18 ms·

Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing th

• zug_zug 1y ago
  It's interesting because there are two diametrically opposed ways to interpret what you said One is - everybody thinks they have disorders, so just ignore that feeling it'll mess with you. The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more
  • Retric 1y ago
    Disorders are labels for things which significantly negatively impact people’s lives. Thinking of them in terms of a spectrum generally means stretching a label past the point of meaning.
    • cheschire 1y ago
      So it’s a 1 or a 0? The kid is either full autistic or just a socially maladjusted asshole? No room for a middle ground with you then?
      • Yossarrian22 1y ago
        It’s a 1 if it goes above 0.6
        • Spivak 1y ago
          You just invented 0,1 again but gave a weird label to the 1.
      • Retric 1y ago
        That’t not it, what many disorders are describing isn’t just the obvious symptoms. ICE engines heat up because they burn fuel, but if it’s overheating in normal operation that’s from something else breaking down. Not that people are so simple, but that transition point to disorder often represents a meaningful transition.
        • wredcoll 1y ago
          Much like addiction, a key facet of a "diagnosed" disorder tends to be whether or not it (negatively) affects your life. As the guy said, if you think you hear voices but they tell you to go to sleep on time and do a good job at work, you probably don't need treatment.
          • freehorse 1y ago
            > a key facet of a "diagnosed" disorder tends to be whether or not it (negatively) affects your life. Which also brings us to an important point that is totally missed in the article and most of the discussion imo: maybe one of the (many) things that have changed is that lives are more negatively affected by stuff nowadays (or more reported to be so). We live in increasingly complex societies, we have to socialise with more and more people and navigate more demanding and fluid social dynamics. Traits that can be advantageous in a certain context can be disadvantageous in another (and affect one's life negatively).
        • Mtinie 1y ago
          An engine is an assembly of parts. When an engine breaks down it does so because it broke down. An engine does not exist without its cylinders, fuel system, gaskets, lubricants, etc. I believe your analogy is flawed. Can you restate your first statement in any other way?
          • Retric 1y ago
            Someone who is clinically depressed isn’t just sad, they are unable to return to normal. Things that help normal people feel better simply fail, it’s a meaningfully different situation. Similarly treatments for depression like electroconvulsive therapy shouldn’t be applied to normal people. OCD, clinical addiction, etc are all more involved than just feeling the desire to do something. The lack of control is the issue not just the momentary impulse. Intrusive thoughts are fine, acting on them isn’t.
    • zug_zug 1y ago
      Well, if you're approaching this as a hard-scientist that's not the case (for psychology). Because "disorder" may be on a spectrum, because "negative" and "impact" may be on a spectrum. Conditions like depression follow a bell-curve, there's no clear line between depressed and not, and we can draw a line in the sand, but statistically there's no justification for where that line falls. One way to try to draw a line is "the point at which a certain intervention is no longer effective." For example studies find CBT therapy reduces depression scores for depressed people ~.8 standard deviations (for a while). But why not try CBT therapy on happy people? Maybe it's even more effective on people who are already happy. Well the reason why not is likely just because of the clumsy nature of healthcare -- interventions are thought of as "treatments" for "conditions", even though that lens doesn't always make sense.
      • Retric 1y ago
        > there's no clear line between depressed and not There’s a meaningful line in the sand for treatments with major side effects. CBT therapy may be “fine” for normal people, but the most effective treatment for depression is ECT which has major side effects. Including a ~1 in 50k chance of death. Saying something is a bell curve distribution is an approximation, it doesn’t mean there’s actually a continuous function out to infinity and negative infinity.
        • pseudalopex 1y ago
          When to resort to ECT is a subjective decision of doctor and patient. It is clear it should come after other treatments failed. But there is no clear line.
          • Retric 1y ago
            Everything is subjective at the margins, but that’s ignoring the clear cut examples where it’s not going to be considered.
            • pseudalopex 1y ago
  • gg82 1y ago
    The other idea is that people who go into the field are screwed up themselves... and are trying to work out how to treat/understand themselves.
  • orn688 1y ago
    In my experience the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's helpful to neither completely ignore nor ruminate over one's traits, but just _be aware_ of them. It's been very helpful for me to pay attention to and think about how my own personality compares to others'. For example, I tend to be a people-pleaser, but I used to think that everyone was just as people-pleasing as me, which only reinforced the people-pleasing because I didn't feel right putting my own needs first when everyone else was already sacrificing their own needs (or so I assumed). At the same time, medicalizing these things paints them as "abnormal" disorders that need to be "cured", overlooking any of the positives these traits bring. When it comes to my people-pleasing, I like it about myself that I care about others. As long as I recognize that it sometimes comes at my own expense, I can begin to make more conscious decisions about when to allow the people-pleasing to flow versus when to try to subdue it.
    • deleted 1y ago
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  • rf15 1y ago
    there's a third: everyone wants to feel special and also takes any excuse to not have to work on their flawed habits
    • zug_zug 1y ago
      There's an odd presumption there... It sounds like you're presuming those who put a label on themselves don't want to change themselves at all; one could also imagine that those who put a label on themselves want to change themselves most of all
      • zakki 1y ago
        >>>who put a label on themselves don't want to change themselves at all<<< Maybe that wasn't the intention but label does shape perception.
      • rf15 1y ago
        Those who see and believe that there's a label to parts of them can easily believe that they're "helpless", and "that's just the way I am"
        • pseudalopex 1y ago
          Those who do not see or do not believe a label can easily believe that's just the way they are. Those who see and believe a label can easily use it to identify what they can do to help themselves.
          • DisruptiveDave 1y ago
            the ol' "name and tame"
        • const_cast 1y ago
          > "helpless", and "that's just the way I am" These don't mean the same thing. You can be the thing you are and not be helpless. For example, if you have ADHD that's just a part of who you are. That doesn't mean you can't take medication or form processes to help yourself and mitigate the effects of ADHD. Also, in my experience, people who choose to never label themselves are not better off. They typically do have some sort of condition, sometimes multiple, and they actively choose to do nothing about it because they're in extreme denial. I see this with parents all the time. "My kids doesn't have ADHD! Stop trying to label him!". Okay great, but little Timmy is about to flunk out at fucking third grade. Let's do something about it.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • jaredklewis 1y ago
    > The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more What if the first part of this is true (we all have a smattering of disorders), but thinking about them more just makes things worse?
    • tonyedgecombe 1y ago
      There is even an argument that putting a label on something will allow them to think less about it. They can put it away in a box rather than continually beating themselves up over it.
  • esperent 1y ago
    > everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more I think this is subtly incorrect. I would phrase it this way: > everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do... And they think that makes them different and therefore deserving of special treatment. We all live on continuums of mental health, and reflecting on that is important. But it's unrelated to what's happening here, there's not much reflection, just self labelling and demanding special treatment based on these labels. Someone strongly on the autism spectrum absolutely needs special treatment, some just a little, some a lot. But somebody who watches a TikTok about autism and recognizes, or thinks they recognize, similar behaviors in themselves, does not need it (except in the few cases where it is actually undiagnosed autism, of course, but that's a very small minority).
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it. This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok. There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Many young people lean into this and label everything as a defensive tactic. A while ago, one of the trends was “time blindness”. People who were chronically late, missed meetings, or failed to manage their time would see TikToks about “time blindness” as if it was a medical condition, and self-diagnose as having that. It was bizarre to suddenly have people missing scheduled events and then casually informing me that they had time blindness, as if that made it okay. Once they had a label for a condition, they felt like they had a license to escape accountability. The most frustrating part was that the people who self-diagnosed as having “time blindness” universally got worse at being on time. Once they had transformed the personal problem into a labeled condition, they didn’t feel as obligated to do anything about it.
  • dataflow 1y ago
    Can't you just tell them to give you a doctor's note and then you'll figure out how to accommodate?
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • Brian_K_White 1y ago
    Oh you have time blindness? How unfortunate! That's just like my check-writing blindness I just got.
  • dsubburam 1y ago
    This parallels the debate about free will and determinism. If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions? Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can: "Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1] i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too. If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual. [1] https://philarchive.org/archive/HOBFWA https://philarchive.org/archive/HOBFWA
• nelox 1y ago
  Precisely. I would posit that many of those are no different from those who start studying psychology formally struggle with statistics because it requires a shift from intuitive, qualitative thinking to rigorous, quantitative analysis, which can be challenging for those without prior exposure. Psychology curricula often include courses in statistical methods or research design, which demand skills in mathematical reasoning, data interpretation, and abstract concepts like probability distributions or hypothesis testing. These topics can feel alien to students drawn to psychology for its focus on human behaviour and emotions rather than numbers.
• stevenAthompson 1y ago
  The author's concerns would mostly all be ameliorated by logging out of TikTok and never logging back in. They seem to think that "TikTok" and "Society" are synonyms. They are not.
  • Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
    you seem unaware that over 60% (150M) of the US uses tiktok and around 70% of that (100M) are 18-30. it's unclear on the < 18 numbers but likely a significant number. i don't think it's unreasonable, particularly when she qualifies gen-z, to conflate tiktok and society. it's really out of hand. the brain rot, beyond just the psych labeling she touches on, is crazy.
    • pmg101 1y ago
      What do you mean by "brain rot"?
      • hyperadvanced 1y ago
        Generally it means “deterioration of creative or critical thought capabilities into facile but engaging substitutes for thought” - usually it means something like “taking the algorithm home with you; letting yourself become one with the endless torrent of memes that infinite scroll platforms hand pick and deliver into your brain”
    • socalgal2 1y ago
      70% of 100M is 70M. There are not 70m 18-30yr olds in the USA.
      • Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
        there's 28% gen z in the US. that's roughly 94M and 70M are on tiktok
        • lodovic 1y ago
• jjani 1y ago
  > But there are a few things we can learn from this: > - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it. This is almost the opposite of what we can learn about this, and the article does a great job at pointing that out. It's a very recent social phenomenon. Yes, that contradicts your abnornal psych class, but think about it. 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)? In elementary, middle and high schools, at the workplace, in other majors? IME absolutely not, very much the opposite. The only ones who did so were the diagnosed, and then only mentioned it when very relevant. Let alone 100 years ago. Let alone the massive differences between different regions/cultures in desire for uniqueness, both historical and uniqueness. This is a massive sociocultural phenomenon, absolutely not something inherent to the human psyche. Almost no one is born this way (strong desire to make themselves feel unique).
  • NoPicklez 1y ago
    I don't think its necessarily untrue. 20 years ago you didn't open your phone to see videos by anyone that called themselves a therapist or psychologist say you might have ADHD if you have these xyz common signs. Or if you struggle to have difficult conversations with your partner you might have grown up in a chaotic household. All very loose, quick and ambiguous explanations that do not provide any balance. If someone sees it and goes "Oh gosh that loosely explains why I do xyz" they will take it, because is confirming something or its providing an answer to something they deem they struggle with that they didn't have any answer for before. It's part of the human psyche to try and understand and answer things and we have a confirmation bias that limits our ability to think of both sides of the coin, not just the one that's constantly popping up on our mobile phones from so called therapists.
  • esperent 1y ago
    > 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic The labels people use follow trends. Labelling (self or others) as autistic or on the spectrum is relatively new, but there have been trends for other disorders in the past. Neurotic, depressed, anal retentive, even phrenology - people worrying that the shape of their cheekbones mean they must be genetically stupid, or applying that to others. We have evidence of such trends going back 100 years at least, and probably more. For sure, social media has amplified and homogenized things, as it does. But it's not a new phenomenon.
• m463 1y ago
  I remember someone telling me a story of a horoscope type thing that was handed out to people in class after ascertaining their birthdate. People were asked to comment and thought things were accurate... until the professor had everyone compare their horoscopes. Theire identical horoscopes.
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• muzani 1y ago
  My parents did psychology and they always warned us about this. Bayesianism helps but isn't taught well enough in school. Basically, we fail to handle the false positive and false negatives into the calculation, and this happens a lot with psychologists as well. This is really the point where people say untrained 'professionals' are dangerous - they can't evaluate that inaccuracy of the diagnosis itself. This is the best explanation I've seen so far: https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-explanation-of-bayes-theorem/ https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-...
  • pramodbiligiri 1y ago
    That's a good one. Some people might like the "odds" based version of Bayes' theorem: https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-bayes-theorem-with-ratios/ https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-bayes-the...
• EGreg 1y ago
  The word “disorder” is loaded, but it is interesting to also look through the lens of the Social Theory of Disability. For the rise in diagnoses for autism, ADD, gender dysphoria, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia etc. Just as we now view the historical labeling of women as suffering from “hysteria” as a systemic failure, not a personal pathology, we should interrogate whether current diagnostic regimes will look just as crude and institutionally convenient in 50 years Many social and health-related challenges we label today as “disorders” may in fact be downstream responses to structural issues in how society is organized — education, labor, healthcare, media, food, and housing. It’s worth asking: what if we’re pathologizing reactions to a sick system? Generations identifying as trans: Gen Z: 2.8% Millennials: 1.0% Gen X: 0.3% Baby Boomers: 0.2% Silent Generation: <= 0.05% A lot of it has to do not with the label itself but with the industry. Where someone in the past would be called a “tomboy” or “femboy” today they would have a different diagnosis, the DSM-5 would be consulted, etc. Similarly with ADHD if a kid would have been called “rambunctious”, today they might be labeled as having a “disorder” and medicated with literal amphetamines, instead of for instance reforming public schools. (To be clear, I am talking not about exteme/acute cases but overdiagnosis of relatively mild cases.) We can look at other examples (eg Finland’s schools where children can climb trees and have much lower ADHD diagnosis rate) as one way to compare. Or in the past, anorexia and eating disorders were a form of body dysmorphia, and some such images were actually promoted by industries such as fashion modeling or ballet performance. And when I say promoted - I mean also heavily enforced within the industry itself. Industry in USA works with government, together. For example the factory farms (overusing antibiotics, abusing animals) and ag-gag orders, criminalizing whistleblowing and exposing them. Or monsanto and intellectual property enforcement. Or pistachio farmers in CA and water shortages. Or bottling companies and clothing companies putting out metric tons of plastics and microplastics, while regular people are told they can’t have a straw or a bag, and must recycle (itself revealed to be mostly a govt+industrial scam, shipped to China etc.) This is across the board. Obesity and diabetes are a major epidemic in USA but instead of questioning high fructose corn syrup, highly processed starches and sugars in everything, people are told they can fix things themselves with diet and exercise. Actually it has been shown that obesity and disabetes in mothers is correlated with autism in their children. It has been shown that there was a serious correlation between obesity, diabetes and covid morbidity but the latter was taken extremely seriously but the former is not. Same with plastic recycling, etc. or going vegan. Or buying free range. Or whataver. The individual is kept distracted. In USA medicating things downstream is the default. One in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. Teenage girls have the highest levels of “sadness” (most outlets don’t want to say depression) etc. Of course when it comes to depression and gender dysphoria we get extra political sensitivity due to activism around those issues. Of the usual character: the INDIVIDUAL is the one that has to make all the downstream adjustments and cope with the SYSTEMIC upstream issues, which are not questioned much. The individual is even told to embrace their label and tell others it is great (eg “big is beautiful” for obesity, celebrating the result instead of reforming the system). Until AI takes the jobs, the social compact has become: both parents have had to work for corporations, to afford the expenses that could previously be paid by one “breadwinner” in the family working for corporations. And they stick their kids in public schools and elderly parents into nursing homes. And then medicate them if they don’t like it, because the DSM 5, school administrators or nursing homes staff say that this is the best way. Everyone is afraid to speak up against the system, they would rather perpetuate it and cover their own ass. There was a time when people derided USSR people for drinking a lot to cope with the failures of their economic system. But now with men on opiates, women on antidepressants, high rates of teen suicide ideation, elderly and kids being medicated — perhaps we should rethink our own economic system. There are a lot of “problems” that people are experiencing and it may be from upstream systemic causes. But they are kept distracted by govt and corporations with the idea that they can fix it by their individual actions, which include recycling, dieting, and placing a label on themselves that the industry then helpfully gives them medications to manage it.
• deleted 1y ago
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• rikroots 1y ago
  When I first discovered that I suffered from a "new" condition called Prosopagnosia - by means of an online "Are you face blind?" test - everything about my life suddenly fell into place. It was a liberating self-diagnosis which gave me permission to admit that it was some small malformations in my brain that were the cause of my troubles, not some selfish malformations in my personality and social skills. Of course a self-diagnosis is not enough. I discovered my condition while it was still in the early stages of research. I signed up to be a guinea pig for researchers, and got paid a handsome £20/hour to undertake various tests (including brain scans - I still have a 3d image of my brain stored in a box somewhere) to help people better understand the underlying causes of the condition. It was fun for a while, until some of the tests got more disturbing. I also got to learn about the coping strategies I had already developed, and how to use them in better ways to help lessen the impact of the condition on my social interactions.
  • vladms 1y ago
    Glad it somehow worked out for you. I find it very sad though that you felt somehow "guilty" (based on "selfish malformations in my personality and social skills"), which I would see as a toxic society pressure. Not sure how, since as long as I can remember I thought all people are different, so it's just about finding some that you like and that can also accept you. I don't want to force my quirks and preferences on others, but they don't get to do that either. Of course that can mean some periods and/or situations when you are not part of "the group", but looking back, although it did not feel cool all the time, that was mostly beneficial, got to know more people and do more stuff while looking for people I like.
    • rikroots 1y ago
      Developmental prosopagnosia wasn't recognised as a "thing" before the late 2000s. Before that, everybody assumed that being able to recognise someone was just something everyone, well, did. Failure to recognise a friend or relative in the street was seen as an affront, or a deliberate snub. Failure to recognise famous people in films or on the TV was something to be ridiculed. Prosopagnosiacs quickly learn coping strategies growing up in such a world, but those recognition mechanisms are significantly slower: they don't solve the problem. It is amazing how upset even the most decent and understanding of people can get when they feel you've slighted them in some way. Having someone (you like/respect/love/etc) screaming abuse at you in the middle of the street because you failed to respond to their greeting, because you didn't recognise them and realise they were saying hello specifically to you ... is humiliating. Not knowing why this situation was happening on a regular basis - can you blame me for thinking that it was my fault? That I wasn't a reasonable, decent person? That the things being screamed in my face were accurate? Hence my relief when discovering there was a label for my condition. Though, sadly, no cure.
• throwaway2037 1y ago
  > now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses. As I understand, this is mostly affecting young women who are much more mimetic than young men. Is this also affecting men at (nearly?) the same rates? I don't see a lot of short form video content from men talking about their emotional issues. However, there is virtually unlimited content from women. To be clear about my comment: I am not trying to be anti-women here, just point out a trend that I see.
• KolibriFly 1y ago
  The problem now is that the internet flattens that nuance
• satoru42 1y ago
  This explains why the MBTI shit is so popular these days.
• uncircle 1y ago
  According to Google, any physical symptom is indicative of cancer. According to social media, any personality quirk is indicative of ADHD. I am diagnosed ADHD from a qualified professional, took medication, found it a great help, and I’ve come around to believe it’s all bullshit. Yeah, you have ADHD symptoms, yeah it’s disrupting your life, yeah you cannot find concentration and motivation. No, you’re not special. You’re not genetically born with pre-frontal cortex deficiencies. It’s, simply enough, an epidemic of massive proportions. We’ve created a society of distracted, gratified, unsocialised lazy squirrels all but interacting with the world through a piece of magic glass; what do you expect?
  • ryuker16 1y ago
    I was diagnosed adhd well before mobile phones. Also, mri scans show adhd so yes, it is a prefrontal cortex deficiency. Let me give you some old man advice. Untreated adhd feels sutble to the person but its not subtle to everyone around you. You think your calm but come off like a zany, pacing autistic person or incredibly anxious. Alcohol and drugs can make you even more spazzy or impulsive. Dont believe me? Go ask friends and coworkers how you come off. Your going to be shocked, trust me. Every adhd person i met who told me what you just said was a spazzy mess or incredibly rigid/disciplined/control freak to counter act the adhd. They were rarely away how much of a spazz we come off as even with treatment.
• seethedeaduu 1y ago
  The "tiktok self diagnosis" thing is more like a moral panic. It is not really an attempt to feel unique and healthcare professionals would do a lot of good to their patients if they understood this.
• msgodel 1y ago
  At least as of one decade ago psych professors still give that warning. I remember being warned not to do that in psych 102. It's always bothered me a little that everyone seems to completely ignore it.
• docmars 1y ago
  I think this is exacerbated by the acute rise in real autism cases (not self-diagnosed) going from 1 in 10,000 clear to 1 in 31 cases in children, in the span of 50 years. As people learn there's something gravely wrong with how they interact with others, struggle with social situations, etc. — and they validate that by observing enough "normal" people interacting or watch enough Hollywood entertainment depicting perfectly rehearsed conversations — in desperation, they seek a remedy in everything from personality systems ("everything must be labeled and explained") to psychiatric treatment just to cope with the lack of frequent, validating, normal interactions; and in many cases, aren't improving because of how isolated their lives have become. This is something I've observed in my own life and in friends who share similar challenges.
• watwut 1y ago
  > if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it. Where do you see uniqueness? If anything, it seems to me that people are making themselves not unique, but more of "someone who is part of large group of same like individuals".
• account42 1y ago
  > People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle. This is part of the cause of the current situation though - that putting labels on yourself gets you more empathy than you would have gotten as a "normal" person.
• LoveMortuus 1y ago
  I always saw these labels as limitations, like if you say that you're a vegan, you can't eat all the other stuff. It was because of that point of view that I always avoided labeling myself or my behaviour, because (in my mind) I did not want to be limited. But I guess I'm the odd one.