Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

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.

> - 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.

I'm sure there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition, but you do realise time blindness is a real issue, right?

https://www.simplypsychology.org/adhd-time-blindness.html

I don't watch TikTok videos, I don't use Instagram, but I have been plagued by these symptoms my entire life, and don't really care about others opinions on it. You probably don't have it if those symptoms don't resonate with you, but there are plenty of people who genuinely struggle, and there's likely some overlap with those who have undiagnosed ADHD.

If you know you have time blindness and you still arrive late it is worse, because you knew it will happen and did nothing to prevent it

Sorry, but you clearly have no idea what it's like to actually deal with this, at all. If I try to be on time to things, I will be stupidly early, or still think I have time to do tasks A & B before doing C, because they invariably take more or less time than I estimate. Or I start doing tasks X & Y, because I'm easily distracted, you know because it's a deficit in attention. Don't trivialise what you don't understand.

Your advice is as ignorant as saying 'just do more fun things' to someone with depression.

Oh, come on.

“It takes me 15 minutes to get to my destination. I should leave 5 minutes earlier than I need to in case there’s traffic or whatever.”

Set an alarm for 20 minutes before you need to get there, and leave when it goes off. Done.

I will absolutely trivialize it because everyone I’ve ever known that’s like that simply leaves at the time they’re supposed to already be somewhere. Or yes, they get distracted and start working on stuff that they know will take 30 minutes when they need to leave in 10. Thankfully we all have mini computers in our pockets that tell us exactly how long it takes to get somewhere that can also easily set alarms.

You clearly don't have these issues, and I doubt you care about anyone who does, because your "Oh, come on." response positively reeks of 'that's not my experience, so other people's can't be that different.'

It's never just one thing like travel time, it's scores of steps in a routine, which aren't always the same, and can easily be derailed by anything unexpected. You can estimate how long something you do frequently will take, based on how much time it took previously, and still get an inapplicable answer because distraction is a constant problem, and the executive function deficit means you literally do not think 'don't do that, get back on task' in the moment. You know how long everything should take, and still struggle to apply that when you're doing the routine.