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540 points drankl | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.424s | source
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parpfish ◴[] No.44485690[source]
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 themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.

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.

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.

- most mental disorders are an issue of degree and not something qualitatively different from a typical experience. People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.

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Aurornis ◴[] No.44485973[source]
> - 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.

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BiteCode_dev ◴[] No.44487357[source]
I think after a few expressions of time blindness, they'll discover that their contracts have continuity deficiency and their career vertical expression challenges.

The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.

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FirmwareBurner ◴[] No.44487762[source]
>The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.

"A child who isn't disciplined at home, will be disciplined outside of the home" - old African proverb.

The issue is kids growing up without being taught accountability, but instead that they're perpetual victims of "the system" created by evil old white men, and therefore nothing they do is ever their fault. This is the fault of the parents, school system and society as a whole who coddles kids giving them the false sense of security that they can always have their way, right until they hit the brick wall of adulthood featuring employment, bills, debt, responsibilities and self sufficiency.

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rightbyte ◴[] No.44487926[source]
"Disciplined at home" is being a maybe not perpetual but victim of the system for something like 18 years though.

I don't get where this idea that kids are coddled with comes from. They usually are not even allowed to wear the cloths they want or choose the food they want and get pushed around to silly extents.

Kids almost never gets it their way.

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1. BlackFly ◴[] No.44488203[source]
In order to hold someone accountable for their actions you need to allow them a choice in the first place. Disallowing children from making choices is one way of protecting them from the consequences of a bad decision: by not allowing them to make it in the first place. That is what coddling is, protecting from the environment. Protecting them from the choice is just a more extreme version of shielding them from the consequences.
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2. rightbyte ◴[] No.44490554[source]
Ye. But the hard problem as I see it is the "the consequences of a bad decision" part, for which many "bad decisions" have no consequence but the arbitrary punishment from adults itself.

I.e. not cleaning up toys from the floor. Staying up late. Wearing different colored socks. Playing or speaking too laud. What ever. The consequences of those are really complex or fuzzy and the threshold level for breaking the rules arbitrary.

Also the subset of "bad decisions" that maybe have some distant future bad consequence, i.e. eating too much ice cream, are even harder. Or all the 'none will like you if you do that' things you need to teach kids.