Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

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

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

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

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

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

I think "normal" is the tough part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why go then?

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

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

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

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

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

This isn't really my original point but the reason I dislike the "you don't have ADHD you have capitalism" meme is that ADHD's intentionality symptoms isn't about attention but about self control[0]

So if you "really actually" have ADHD[0], that isn't just manifesting in not getting work done, it's manifesting in saying things before speaking, issues with addiction, issues with self-management leading to hygiene issues etc.

Loads of social effects that go beyond "don't want to work".

Me having a job or not isn't what's causing me to insult a friend by snapping back at them in a way that I _know_ is wrong. It's not causing lasting damage to social relationships because of my behavior. Capitalism isn't causing that.

And hey, meds help my management of those things. Even if I had all the money in the world these are things I would like to continue managing.

Bit of a glib opinion, though.

[0]: Not a doctor, etc.

I really hope there was a missing /s.

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

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

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

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

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

It's sarcasm.

the idea of "its capitalisms fault" is that capitalism is responsible for placing these "self control" constraints on people.

capitalism is the thing making too much choice, and to many choices over time.

capitalism set the context for you snapping at your friend, where you are doing work you dont want to to avoid being homeless, while they are doing different work and you feel like its unfair that their work is different from yours.

if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them

> if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them

These interactions are not in that sense, they are in the "I say some stupid unvarnished opinion first and immediately realize there was a better way of saying it" variety. It is not downstream of me being stressed out about money or work or whatever. These are things that happen when I am in a perfectly normal mood, not thinking about how to pay rent or whatever.

I have plenty of social failings that are very much unrelated to capitalism. I have also had bad social interactions downstream of money/capitalism/etc too! But that's its own thing

Maybe you subscribe to some grand unifying theory here but I don't. Social structures and norms existed before market capital, and they exist in spaces fairly separate from the economic sphere ("those don't exist!" you might say, but I believe they do exist, at least in a time-and-space limited fashion).

Subsuming all of my issues to capitalism is unsatisfying. Thinking about the texture of it all (and potentially identifying some things that really are linked to that, and become as solvable as gravity[0]) is more valuable to me. I think it's also valuable to others.

[0]: or political action or whatever

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

> The inability to want to sit in a chair and reorganise spreadsheets for 8 hours straight isn’t a disability

I mean sure, but that's also not what ADHD is. It's how ADHD gets described, by medical professionals too, but in my lived experience the attention deficit part of ADHD is the least bad part.

It's the executive function stuff that's real fucked up. You know how if you gotta do something you don't reaaaally wanna do it's kinda hard to get started? Imagine instead if it was nigh impossible. Imagine if it happened with things you DO want to do. All the time. On the outside you just look lazy, while on the inside you're screaming at yourself to go do the thing for hours. Imagine being unable to attain your goals specifically because they are your goals.

Imagine the only way to keep your house even slightly clean is to wait for the planets to align and give you the power to even start cleaning. Half the time it happens at 1AM, but you can either clean until 3AM and be completely fucked at work the next day or just not clean at all until the next time the planets align, which might be the next day or next month.

Imagine being told your entire life you're a lazy fuckup that's not living up to their potential.

Yeah not being able to do boring shit for 8 hours straight is normal. Not having sufficient executive function is a real handicap and being told that it's a moral failing repeatedly will really fuck up a person for a good long while.

Because sometimes you just need somewhere to be.