4 ms·

Like any good article about a psychological disorder, it will leave every reader with the sense that they also may suffer from the condition.

kayodelycaon 4y ago
It does, mostly because people don’t have context to judge the severity of their own tendencies. Psychology is kind of a mess. A great many disorders are on a spectrum from normal variation to truly severe, disabling symptoms. We also don’t know enough to definitively identify the causes of a person’s disorder. For example, many cases of depression are caused by circumstances. In those cases, depression may be an expected result. Other cases are inherited genetic defects, which no amount of circumstance can fix. Edit: definitely -> definitively
- Eleison23 4y ago
  We would know enough, except people tend to reject the philosophers and prophets who impart ancient knowledge in ways too mysterious to accept as truth.
  - kayodelycaon 4y ago
    That’s an interesting perspective. I had a few classes in philosophy but I’m not entirely sure what realm of ancient knowledge would be applicable here. Would you happen to have a Wikipedia link or two to some of the stuff you’re thinking of?
    - Eleison23 4y ago
      Ecclesiastes 1:16-18
- itronitron 4y ago
  There are two aspects to this that I find interesting, one is that disorders are described in terms of traits when they are predominantly a matter of degree, and the other is that the modern world enables these disorders to amplify to such a degree by blocking out nature, or the natural order of things, and also by producing so many durable items.
  - kayodelycaon 4y ago
    They are actually defined as a matter of degree. The traits are guidelines. If x, y, and z are outside normal range, the following could be descriptive of a known category of disorder, which guides treatments. Some disorders could simply be the result of living in a modern society. Things like clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, bipolar, schizophrenia, and some PTSD are severe enough to exclude that as a primary cause.
    - tonyarkles 4y ago
      > Some disorders could simply be the result of living in a modern society And to make the snake eat its own tail, I’d argue that some of the traits that define some disorders aren’t traits that are inherently bad, but more mismatches with the expectations of “modern society”. ADHD being a prime example: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html Compare that to, say, BPD: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3494330/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3494330/ The ADHD criteria mostly describe ways that the patient either doesn’t fit in to societal expectations (sit quietly for long periods of time, difficulty engaging in tasks that require prolonged mental effort) or the ways they annoy others (fidgeting, high energy that exhausts other people) vs. intrinsically self-harmful behaviour (unstable self-image, suicidal behaviour, feelings of emptiness). The thing that intrigued me the most about it is that these are all contextual. Someone with undiagnosed ADHD two hundred years ago world have probably gotten by just fine. They might be known as a bit “different” in their communities, but could have readily found their way. In 2022, that gets much more challenging, especially since we’ve dramatically systematized things. 200 years ago, maybe you would become an apprentice potter or blacksmith; today, if your ADHD is so bad that you can’t finish high school (not because you’re dumb, but because sitting in a quiet class room followed by going home to study makes your brain bleed), you’re going to have a really hard time finding anything but the crappiest minimum wage job for the rest of your life. Depression, BPD, bipolar, etc? Those all have the same unfortunate outcomes 200 years ago or now.
- q-big 4y ago
  > Psychology is kind of a mess. I rather quote from the jargon file (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html): "Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really ‘diseases’ rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’. So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about clinical explanations of the hacker personality."
- syntaxfree 4y ago
  We want psychology/iatry to sort out the normal from the abnormal, but that doesn’t work: normal and abnormal are fundamentally social. This is a version of the is-ought problem. In my experience (both as a walk-in consumer-patient and with friends who happen to be shrinks) psychiatry is at its best when it focus on functionality — can this person brush his teeth; can he walk among crowds (and not lose his virtue); can he hold a job, a relationship. Most gratifying for a psychiatrist in private practice (I’m told) is to watch someone go from Mozart-and-the-whale nuts to having a good career, marriage and kids. Of course, in institutional settings people want to cure madness like one cures pneumonia. That’s fundamentally dehumanizing, though.

kayodelycaon 4y ago

It does, mostly because people don’t have context to judge the severity of their own tendencies. Psychology is kind of a mess. A great many disorders are on a spectrum from normal variation to truly severe, disabling symptoms. We also don’t know enough to definitively identify the causes of a person’s disorder. For example, many cases of depression are caused by circumstances. In those cases, depression may be an expected result. Other cases are inherited genetic defects, which no amount of circumstance can fix. Edit: definitely -> definitively

Eleison23 4y ago
We would know enough, except people tend to reject the philosophers and prophets who impart ancient knowledge in ways too mysterious to accept as truth.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  That’s an interesting perspective. I had a few classes in philosophy but I’m not entirely sure what realm of ancient knowledge would be applicable here. Would you happen to have a Wikipedia link or two to some of the stuff you’re thinking of?
  - Eleison23 4y ago
    Ecclesiastes 1:16-18
itronitron 4y ago
There are two aspects to this that I find interesting, one is that disorders are described in terms of traits when they are predominantly a matter of degree, and the other is that the modern world enables these disorders to amplify to such a degree by blocking out nature, or the natural order of things, and also by producing so many durable items.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  They are actually defined as a matter of degree. The traits are guidelines. If x, y, and z are outside normal range, the following could be descriptive of a known category of disorder, which guides treatments. Some disorders could simply be the result of living in a modern society. Things like clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, bipolar, schizophrenia, and some PTSD are severe enough to exclude that as a primary cause.
  - tonyarkles 4y ago
    > Some disorders could simply be the result of living in a modern society And to make the snake eat its own tail, I’d argue that some of the traits that define some disorders aren’t traits that are inherently bad, but more mismatches with the expectations of “modern society”. ADHD being a prime example: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html Compare that to, say, BPD: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3494330/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3494330/ The ADHD criteria mostly describe ways that the patient either doesn’t fit in to societal expectations (sit quietly for long periods of time, difficulty engaging in tasks that require prolonged mental effort) or the ways they annoy others (fidgeting, high energy that exhausts other people) vs. intrinsically self-harmful behaviour (unstable self-image, suicidal behaviour, feelings of emptiness). The thing that intrigued me the most about it is that these are all contextual. Someone with undiagnosed ADHD two hundred years ago world have probably gotten by just fine. They might be known as a bit “different” in their communities, but could have readily found their way. In 2022, that gets much more challenging, especially since we’ve dramatically systematized things. 200 years ago, maybe you would become an apprentice potter or blacksmith; today, if your ADHD is so bad that you can’t finish high school (not because you’re dumb, but because sitting in a quiet class room followed by going home to study makes your brain bleed), you’re going to have a really hard time finding anything but the crappiest minimum wage job for the rest of your life. Depression, BPD, bipolar, etc? Those all have the same unfortunate outcomes 200 years ago or now.
q-big 4y ago
> Psychology is kind of a mess. I rather quote from the jargon file (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html): "Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really ‘diseases’ rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’. So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about clinical explanations of the hacker personality."
syntaxfree 4y ago
We want psychology/iatry to sort out the normal from the abnormal, but that doesn’t work: normal and abnormal are fundamentally social. This is a version of the is-ought problem. In my experience (both as a walk-in consumer-patient and with friends who happen to be shrinks) psychiatry is at its best when it focus on functionality — can this person brush his teeth; can he walk among crowds (and not lose his virtue); can he hold a job, a relationship. Most gratifying for a psychiatrist in private practice (I’m told) is to watch someone go from Mozart-and-the-whale nuts to having a good career, marriage and kids. Of course, in institutional settings people want to cure madness like one cures pneumonia. That’s fundamentally dehumanizing, though.