6 ms·

I am absolutely sure that if I had been given the out of ‘having anxiety’ as a young adult, my life would’ve gone very differently, and probably very much worse

• jcims 5y ago
  I’m struggling with this now with one of my children. All of the professional/medical support she is receiving is reinforcing the same notion and I’m left with nothing but an intuition that it’s ultimately destructive or at least limiting. She has been and still is going through some tremendously stressful situations however and I’m trying to balance that against the fact that more stress is on the way. I completely agree with you but it’s tough.
  • redis_mlc 5y ago
  • d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
    This is a tough one and also one of my fears with my child. Take comfort in knowing that despite how powerful external forces may seem that you as her parent have an even more powerful influence. A wise man once told me "kids will never ever do what you say but will always do what you do". I would show her that obstacles are intrinsic to life. We are wired for struggle. Our struggles are what define us. Even when we have no struggles we tend to manufacture them just so we can overcome them and give meaning to our life. If she wants to give her struggle a label as x condition then that's fine, what matters is what her path should be to overcome that condition. Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot, especially in "12 Rules For Life" and in his lectures about his daughter's medical condition. I couldn't find the relevant quote but he touches on it in this lecture segment [1] [1] - https://youtu.be/VrNM-JCGGfI https://youtu.be/VrNM-JCGGfI
    • jcims 5y ago
      Thank you, I appreciate it. Will definitely check it out.
    • throwaway1280 5y ago
      Just letting you know that I downvoted you not because of the advice - which is pretty good - but because of the link to Jordan Peterson, who is generally a pretty nasty pseudo-intellectual piece of work.
      • d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
        Thank you for your opinion. I figured a lot of people would have mixed feelings about him but I wanted to give credit to where the advice was coming from. Personally, I've gotten a lot of value from his work.
      • throwanem 5y ago
        With enough of a benzo habit that he had to detox in an induced coma, besides. Can happen to anyone, of course, and it's not necessarily a reflection on character in its own right, but it is worth taking some thought on the value of advice on how to keep your life together when it comes from someone who's demonstrated such an inability to keep his own life together. Even on the simplest things - his constant line is "clean your room", and every time you see him on a Zoom interview from home it's wall-to-wall clutter in the background. Granted, "clean your room" is pretty uncontroversial, and is good advice - as is that you should pet a cat when you find the chance. But, in this as in everything else, epistemology matters: you do want to consider the source.
• fragmede 5y ago
  Having it as an out is doing it wrong and totally missing the point. It's a framework for understanding yourself/the patient, and how they behave, and not as an excuse for poor behavior. That's not to deny that some people certainly use it that way, but anything, including treatment plans, can be misused.
  • wisty 5y ago
    It's not a question of whether it's misused. It's whether it's misused so often that it's a bad idea. And while I hope most professionals can be trusted to use it appropriately, I think the whole "awareness" thing makes a lot of laypeople (including self-diagnosed people and people connected to them or actual patients) misused it horribly. The latest I've seen is "mental health days". I'm sure some professionals would advocate taking some time off in specific circumstances, but is it wise to reward yourself for being stressed by having a holiday? That seems about as wise as telling an alcoholic to take sick leave as a reward for their big hangovers. I'm not a mental health professional, but the people who give advice on taking "mental health days" do not seem to be either. And that's just the latest one that bugged me. There's an endless list of advice (both for people with mental illness, and people around them) that seems to be vaguely related to mental health advice, but isn't, and it's accepted because it sounds "nice".
    • adamweld 5y ago
      I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say, what's wrong with advocating for people to take personal time off when they are feeling burnt out or tired from repetitive stress? I'm struggling to understand why that's misuse or in anyway similar to an alcoholic.
      • lazyasciiart 5y ago
        He thinks people cause their own stress at work.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
• d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
  That and the cultural norm that we're creating around mental illnesses. I mean, it's great that the few who truly do have mental disorders can be accepted socially but what are we doing to the thousands of kids that just need some structural social target to aim at? Personally, I was an emotional basket case until well after college when I decided that I should give the "be normal" thing a try. Turns out being normal makes a lot of things easier in life. It's amazing how much freedom you have to be weird on the inside when you're normal on the outside.
  • jimkleiber 5y ago
    I try to see things less from a "mental health" perspective and more from an "emotional health" one. I'd be really curious to see how people who work as psychologists and psychiatrists might delineate between a mental health issue and an emotional health issue. Perhaps it's just semantics and they wouldn't see a difference, I guess I'm just looking for ways to address some emotional challenges separately from potential mental health challenges.
  • stadium 5y ago
    How do you define being "normal?". How do you manage the tension between your inward and outward presentations of yourself? It seems exhausting, and that's coming from someone who does that currently and idealizes some magical place when those selves merge into the same person. That's "normal" to me, when I don't have to put masks on to fit into a preconceived notion of who society wants me to be. That's also a big part of mental health, not boxing people into mental disorder diagnoses, but helping people figure themselves out and be comfortable in their own skin.
    • d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
      I define "normal" as things like wearing unremarkable clothing, eating at trendy restaurants, going sightseeing, saying grace at family dinners, keeping a decent job, bringing food to parties, keeping my lawn tidy, driving an unremarkable car, learning the art of small talk, etc. People use these things to calibrate their interactions with a person they're meeting for the first time. Once people see you as "normal" they're more prone to listen when you start throwing out the weird ideas.
• adamweld 5y ago
  I don't know anyone who thinks of 'having anxiety' as an out, identifying it as something that's negatively impacting your life is just the first step in making changes to reduce its presence. Furthermore the vast majority of people, with or without mental illness, are happier and more supported with some amount of therapy. If you can get that from your friends/partner alone, great, but often times it's quite beneficial for your relationships to take some of that emotional burden off of those people as well. I'm quite concerned about the rate of medication being prescribed these days, often as a band-aid fix when people really are in need of serious life/habit changes. But I'm really surprised by the amount of people in this thread talking down on psychology and psychotherapy.
  • raffraffraff 5y ago
    Someone I know has social anxiety. They told me that when they read about it and could finally give it a name, it really helped. Up to that point, they just felt like they were an oddball. They couldn't really explain to anyone, which made it feel like they couldn't get help or do anything constructive about it. Being able to name it lets you know that other people also have it. It can help you feel more "normal". It can help you research ways to work with it. Of course, falling back on a diagnosed condition and using it as a crutch or an excuse for bad behaviour can be awful. I used to know a person with BPD, who absolutely loved being able to let herself off the hook for terrible behaviour. She would easily make friends, and sometimes would keep them for a few years. But eventually, one by one and sometimes in groups, they would cut her out of their lives because she was utterly toxic and selfish. So naming your problem can be positive or negative, but I think that depends on the nature of the problem.
    • leoedin 5y ago
      I found putting a name to anxiety helped a great deal. I spent most of my childhood not really sure why some situations filled me with crippling fear - and felt like a failure because of it. As an adult I've realised it's a form of anxiety - and also that anxiety definitely runs in my mother's family. I think my teenage years would have been easier if my family had been willing to talk about our anxiety rather than just pretend it didn't exist. There is of course a danger that the diagnosis becomes an excuse - which is a particular problem with something like social anxiety where (at least in my experience) the only path to improvement is to face your fear and do whatever you're anxious about.
• stadium 5y ago
  Consider that maybe you had some luck, good fortune, or support structures that helped you pull yourself out of your anxiety, and it didn't turn inward on you. Anxiety is not a disorder that causes or relates to introversion or extroversion. Glad you're in a good place now but be careful on pumping yourself up at the expense of people who are truly struggling with anxiety. It's a mothafuka, not an out.
• sornaensis 5y ago
  If my parents had noticed that I had severe social anxiety they might have considered getting me help and I potentially wouldn't have ended up as disconnected and friendless as I have via being enabled for much of my life. I didn't know anxiety was a treatable condition until I was 21. And I've only been able to actually go get help years after that.
  • telxosss 5y ago
    No doubt. To me all this relates to an implicit dualism and just not taking mental health seriously still. I just don't think we ever will while viewing the mind as one thing and the body as another. There will always be this bias that we would consider morally really off if discussing a "physical" health problem. Even being aware of this I have a bias with typing out "mental health" without realizing it. We are probably doomed until "brain health" replaces "mental health" in common language. I had really bad social anxiety about a decade ago but the treatment for my ingrown toe nail was so much better and taken more seriously than a problem with my brain. The first person I went to about it had a community college degree and said they didn't believe in medication. Just incredible.
• medstrom 5y ago
  On the other hand if you have an undiagnosed disorder, you may live your life never being your own friend, always fighting with what you see as character flaws. This leaves you stuck in a rut until the diagnosis, which finally lets you look at and apply constructive solutions.
• Cass 5y ago
  A diagnosis of anxiety is usually not an out but the beginning of the hard work of improvement. The generally accepted treatment for anxiety is therapy that will encourage you to put yourself into manageable but challenging situations where you can practice overcoming your fears, while finding and rooting out the mental fallacies that those fears are originating from. No competent medical professional would've told you "You have anxiety, so go sit at home neglecting your social life." That's the OPPOSITE of what people with anxiety should be doing.
  • Retric 5y ago
    I doubt these apps are providing high quality mental counseling.