i mean they were, if you got lucky.
If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that they did and just simply passed it forward or didn't talk about it.
i don't know what the ratios are but a LOT of people fell through the cracks.
it's just that the birth rate was high enough to continue the population growth, and there were socially acceptable ways to ignore the inconvenient problems (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)
it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.
now the stigma is gone and we're finding EXPLICIT paths to treatment, tolerance, and embracement of mental health, neuroatypical brains, spectrums, etc. Is there overpathologizing? Maybe? Hard to know! The stigmas still aren't gone. Go read the comments on any video providing tips on how to parent children on the spectrum and see neurotypicals freaking out about how soft the current generation is.
the western world seems to have peaked in tolerance in the 2010s, and is now backsliding into authoritarianism and fascism. that's trying to recreate a lot of those original support systems (by destroying the new ones). It's a bold plan, let's see how it happens.
The people who, according to your theory, want to reverse the tolerance trend and slide towards fascism/authoritarianism didn't pop out today. They existed and lived in society in the 2010s too. So, from a logical standpoint, what changed?
By definition roughly half the population in any society must belong to a below average family and/or below average communities.
And it seems pretty likely that those with below average capacities at handling, processing, reflecting, etc., on these issues would be concentrated there.
I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.
The algorithms are promoting those views?
The views of people you are trying to label as fascist are more accurately described as individualism vs welfare state.
Anecdotally, the people I know who have become most immersed in therapy speak are also the most socially connected. The therapy speak and associated language have become tools for establishing themselves within their social support system, communicating cries for help, and even trying to use therapy terms to shield themselves from accountability for their actions by transforming it into a therapy session.
In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression, the "help" out there is criminal. It is not a disease we have a cure for, in fact it's not clear to me it's even a disease in most sufferers, but a healthy and rational response to societal decay. I do not believe some disorders will ever be satisfactorily explained by individual-centric medicine, in the same way history will never be satisfactorily explained by great man theory.
I disagree! There was never a good support system at all. We used to just man up and live with it. Now that stress is reaching it's new heights. We can't cope with it.
In my parents’ time in a (then) Dutch colony, nobody was diagnosed with anything (that was only for crazies), but all the men knew how being hit with a belt felt (daughters were spared, from what I’ve been told). Self-medicating with alcohol and beating your kids if they ‘misbehaved’ was just the done thing, as far as I’ve been told.
This is to say that anyone who showed (what we would now identify as) neurodivergent behaviour probably would’ve been beaten, but this then wouldn’t have precluded them from going on to start a family and business (and maybe beat their own kids).
Actually, this is probably still how it works in many parts of the world. Even here in the Netherlands, beating your children was only outlawed as recently as 2007.
You don't even get social benefits, no one excuses your behavior just because it has a label. You get told it's your fault for not managing your disorder properly. Have you seen how we treat people with visible, obvious, undeniable disabilities? Like shit.
In my perspective, it's less about what you should or shouldn't do; its about making sure that question is down to your individual morality.
what you're describing is survivor's bias.
1) the most talented people with cognitive differences made it out for sure. But not every person on the spectrum is "amazing with technology" in a useful way. But not all are, and the ones that weren't just didn't make it. Today they do.
2) those people still needed luck. Luck that they were able to come up in a society that didn't expect more from them than to perform a "function". Things like meeting a spouse were "easier" because there was a more rigorous social structure. Depending on which society this was in, potentially to the detriment of your grandmother who didn't have a lot of choices.
2b) and luck that the community around them accepted them. That wasn't JUST because he was a farmer, it's also because he hit the other markers of inclusion whether he wanted to or not.
People in that day and age were not cognitively free. Is cognitive freedom preferable? Well that's the question of our age. We weren't supposed to just kill god and stop. We were supposed to replace a new humanist secular philosophy to replace the theology to find purpose to humanity.
We didn't, society is now full of anxiety and malaise, and the right wing is rising promising to fix it by a RVTRN to the old ways regardless of who they harm.
I claim the DSM-5 is why. We changed diagnostic criteria then we diagnosed. People who used to be "normal" were suddenly "undiagnosed until late in life." But the people themselves hadn't changed much, just the diagnostic criteria.
Very anecdotal which makes me think this: immediate physical stressors like exercise are uncomfortable but I get through them fine. Chronic stressors like climate change are totally ruining my quality of life.
Economic anxiety could be the big one, and people don’t see the end of the tunnel.
Most people suffered, and made the ones around them suffer as well. On top of that, you are in no position to move to an “average” position on the behavior spectrum, because it’s fundamentally outside your biological operational parameters.
There are TONS of relations which were kept in place, because of society, keeping people who made each other worse, in permanent proximity.
Survivorship bias is real.
We’re the ones who inherited the world with more knowledge than past generations, it’s up to us to do better with it. This will include getting better at diagnosing.
For self diagnosing, I have no idea what to do.
The media apparatus in America has split into a center and left, and then a right wing which has different norms and produces its own products.
That in turn has created a durable political coalition that self referentially calls itself when it needs to support its descriptions on reality.
It’s significantly more effective at producing narratives, and moving ideas from the fringes to the main stream news channels.
Since it has little traffic with the left and center media channels, it avoids counter claims and norms on journalistic standards.
So you can now primary Bipartisan politicians, and then the ideas that gain media attention are the ones that reinforces party talking points. Counter views simply do not get air time.
What we are seeing today, is the progression of those forces, as the narratives are never challenged.
But yeah it's an interesting question, and with the Internet as well. The 1980s world I grew up in as a kid (in Czechia) was more dangerous than the Internet-focused world of today; yet young people seem to be more stressed by the latter.
My classically-autistic son who needs a lot of support apparently has the same disorder as a nerdy guy who comes across as a bit abrasive, doesn't understand the point of small talk, and would rather work on Linux kernel patches on a Saturday night than hit the town.
Stress is caused by our internal perspective of our problems, not by some external unchanging measure of it.
Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
Regardless of how bad things are, we still have hope, both as individuals and as a civilization.
Slightly more seriously, things will be on an upward trajectory until they aren’t. There are some decent reasons to think we might be nearing the peak.
Would your grandfather have been so well integrated if his problems had not been offset by such ability?
Whoa now. That may be true within a strict scope of the "arithmetic mean" definition of "average", however, the idea of average as a 'concept' is much older. As an easy example, early references to agrarian yields (crop farming and how much food they produce) talk about average size of crop harvests, etc. Early tablets from Mesopotamia talk about average yield size, and those are dated 700ish BC.
My partner is disabled and her transplanted kidney is failing. She will, in the next year or two, need dialysis and then a kidney transplant. Her Medicaid will be cut. The hospital she goes to will be closed. Both as a result of a bill that just passed. The average kidney transplant out of pocket costs $250,000, and because her first transplant happened before she met me, my insurance will deny her coverage because it's a pre-existing condition. We are in the process of trying to move to a different location, get her a job while she's going through kidney failure (not easy since nobody wants to hire a sick person, and definitely not at a workload that would give them benefits), and I'm in the process of trying to move us out of the country (I'm a dual citizen, she is not, so that's holding things up).
At what point in that is despair not a logical emotion, even when we're doing something about it? What is illogical about being so overwhelmed with circumstances that it makes you question whether waking up tomorrow is a net positive or negative? Please explain.
ancient men and women coped with existential fear by either embracing that everything is a cycle, or inventing some semblance of immortality by raising children or believing in life after death.
I guess I have no stress about climate change because it seems very normal to me that society and biosystems occasionally collapse. The stress comes from thinking there's something that can be done to stop it, and feeling that you're unable to achieve it. Maybe that's me throwing my hands up and accepting death instead of trying to stave it off, I just want to throw out there that the stress is self imposed, not environmental.
There is a significant meaning to my claim, which is that it's unconvincing to make exactly the sort of "it has always worked out before" argument that you're making here.
Turns out that the poorer a nation is, the less reported autism they have. That could be because there is no benefit to the diagnosis or it could be because they have less healthcare in general and a real diagnosis can easily take 4-8 hours of clinical time.
Interesting either way.
If they're faking it for benefits they are REALLY committed to the bit.
No we don't. Evidence: falling birthrates is the society collectively deciding that live ain't worth it. Personally, I think this is the real reason why we don't see aliens - any advanced civilisation will eventually reach a point where it realizes that life ain't worth it.
Therapy, and psychology in general, is one of the weakest areas of science, still based mostly on mysticism, large personalities, and weak statistical correlations. And that is assuming you even can get a "good" therapist, and not some schmuck who just happened to nab the degree.
I would go so far as to say that 90%+ of problems that are served in therapy sessions are better served by the regular participants in an intimate social network, friends and family, than some "expert" who is incentivized, knowingly or not, to send you into the pharmaceutical pipeline or, as this article describes, hand you a bunch of random labels you can forever use to psychologically handicap yourself with.