←back to thread

Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

(www.freyaindia.co.uk)
540 points drankl | 3 comments | 06 Jul 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.772s | source
Show context
iambateman ◴[06 Jul 25 23:26 UTC] No.44485087[source]▶
As a child, my dad’s brother fell out of a bunk bed and got a traumatic brain injury that would kill him 15 years later.

My dad experienced real trauma but was told to bottle it up. After 30 years, he finally went to counseling and it was transformational for him.

By contrast, I had some mean fifth grade classmates who still live in my head in uncomfortable social situations…

Did my dad have trauma and need to put a “label” on it? Yep. Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...

As a society, we’re responding to the fact that a lot of our family and friends are living with the weight of a past which haunts them or psychological challenges which deeply affects their ability to relate to the world.

I think it’s ok to be overweight on therapy-talk. Kind of like how a little too much inflation is ok after a long period of zero inflation…

But I do think we should let younger people have more time before they get labeled/diagnosed. There’s a lot of 15 year olds who are just kinda weird…

replies(4): >>44485301 #>>44485703 #>>44486231 #>>44488095 #
1. bigDinosaur ◴[07 Jul 25 02:36 UTC] No.44486231[source]▶
How does a TBI kill someone 15 years later? Do you mean that it caused a suicide or was it a physiological sequela?
replies(1): >>44487896 #
2. Fluorescence ◴[07 Jul 25 08:15 UTC] No.44487896[source]▶
It can mean they suffered serious health problems for 15 years until a particularly bad seizure or some such took them. TBI can cause long-term conditions like epilepsy, physical disability, organ dysfunction, sleep problems etc.

I was very struck reading about about a mass-shooting "survivor" dying 20 years later and it being considered a murder. It sounded wrong but when reading the account of the terrible health problems they suffered every day until their death, I was left in no doubt it was not just murder but a far crueler one than those that died on the day.

replies(1): >>44488739 #
3. bigDinosaur ◴[07 Jul 25 10:32 UTC] No.44488739[source]▶
That makes sense. I naively assumed that if someone had survived ~15 years they would more or less be likely to live as long as anyone else, but on reflection there's no real reason to believe such a positive thing.