondary sex characteristics of their sex, etc) but it doesn't cross a threshold where it becomes behaviourly significant.
Ask someone "If you had to sleep with someone of the same sex, who would it be?" If they have an honest answer of a specific person, they aren't _technically_ straight.
Honestly seems like a perfect comparison in my experience as well.
> There's a whole detrans movement of such folks who regret doing such, often irreversible, massive damage to their body.
I looked into this a while back and found that the vast majority of this "movement" was british transphobes making up stories about their friend who this definitely happened to. Didn't seem to have a whole lot of legitimacy to it.
Why British specifically? Beats me but they were definitely over-represented amongst these stories.
Could it be the case that there is now less social stigma to address and speak about mental health publicly?
Speaking from anecdotal experience (which is, yes, the worst), I struggled in school on mathematic topics, and just about never did my homework. My high school pushed me for a study, which was performed. My parents and I were invited to a meeting to review the results, but they did not allow me to come along, and I was not allowed to view the results of the study, but my school did grant me extended time on tests but was not allowed by my parents to elucidate why. (I did not need the extended time.)
These days, I went to a psychiatrist and had more studies, done, it turns out I have a rather textbook case of ADHD which was not disclosed to me and was left untreated. I also casually think that a small slice of my family, possibly including myself, is on the autism spectrum (on the DSM-5 style definition).
So, while I partially agree with some of the perspectives here, I also firmly believe a non-zero amount of the change is that we're getting better at understanding and speaking about mental health—where definitions and processes from a psychiatric perspective are evolving, and that socially it's no longer something that must be bottled up and kept hidden (as much).
There is a big, seeming North American sentiment that children are incapable of functioning without an adult and need to be protected at all times, rather than fostering their capability for independence. This is not to say you don't watch over them, but they have the capacity to learn from the world just as you do.
With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences, etc.
It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around.
Some parents. Elite schools in Manhattan and Palo Alto send home fliers that parents (or at least those I know) read.
Screen time of all types is monitored. And the children have a somewhat hilarious self-protecting pride in their control over digital intake. (Most of them. Thinking of two brothers, one who eats his veggies because he, and I quote, doesn’t like his poop going soft, and self moderates cartoon watching and phone fucking around. The other who steals my phone to watch loud videos.)
On the other hand I try to compare it to the empathy of people that were not exposed to anything like the free media on the internet. And often they don't show increased levels of empathy either, often quite to the contrary.
100% agree. Just pointing out there are parts of society where this is being messaged and socially enforced. So it isn’t a situation where we don’t know what to do. It’s one where we’re being selective about where we give a shit.
Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving.
Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more.
So I suspect there's not necessarily a decrease in parents keeping their kids from bad influences, and more that there's an increase in access to (and severity of) bad influences.
Edit: I should be clear, I want to minimize banning stuff as a solution as much as possible. I think the goal should be to move kids back into supervision and teaching by their parents, and just real people in their life. Parents, friends, educators, etc.
The problem is much of America (and much of the world) is completely boned on this front by living in places that just don't form a community, like suburbs, or just low-density non-walkable areas in general. Complicated by the fact that the vast majority of parents are getting non-work time squeezed out of them by increases in cost of living without any increase in pay.
Banning more stuff is the single-line-item solution, the simple way, the just-get-biden-to-do-an-executive-order way. But I would be horrified if that's all we could manage. I hope we can do the real solutions, not the deeply flawed patch that banning stuff is.
This is the change that has never occurred in human history. Every thread brings up that all complaints about this new media were applied to past forms of media.
My point was more that there were still ways for bad influences to reach people.
This may be new-ish but I’m not sure it’s that new. I grew up with the early web in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it’s always been pretty unfiltered. It wasn’t centralized in the way TikTok is, but plenty of us grew up on the web with little supervision, and web circles were/are much wider than the neighborhood.
there's a lot of stuff we know isn't good and won't consciously choose to go watch. but short video shows us some of that and we subconsciously engage with it more instead of consciously choosing so we watch more and more.
this is hard for adults to deal with but way worse for kids with shitty impulse control.
It may be the case that algorithmic feeds and social networks that have one giant global context tend to expose stuff like this in ways that would have been less likely on the early web. 4chan has always been pretty awful but you wouldn’t have seen it unless you were on 4chan, which for most people was “never”. The norm at the time was to be in multiple different communities, and there typically wasn’t much overlap.
By contrast, TikTok is all one big space, and if the algorithm wants you to see something you’ll see it. That part is new.
Maybe that falls under “monetary influence to drive engagement” in which case I suppose I agree.
I would say it is a really hard problem, because it boils down to trust the trustworthy -- and who to trust is left as an exercise to the reader.
I don't know when it started happening, but why do we continue to let these companies off the hook for their absolutely terrible externalities? Banning these topics if your platform allows children, preteens, etc is absolutely an effective solution if said companies refuse to rectify the problem.
Why should society bare the costs because a company wants to make money at the costs of a child's mental health? How is that just or even fair? Have we truly devolved into a new feudal age where no company can do wrong and we simply have to blame ourselves for their faults? These apps are designed to be psychologically addictive and fuel outrage/fear to drive advertising revenues... why is this acceptable? Why are we blaming parents and not the executives who signed off on these decisions?
[citation needed]
Also, since children don't have the cognitive abilities to critically think, maybe some responsibility should fall onto the parent? You can deflect blame all you want and call for TikTok to go around swinging their banhammer, but your "think of the children" alarmism is short sighted. It's impossible for TikTok to blanket ban an entire topic without causing major damage in the process.
I won't move into "mind reading" territory, but I suspect people who are so trigger happy to ban things online to "protect children" have a guilty conscience due to the lack of effort they put into their own child's development.
The internet boogeyman can only influence your child so much... Raise your kids, people!
What is a valid use-case that a child/teenager requires a phone?
I would argue that don't need unrestricted internet access too, but education has largely moved online.
Also, why can you socialize with the neighbors. Parents used to be super comfortable with "tommy is coming over for dinner or spending that night"
Is that still the case? I don't have any anecdotes on this.
There are less kids overall.
Kids today have more activities, so you won't meet them just by randomly going outside.
They do a lot more activities at home on computer, again you won't meet them randomly outside.
Parents are not even allowed to let their 6-7 years old outside alone, meaning they would had to be with them. Meaning kids won't get habit to he outside nor will find friends outside, even if some kids are around.
And if those other teenagers have phones, they expect you to organize it all by phone. They have own friends they socialize with and coordinate via phones. It is rude to just show up without calling first and you need phone to be reachable by other in the first place.
And other kids will not call on parents home. They are shy or scared.
When kids went to Timmy, pwople assumed landlines. Before landlines, it was accepted to just show up. Today, expectation is phone.
There is a difference in reading an article in a newspaper with critical thinking and lumping through a social media page where the whole purpose is not the content but to keep you glued to the screen.
The timescale of this process is ~15-20 years. "Critical thinking", "common sense" and "being an adult" all refer someone that has cultivated the ability to filter information independently.
I would argue that many 18+ people don't fully develop this skill. See cults, propaganda, conformity for datapoints.
I agree that we SHOULD teach children critical thinking. But MAYBE if you give them a smartphone and social media you should expect this type of result.
In general, I think that the move from TV (where CNN had "authority") to the internet (influencers have the power) can explain some social trends that are going on. Ex. conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen these days with youtube videos slowly hypnotizing you.
Yes, it won't happen overnight. This requires a culture shift. But banning things to coddle children's mind even further will hinder the process.
> I would argue that many 18+ people don't fully develop this skill. See cults, propaganda, conformity for datapoints.
I agree. Which is why I initially said we should teach children critical thinking skills.
> But MAYBE if you give them a smartphone and social media you should expect this type of result.
This is a parental issue. And if a child has incompetent parents, then no proposed solution matters at the end of the day.
> In general, I think that the move from TV (where CNN had "authority") to the internet (influencers have the power) can explain some social trends that are going on.
?
I meant that it takes 15-20 years for critical thinking to develop. I don't think you can teach a kid critical thinking (at least anything that is useful against internet content). The best mechanism is teach them dogma/fear mongering "don't talk to strangers".
> But banning things to coddle children's mind even further will hinder the process I agree with banning content. The technology needs to be eliminated. I realize this is an extreme view, but little value comes from giving kids tech. Tell them to go play outside and explore the world.
> And if a child has incompetent parents, then no proposed solution matters at the end of the day. Yup, the best you can do is TRY to be a good parent and maybe help out with friends that are struggling.
> ? You notice how everyone is politically divided? People are anxious about the future? It's never not been the case that "things are bad" and "life is unpredictable", what is different is the hysteria around "it's the end of days".
All that is social media. Prior to internet, TV told us what to think. It was a unified message - communism bad, nazis bad, etc. Even opposition media was mostly investigative and finding really messed up stuff to "correct" the system. Because these were professional journalists creating an elegant narrative of the world around us. Obviously, 24hr news was the downfall of that. But even there, it was left and right.
Enter the internet, which democratized free speech (GOOD). But ANYONE can say ANYTHING (BAD). Which is how you get ridiculously outlandish conspiracies, niche political movements and just general hate towards everything.
So this social trend of desperation and hopelessness, that's social media.
I find it astonishing that this is the limit of "bad". There are people alive today who were at lynchings in the US as children and cheered them on.
Setting cats on fire by comparison was a harmless past time.
It also worth noting that in the past there were more supervisory resources: homemakers. Now both parents tend to work and have far less capacity to manage those bad influences.
Why do you think you’re less likely to form a community in suburbs? I live in SF in an apt with a walk score of 98 and I don’t think there is much of a “community” here at all.
If I didn't have that formative experience of learning to time-manage and manage my own little technology addictions before going to college, college would have been really rough.
And this was very early 2000s like 2004
This is proved by science, of course this is not easy to communicate to a child of that age that is a culture demonstration of yours how to handle.
Every older generation has said this about the incoming generation - without fail.
I'll take the flip side.
There are so many great social medias about loving yourself, loving your kids, crying is okay for dudes, and men don't have to be a certain way (i'm a dude). It's okay not to know how to change your oil or shoot a gun, better to hug someone, allowed/proud to be gay, black, etc etc.
You should not show your feelings to just anyone. You should have self worth and share with those you trust. There is a reason why PR exists for people in the public sphere. Most people will treat you kindly and it is important to remember that, but a good lesson for the internet would be to be keenly aware of the pitfalls of sharing too much and that includes your feelings very often.
I disagree with both. Expressing your feelings is a part of good communication, and feeling free to express sadness or frustration as needed is how you stave off the kinds of arguments and blowups that have much more severe consequences.
But that is act, not emotion.
This is a cornerstone of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is, in short, "I am free to notice that when this happens, I feel this certain way, and that usually relates to these outcomes. How can my behavior influence this in my favor?"
The alternate that "you are allowed to show your feelings" is trying to combat, is the idea that you can't show your feelings to anyone, at any time.
So your advice is correct, but nowhere near the issue yet. You're telling people when to shift into fourth gear, when they're struggling to get out of first.
Changing oil and car tires, shooting a gun, fishing and performing basic repairs critical life skills that everyone should learn. If you are an adult male and can't complete some of the most basic tasks without help, you will have a difficult time living on your own.
Loving yourself, being "proud" of homosexuality (I find this rather odd; why make your "sexuality" your core identity?) and knowing how to navigate the world are not mutually exclusive.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Not to be pedantic, but is this actually true? Parents used to send their kids to work in the factory at 10. Was that "keeping them away from bad influences"?
If you're saying something is "across every culture", I think some citation is required.
and so on
Fairy tails is essentially teaching kids to stay away from bad influences. Telling to not go into the forest alone because X/Y/Z might happen is not far from telling to not go into a bad neighbourhood or visit a certain kid. And fairy tales did happen in pretty much any culture for thousands of years.
This is also a good recipe to plant prejudice. I'm glad parents no longer have such a strong influence.
Of course, TikTok is not vetted and you can have a lot of bad stuff there (I think, I didn't use it a whole lot) but surely this whole thing is moral panic.
As an aside, a TikTok employee told me TikTok is known to trigger old maladies like anorexia etc. I was told this after mentioning that trying TikTok gave me my first nicotine cravings in several years.
A dystopia that the many have chosen to believe in who's goal is to only worsen the digital crack cocaine addiction which that is already just as bad and present in society.
We do not need society to regress any further with platforms like TikTok.
A community that controls the narrative its members hear, will very likely turn into a a society full of prejudices imposed dogmas.
We live in a different world as it is radically connected like never before. Taleb refers to our current age as "Extremeistan" and the previous world history as "Mediocrastan". It's about power lawn distributions and this happens overnight now across vast swaths of the population. [1]
[1] https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
I'd imagine that for China, US/Western Tik Tok is a literal treasure trove of useful information on the state of practically every facet of US/Western life and culture. Oh the subtle and untraceable mischief you could get up to by just turning a few knobs.
There maybe be some technical reasons for this.
But feeding into the psyops narrative, it's good practice to separate your intelligence gathering into domestic and international. Ex. CIA and FBI
Normalize keeping children away from the obscene and stop letting grown adults normalize exposing weird shit to children, should be obvious innit
That is a very curious statement.
Although Quintilian agreed that public schools can be a bad influence, he argued that parents were the worst influence on their own kids.
“If only we did not ourselves damage our children’s characters! We ruin their infancy by spoiling them from the start. That soft upbringing which we call indulgence destroys the sinews of mind and body. If a toddler crawls around in purple, what will he not want when he grows up? […] No wonder [why children have bad character]: it was we who taught them, they heard it all from us. They see our mistresses, our male lovers; every dinner party echoes with obscene songs; things are to be seen which it is shameful to name. […] The wretched children learn these things before they know they are wrong. This is what makes them dissolute and spineless: they do not get these vices from the schools, they import them [vices] into them [the schools].”
With my brother I've found that if you treat younger adults and children with seriousness and listen to them as though their POV is valid, you build a trust there where they have a sense of where to discuss their doubts and insecurities so they don't fall prey to hypes and misinformation.
I mention this because I had a huge amount of influence on him growing up, almost the opposite of my experience with my parents dismissing and ridiculing my concerns. Although when I was a teen social media was mostly all chat rooms, forums, myspace, and then facebook (YouTube barely existed until the end of my adolescence) where I found people who listened- and there was the potential for them to have an influence which may have led to something very similar to this article.
Although social media now is vastly more powerful and common, it is not the sole variable. For many of these children it is filling a gap where a solid foundation of reality and context should be- with family members and social support structures who can be trusted to provide a reality check. I can see why many young ones listen to online personalities (many adults do, too) and although the medium through which they're getting these concepts (tiktok) plays a large part, it is not the root nor is avoiding tiktok the solution.
I would add, my parents moved us far from the town with the intent to take us away from bad influences of kids who hung out downtown- what this actually did is prevent me from being able to walk to the library, while my sister still found a way to get in trouble because lo and behold, her friends had cars or knew older kids with cars. The isolation they thought might be a solution proved ineffective, but I think if their parenting had been more nutruring and less abuse/neglect she might have avoided a lot of the trouble she got into.
My preferred outcome would be if the companies involved performed mutual annihilation by making social media as a whole look as bad as possible.
I don't blame social media for this, while it is true that it has heavily increased knowledge of various real illnesses, and therefore increased the case of false positives - clinics should be able to differentiate between this. That's the point. The professional should be able to properly diagnose, because the patient themselves doesn't know what the problem is or how to treat it.
But there in comes the "do no harm" idea. Where we have to do something because if we get it wrong and didn't prescribe pills then the patient may kill themselves or harm others. And conveniently we can point and say "we did it by the book, no liability.". It should be recoined "do harm to everyone equally" for correctness.
Is it healthy to be so acutely aware of mental health when you're a teen, though? Why is disability valid social currency? Is it because we also see adults tap into victimhood as currency?
However, there is another huge offender in the psychiatry misinformation space: Reddit.
The amount of incorrect, oversimplified, and downright weird psychiatry and psychology information they pick up from Reddit is astounding. The most common self-diagnosis is ADHD. Do some of them actually have ADHD? Sure, statistically speaking some of them will actually have ADHD. However, there’s something about Reddit’s hive mind that has convinced these people that the bar for ADHD is very low, such that they see everything as ADHD. It’s so bad that entire cohorts will come through and convince each other that they all have self-diagnosed ADHD, despite most of them functioning just fine in their personal, academic, and work lives.
They say things like “My brain doesn’t produce dopamine” (ADHD has dopaminergic involvement but it is not a disorder of decreased dopamine production, thats Parkinson’s) and other such statements that would be easily disproven with even cursory research on the topic. This is one of the most confusing aspects to me, as these are the same people who will spend hours researching the intricate details about front-end frameworks or other topics. There’s something about Reddit psychiatry that short-circuits past their normal logic and leads to blind acceptance.
I suspect the root problem is that they’re not actually going to Reddit for psychiatry advice or self-diagnosing with the goal of learning how to work with a mental health condition. It seems to be more about identity and adopting an explanation that makes them different and unique. ADHD has become especially attractive as a self-diagnosis because it’s trendy right now and it gives people a sense that their accomplishments are that much greater due to starting from a disadvantaged point.
Meanwhile, I have worked privately with several mentees who admit struggles with doctor-diagnosed ADHD and they behave completely differently. They usually don’t want to public announce their condition and go to lengths to avoid letting it be obvious to their peers or employers. The trivialization of genuine ADHD is massively frustrating to these people.
Self-diagnosis aside, I had this exact thought after a conversation with a teacher. The number of kids on medication for ADHD in their school was just too much. Sure, the school could just be lucky but I doubt it. More likely pressure from educators and parents for a "quick fix" for what should be correctable (sans drugs) behavioural issues.
The best way I can describe my use of TikTok is, it makes me happy. There are fun people doing fun things, and it makes me happy to watch. Even if I'm older than most of them.
Whenever I go on the platforms I mention in my first paragraph I instead get insulted, provoced, accused, questioned, and depressed.
I'm sure there's some bad stuff happening on TikTok, but on the whole it's a happy, friendly place. That simply cannot be said about the others.
As usual, the real "problem" with TikTok is that it's not owned and controlled by a western tech giant. That's why it gets attacked in western media.
This is a long winded way of me saying I agree, and this doesn’t seem like a particularly new phenomenon.
I use to joke with my sister who would go online and read things then come up with self-diagnoses.
I think people have to be more aware that not everything you read of see online is real.
I think you have to break apart those 'using' TikTok by anonymously consuming content, and those who are 'using' TikTok by producing content with the aspiration of hitting it big. Narcissism seems connected to the second, but not so much the first.
Pretty broad statement to make about an app with 1B+ monthly active users. Are 7% of the world's population narcissistic?
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
“Well, what’s the matter with you?”
I said:
“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I have got.”
And I told him how I came to discover it all.
Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it—a cowardly thing to do, I call it—and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.
I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.
He said he didn’t keep it.
I said:
“You are a chemist?”
He said:
“I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.”
I read the prescription. It ran:
“1 lb. beefsteak, with 1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
I wouldn't want my kid spending hours each day scrolling through various social media, but likewise I wouldn't want them making pointless garbage videos just because... well because I guess that's what some people feel they should do?
My son watched gaming streamers for several years in his early teens, and that drove me nuts. I understand watching people who are good at something do their thing, but most of the gamer stuff I saw was just obnoxious punks who really needed a life. I'm still baffled at how successful (followers, income) many of these garbage can kids are. If they tried to talk to people, or even just talk out loud, in public the way they talk on their videos, they would be getting broken noses weekly.
There's an actual term for it but I can't find it for the life of me. I don't believe it is echolalia but it is a precise word for people 'catching' tics from loved ones.
I'd rather my business fail than get addicted to it.
TikTok knows this and they thrive in knowingly damaging the mental health of their users of this addiction.
It's all so tiring.
These contagious social phenomena seem to arise most in young adults, especially women, who are heavy users of social media.
Being lgbt isn’t a mental illness. Not medically speaking, anyway. Maybe they were considered such in the past. Go far enough back and we used bloodletting as a common treatment, our understanding generally improves with time. I have no desire to go back to an era where lgbt people were persecuted.
With respect to your other point. “Children” is a broad category. Pre-pubescents are not “changing sex”. Instead we are being encouraged to respect their gender identity, and not reject gender-non conforming behaviors [1]. Teens may take puberty blockers to buy time, this also isn’t “changing sex”. Perhaps HRT is what you mean by changing sex, and yes some teenagers are able to access the HRT of their preferred gender. The science on this is pretty clear, that suicide rates of trans people is drastically lowered when in a gender-supportive environment, and their mental well-being is infinitely better.
[1] I implore you to watch this video: https://youtu.be/h60YLGDJ6n0
Edit: despite what a child comment I cannot reply to is saying, while over-medicalization and misdiagnosis is definitely something to watch out for (being gender-nonconforming is not the same as being trans and this is why education about lgbt issues is important), the vast majority of transgender youth do not suffer from an overabundance of societal and medical acceptance for their issues.
Puberty blockers are indeed not a drug to prescribe lightly. Same with SRS, it should not be handed out like candy. People who have only had gender dysphoria for a short time may indeed be better served by a “wait and see” approach. All of these things I can agree with.
If you are under the impression that being trans isn’t stigmatized enough and all the kids might turn trans if we aren’t careful, I’m simply going to disagree with you. There’s no evidence of this.
Medically defining what an "illness" is can get into a lot of squirrely philosophical questions that aren't really scientifically or objectively answerable. We basically just define a mental illness as something that significantly impairs your ability to function happily in life. If society, in general, is intolerant and hostile to you due to that orientation it's not far off to think maybe that's something people might want to take a pill to fix if that was actually possible.
We do recognize, now, that pathologizing being LGBT didn't really do the people with those orientations much good and attempts to reverse or suppress the impulses tended to just lead to worse mental and emotional outcomes. It turned out that simply carving out space in society to accommodate it worked a lot better than turning it into an individual problem to be "solved." And, it turns out, it wasn't that big of a deal to let people live like that after all.
But I'm not sure to what extent a lot of stuff we think of as mental "illnesses" aren't like that as well. Like perhaps a lot of ADHD or anxiety disorders are actually fairly reasonable responses to sociological stressors, but we just treat them as individual problems to fix rather than wide-scale issues to address at a higher level.
All that said, I think awareness of mental illness and self-mis-diagnosis largely isn’t the primary problem. The successful person who became a crippling OCD shut-in was convinced OCD was a myth until it was far too late. If only they took it seriously while they still had enough functioning to follow therapy instructions, they might be in a much healthier state right now.
So, for instance, shepherd breeds’ herding instincts come from a combination of a sort of compulsive desire to keep things together and a deep suspicious of aberrant. Consequently, these breeds are prone to neuroticism and anxiety when those traits present too strongly.
Sure, there are those that use that as a reason for why they think they have ADHD or an excuse for drug seeking, but it's not the sole symptom, and in some cases not a symptom, for those who legitimately struggle with it. Those who have it, know how crippling it is dealing with the rumination, confusion, irritability, insecurity, regulating emotion, depression that can and often does result from these aspects, among a list of other issues. Not everyone deals with every aspect as it's more of a spectrum than anything, but personally I deal with the ones listed among other things and daily life's been far from an issue of "not being able to sit in a seat/getting bored easily".
Please don't minimize it to a frivolous cliche.
No one in this thread was claiming that. With the possible exception of aspects of trans, but don’t conflate that with the larger LGB community. Separate issues, and not being discussed here.
…
I, too, can rephrase bad things in superficially-positive language to make them seem like good things.
>The science on this is pretty clear
Ah, off course. THE SCIENCE^TM. The single, monolithic, Science; which by very happy coincidence happens to hold the opinions you deem acceptable.
>[1] I implore you to watch this video
I implore you to understand how bias and cherry picking works, for every heart-wrenching sob story about brave and stunning joe or jane finding their "true self" there are 10 heart-wrenching stories about kids being misled into mutilating their bodies irreversibly by their peers, teachers and caregivers as they chase their mythical true self, and the overwhelming power of state and mass media are on 1 side and not the other, namely that of trans activists.
>If you are under the impression that being trans isn’t stigmatized enough
I'm always amazed by the ability to live in parallel realities that human minds have, it's like sensory data is just an abstract high-level description that isn't enough to determine reality, and each person constructs their own reality by filling in the blank. Like, judging from my experience online, being trans is really really privileged. Is there any other groups (besides the usuals, which are also privileged) that can make public discourse salty against a comedian for 6 or 7 months straight because they made fun of the group ? Is there any case of people being outraged that comedians make fun of men ? Men literally had one of the corporations marketing products for them to shit on them in an ad in 2019, and the whole incident was forgotten in days. Yet, here you are, apparently the group that is coddled and put on a pedestal seemingly everywhere is oppressed and stigmatized.
Just to add some context the parent author is might be trying to refer to "rapid onset gender dysphoria" ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... ) which, while far out of my understanding, is a rather new topic that's still being studied.
What are you trying to say here? Problematic isn't a scientific quantity but maybe you're throwing this in from some other context? Personally, these days I see people of all walks invoking science when they just mean "my own common sense."
People confuse their own preference with science. Also, because preference is political, what to research and what science is focused on is a political question.
You jump over the gaps in the tiles on the road? You must have OCD. You broke up with your bf/gf.. you must have depression. You're happy a bit? Bipolar disorder. You're a guy and play with a barbie... trans. Less horny, asexual. And let's not forget a bunch of adhd/autism and other disorders, when a kid gets bored in school.
On the other hand, we have professionals (doctors, etc.) reinforcing this, by (eg.) giving pills to kids who can't sit still for 8 hours in school without any physical excercise during that time, and parents give their kids pills,because it's easier than actually parenting that kid.
Given 2 statements: 1) Americans don’t seek/receive enough mental healthcare 2) Americans seek/receive too much mental health care
no one (other than the old school types who think mental health is simply something for weak people) would pick (2) as true.
The physician breezes in, looks at some lab work, asks a few questions, writes a prescription or two (hey they have to “treat” something), and heads to the next patient because they do not have time.
80% of anti-depressants are prescribed by general practitioners, not psychiatrists:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5473964/#Sec1ti...
I know many, many people who were going through something in their life and mentioned being “a little down” to their primary care doctor. They were handed a prescription for an SSRI on the spot. So now they have depression.
General practitioners do not have the time or the training to be diagnosing and treating mental health disorders. This isn’t a case of “look at a rash for 2 seconds and prescribe a topical steroid”. Psychiatrists schedule hour long appointments and many of them will want to see you a few times before they attempt to diagnose or treat anything.
You can receive not enough health care and too much at the same time. It’s a matter of the right quality and appropriate type of health care.
Big picture, Americans use a bit less healthcare and an other parts of the world, but they tend to spend about five times as much which is where the costs come in.
Edit: I’m being told I misunderstood the parent comment but it appears to be claiming the bar is much lower now than in the past. Certainly skipping over sidewalk cracks isn’t OCD. The point of my comment is that when someone is diagnosed with OCD in 2022 by a professional, it’s generally for very serious reasons.
The claim being made, is that in times past, the bar for being diagnosed with something like OCD was much lower than today, causing people to consider mundane things as symptoms.
It appears GP is saying the bar for being diagnosed with a mental illness is lower today (“got a lot lower”). I am pushing back, at least where OCD is concerned.
Kids today think they have OCD because they jump over the gaps in tiles, and promote that on social networks. Other kids claim they have it too, because they jump over the gaps too. And in the end... social vmedia (tiktok videos) leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (like 'real' OCD)... as the title of this post says.
If you’re talking about merely kids self-mis-diagnosing, then sure I’ll grant that, it’s unclear to me that GP was solely talking about that though.
I had read "The bar also got a lot lower back then." and missed a critical word. Sorry!
And then you have threads like this, where people call for mass censorship because some believe it's easier to ban "bad" topics than to actively parent their kids.
You’re not sad, you’re depressed.
You don’t worry, you have anxiety.
Depression and anxiety are medical diagnoses. The other are normal emotions everyone can, should, and does experience.
If you don’t ever worry or get sad about anything there’s probably something else wrong with you.
In terms of diagnoses, the DSM-4 included a “bereavement exclusion” from the depression diagnostic criteria. Thinking being if someone close to you dies a normal person almost should feel the symptoms of depression for some period of time. You don’t have depression, you’re mourning.
It was (controversially) removed in DSM-5:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4204469/
The “slap a medical diagnosis on a normal feeling” described in the article seems to have entered society across the board.
“The meaning "dejection, state of sadness, a sinking of the spirits" is from early 15c. (as a clinical term in psychology, from 1905);” https://www.etymonline.com/word/depression
“anxiety (n.) 1520s, "apprehension caused by danger, misfortune, or error, uneasiness of mind respecting some uncertainty, a restless dread of some evil," from Latin anxietatem (nominative anxietas) "anguish, anxiety, solicitude," noun of quality from anxius "uneasy, troubled in mind” https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=anxiety
The medical diagnoses are generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder (with a variety of variations). Both of which, in common usage, have meaning.
The average person with their arm in a cast doesn’t say they “have a compound fracture of the radius and ulna”. They say they broke their arm or MAYBE fractured their arm. In this case the simple language and medical diagnosis is fracture.
Just like people with SERIOUS, life ruining disabling and debilitating depression don’t say they “have non-psychotic major depressive disorder”. They say they have depression. I’m not gatekeeping, just being extreme for the purposes of discussion.
To me, you can be depressed about something and not have depression. You can be anxious about something and not have anxiety. Those are slightly more sophisticated uses of sad and worry.
To me (again) the issue comes in when you apply a diagnosis to a feeling. When you bump your funny bone you don’t tell people your arm is fractured.
You are contradicting your own examples:
> You’re not sad, you’re depressed. You don’t worry, you have anxiety.
It's possible the people are expressing they are feeling depressed or having anxiety in a colloquial way without confusing the emotion for the diagnosis. Your prior examples indicated that to use those words is problematic, yet you now say that "you can be depressed about something" and that "you can be anxious about something."
On the later the separation is:
“I’m depressed” = Sad or a variation of it.
“I have depression” = Diagnosis of a disorder
Maybe they think hunger is a disorder to be cured by prescribing food, instead of a feeling to be satisfied by eating. ;)
People casually describe emotions in a silly number of ways. Sometimes it’s possessive like “I got (hungry, depressed)” Other times it’s a state like “I am (hungry, depressed).” Sometimes it’s a transformation “That makes me so (hungry, depressed, happy, angry).” etc
Most people aren’t suggesting a medical diagnosis any more than “I have a crush” suggests you physically caught someone.
Also, “I broke my arm” doesn’t always imply someone broke a bone. Ex-pitchers for example sometimes use the phase to refer to a lack of functionality, though busted is more general.
It’s like look, my kid has literally been in the NICU for 6 months now (it ended up being 9 months total) and you’re strongly pressuring us to get her a tracheostomy (let’s not use medical euphemism here though, they wanted to put a tube into our babies throat which would make her unable to cry and necessitate round the clock nursing care) as the “standard of care” (bullshit, it would have made her quality of life worse). But she’s a little upset, better prescribe her happy pills!
For anyone wondering, this was 2019 and my daughter is right this moment peacefully sleeping in her bed with no external breathing aids necessary aside from a wedge pillow to help with her sleep apnea. My blood boils when I think of what we were forced through (especially my wife) dealing with the medical establishment after our daughter was born, but the psych meds being dangled in front of us is a particularly sore spot.
If your only tool is a hammer....
This is part of why I avoid the medical establishment.
I’m curious, did any doctor bring up therapy?
I have major depressive disorder and I take antidepressants to help manage it. There was a landmark study a few years ago indicating that, while SSRIs/SNRIs are beneficial for people like me, they are no more effective than the placebo for people experiencing transient depression.
Therapy, however, would’ve been a sound recommendation for her. In this case it would have given her a place to vent and taught her some tools to cope.
Finally, you should consider whether you and your wife experience any post-traumatic stress from this experience. Your experience meets the qualifications for one that can lead to PTSD in DSM V. There are extremely effective therapy approaches that can put PTSD in complete remission.
I take 8 daily prescription medications to cope with chronic pain and chronic mental health issues. Removing any of them would diminish my quality of life in some way.
How are compassionate friends going to help me manage depression which is endemic to my brain and has no cause in my perceived reality?
Life comes in many perspectives. Before you prescribe how the disabled should live, please at least imagine walking a mile in our shoes.
Better get some prescription for that. ;)
IIRC the bereavement exclusion was six months? This made sense to me, if you had some terrible event in your life and you’re not back to something resembling your baseline mood and function after roughly that time period there’s probably something going on that needs to be looked at.
To me this is the mental health equivalent of “Sorry you sprained your ankle and it hurts a little, here’s a month of OxyContin and what could very well be a lifelong addiction”. We don’t do that anymore - today you’ll get ibuprofen and ice.
Even with more serious injuries you’re more likely to get lifestyle suggestions, physical therapy, etc than opioids.
In many cases we’re throwing pills that change mood and brain chemistry at people suffering from what is basically “life”. I’m not saying people shouldn’t be treated, I’m saying general practitioners throwing SSRIs at someone and diagnosing them with depression after talking to them for literally five minutes doesn’t seem right to me.
But it is easier and faster than hours and hours of therapy.
What comes first? An irresponsibly written anti-depressant prescription because someone said they have depression, or someone says they have depression because someone irresponsibly wrote them a prescription for an anti-depressant?
The fact that bereavement may be different than other causes of depression may be a reason to treat it differently, but not a reason to ignore it.
The difference is handing someone a bottle and saying "here this will go away quick!" Vs just generally having a better more emotionally aware society.
Some processes that are brains go through should be allowed and it should be accepted that they run their full natural course given that the human that has the brain is also being cared for and guided in some sort of way during this process and not just isolated and shunned away.
It is perfectly reasonable to address concerns about the bereavement process with therapy.
Why? In what sense are they "normal"? They're unpleasant and they leave you worse off than you were before you experienced them. It's also becoming clearer that frequently experiencing them has harmful physical effects from stress responses. Over-diagnosis with depression and anxiety is bad because the treatments have such a wide array of potential side effects and limited evidence for efficacy, but it makes no sense to not categorize something as a disease just because we can't treat it.
Setting aside, for now, the fact that these are things that people realize about themselves and not things people are diagnosed with by others... Why are you bringing them up in response to a comment about mental illness?
Please don't misinterpret the comment.
*Edit: removed the word diagnosed as wasn't in the original comment.*
Yep, I meant exactly this.
I mean... take the clothes away, and Action Man and (barbie's) Ken are practically the same doll.
No kid is diagnosed with gender dysphoria for playing with dolls.
This literally does not happen.
I know enough people outside of the heteronormative experience to know that nothing about playing with Barbies pushes people toward being trans. It's reminiscent of the classic "violent games make kids violent" line. That's not the case at all -- rather violent kids are attracted more to violent games. The causality is completely incorrect and displays an obvious naivete paired with a pre-existing ideological bias.
Because independent people agree, when independent sources of data agree on something, that means the thing they are agreeing on is (plausibly) larger than them, and that's what we call 'reality'.
>What makes you think a first assertion holds more weight than a second?
I don't.
>What makes you think bubbles are not a thing?
That's literally the opposite of what I said.
>I know enough people outside of the heteronormative experience to know that nothing about playing with Barbies pushes people toward being trans.
Cool, but you're missing the point that nobody claims that playing with Barbies, by itself, makes people trans. But rather what's being claimed is that certain people push the people who play Barbies into being trans, which is an entirely different thing.
>obvious naivete paired with a pre-existing ideological bias
You say this as if you don't have an obviously ample supply of those yourself.
But by all means, provide me one documented case of a biological male being diagnosed with gender dysphoria by an actual medical professional based on nothing but the fact he plays with Barbies and burst my "bubble".
>our own experiences with birds
Which is none in the case of gender transitions, or very little for some people. But certainly nowhere near the experience of an average person with birds.
>information provided by people who study birds for a living
Which is not reliable in the case of gender transitions, because those who "study them for a living" have proven themselves to be unreliable and value-laden communicators who either has an ideology to push or are too timid to challenge those who do have an ideology to push. Don't forget the substantial material incentive for diagnosing people with gender dysphoria (months and possibly years of consultation and medical appointments, services and products), if ornithologists were similarly ideological and have reasons to benefit from denying that birds are drones, I would be skeptical of their claims too, until I see lots of birds and study them myself at any rate.
>provide me one documented case of a biological male being diagnosed with gender dysphoria
Diagnosis is medical data that is mostly non-public, so this is an impossible demand for rigor. And yet, here's[1] the next best thing, a celebrated psychologist with a long career in sex and gender research, editor for several journals, slandered and fired because activists are outraged he tries to encourage gender-non-conforming kids to be comfortable in their assigned gender instead of transitioning them immediately. So anybody who doesn't diagnose a barbie-playing boy with dysphoria and transition them is at risk of being slandered and fired no matter what their contribution or position is. I consider this pretty solid evidence for the original claim.
[1] https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-r...
Which is odd, because neither the physiologist nor the activists decided anyone was trans for "just playing with Barbies".
They're "Action Servers", not "Doll Models"!
https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-stop-a-boy-from-playing-wit...
Don't know if that's true. But if it is, who is pushing back against treatments? Doctors? Insurance companies? Government? Parents?
That's...not how anyone realizes they're trans or is diagnosed as having gender dysphoria. Your comment is very moral-panicky and transphobic.
Now, those sites are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Can't afford to do the right thing.
Which sites?
Tumblr was started in 2007 - it wasn't very big until 2009. I'm not sure why it's even in your comparison.
The only company worth hundreds of billions of dollars remotely relevant is Facebook and - possibly - TikTok. Are you implying that the majority of their business is promoting teen mental illness and eating disorders? Because it's not - especially Facebook. Most of the tweens have moved to TikTok.
Facebook's audience is like ~3% teens & tweens. And of that a small percentage is getting sucked into this strange & toxic echo chamber.
The reason this is mostly a TikTok problem is because Facebook can easily and did do things to prevent this. They could do more, and TikTok can certainly afford to do something about it. The impacts on the top and bottom line would be irrelevant.
I'll end by saying I find it odd we seem to be talking about this being a children only problem. Every time there's a new allergy in the buzz or a new condition - I have at least 100 contacts talking about how they're convinced they have it. This is just typical human behavior - trying to always be the center of attention. Should we be surprised kids want to special? No.
The new 2010s-present wave of social media seems to have largely avoided this sort of controversy. All the focus is now on the way these websites/apps can indoctrinate people into political extremism, but little attention seems to be given to [other sorts of] socially transmissible mental illness.
These websites will do anything to prevent teens from migrating to a new platform. The majority of content, even teen content, isn't the unhealthy trends, but they will do nothing to curb it if it risks nudging that cohort to a competitor.
Facebook didn't do much to prevent tweens from migrating to TikTok.
There's not much money to be made from tweens, and now it's a regulatory nightmare.
They can just get you when you're more easily monetizable and want to brag about going to Ibiza for Spring Break in college.
In addition what people have learnt is that focusing on illness prevention isn’t the best approach. Focusing instead on more positive alternatives works better. Hence the rise of the body positivity movement.
Finally, anorexia and other eating disorders are much better known so parents and children receive information and education about them through normal channels. Their doctors and school teachers. So discussing it through news media isn’t as important.
This makes so much sense, I can't believe I've never thought of it. We do this on boxes of breakfast cereal, why not fashion magazines too?
Advertising is an act of speech, but it is also an act of trying to get someone to buy something, and that act can be constrained by law.
If you wanted to regulate the iPhone camera issue, I suppose regulating Apple would be the only way to go about it, though I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not.
I mean, that's what religion is. It's a shared delusion that functions as a mind virus, where the conceptualization of deities that are on your side (but not the other side's) is mistaken for there actually being such a thing. The fact that it's normalized doesn't change the fact that it's a delusion.
If free will is an illusion, none of this matters anyway :)
I don't believe in anything super human or God like, but that's a very strong assumption
People do know that God might and probably does not exist I mean, ancient Greeks knew that gods did not exist, it was never intended literally.
Religion is simply a set of rule that defines the identity of a community.
I don't like or follow them, but if religion was really a threat for humanity, we would be all dead by now.
Most religious people, the vast majority of them, are perfectly capable of living a normal life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twhvtzd6gXA
I mean watch this and tell me you don't want what they're selling.
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-paper-ignites-st...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
And considering the shallowness and speed of socnets... It seems a very bad combo.
Old world may be what it is but there were some natural brakes.
It’s willful blindness
I believe we're seeing a massive Clever Hans effect among children whose mentors have deep moral anxiety. They grew up during the final battles and ultimate victory of the LGB rights movement, and desperately wish to avoid being seen "on the wrong side of history." Driven by this anxiety, they aggressively pursue gender-affirming care for their children. They do this even in cases where the child's discomfort may more likely result from depression, autism spectrum disorders, the normal effects of puberty, or other conditions unrelated to gender dysphoria. Their children will bear this moral panic's lasting fallout. The effects of puberty blockers are lifelong and largely unknown. The effects of mastectomies and testosterone injections are irreversible.
The real shame will be felt by those who knew, but said nothing, because they didn't want to lose their personal comfort or social networks. The evidence of most trans children desisting in adulthood is clear. "For decades, follow-up studies of transgender kids have shown that a substantial majority-- anywhere from 65 to 94 percent-- eventually ceased to identify as transgender":
https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/441784/the-controversial-re...
The detransitioner phenomenon has been covered since 2017 (this article got Katie Herzog harassed and fired from The Stranger; she now runs a successful podcast with writer Jesse Singal):
https://www.thestranger.com/features/2017/06/28/25252342/the...
The edit timer on my original comment expired, but I didn't want to leave that error hanging out there.
In the 90s, there was a study done on "sensitivity to environmental toxins," where people would complain about sickness and headaches and similar things from new carpet or new paint in offices.
IIRC, the study found that the reported cases were in a kind of "line of sight," i.e. one person would complain about it to another person, and before long it had passed all the way through the weird social groupings in cube farms, passed from person to person.
It's odd, but important to remember, that humans are still just smarter than average herd animals.
I think levels of anxiety are also on the rise, which causes many symptoms which are similar to more severe mental illnesses. Which also reinforces my first point.
For example it's still not clear to me whether I consider my adhd a disorder in a vacuum. It definitely is here, I can't consistently execute the tasks that that will allow me to safely live.
But there have definitely been times and places where "weirdo who is good with kids, calm in an emergency, and knows a lot of infrequently-used-but-valuable skills" is a role people are allowed to occupy.
I'm definitely disordered within a context where each individual must labor effectively or die. There have been other arrangements though. This is probably true for some, but not all or even maybe most, mental illnesses and neurological disorders as well.
There were parts of the book, The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine Aron, which were eye-opening to me in how they illustrated facets of myself (and how they showed the human value of some of those facets). There's definitely a place in the world for fixers, watchers, and people with unusual behaviors.
I suspect there may be uniquely valuable things to be learned or received from autistic people; but we haven't figured out how to bridge the communication gap. So while most people would assume that autistic means broken or useless, it's possible that the rest of us are just not ready or not capable of comprehending what's actually available.
Other than becoming a social media influencer, what goals are young people actually striving towards? I'm not sure what you're seeing, but I'm not seeing hordes of young people crying because they're trying to become a medical researcher or engineer or achieve some other tangible goal and can't make it for some reason.
I seem to recall tiktok zoomers also eating tide pods and dying after doing the blackout challenge so maybe they do have a mental disorder.