Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.

except they weren't really "support systems"

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.

> It's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis

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.