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540 points drankl | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.215s | 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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1. mapt ◴[] No.44521780[source]
There is a pervasive feeling in our complex postindustrial society that one thing we are lacking is a little fucking slack, the sort of thing that might be unavoidably extended on a very regular basis in the primeval human tribe/clan. We get it where we can.

Turning employment and education into an up-or-out pressure cooker that thinks nothing of, for example, firing the bottom performing 10% of people every year, or failing a student who's fifteen minutes late to a final exam, is not what we are built, cognitively/socially/culturally, to tolerate. These people are taking a norm that we DO make a formal attempt to force tolerance on, disability, and trying to extend it to get the system to treat them more like a human being and less like a competitor.

Let's take a more consensus trend: ADHD.

ADHD barely existed as a recognized social phenomenon until the 1990's.

> I didn’t realize how much of a psychiatrist’s time was spent gatekeeping Adderall.

> The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?

> (it’s because his colleagues are all on Adderall already – but telling him that will just make things worse)

> He goes on to give me his story about how he’s at risk of getting fired from his Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers position, and at this rate he’s never going to get the promotion to Vice President Of Staring At Giant Spreadsheets, so do I think I can give him some Adderall to help him through?

> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

https://youtu.be/xErFsi5AdQ0?si=x0OWNLy07fUr3Cry&t=702