My experience has been a mental health diagnosis, even from a professional, has the terrible byproduct of reifying the symptoms of that condition.
It's perfectly possible that the environment that manifests something like social phobia can change, and a person who previously felt uncomfortable doing something can feel again comfortable.
However, if having social anxiety becomes part of your identity, it becomes the lense that you see the world. TikTok makes it easy, but social media as a whole is identity obsessed by its nature, and as the article illustrates is making this problem worse.
This has been my experience, both professionally (I used to teach children at a school which specialises in those who may have some form of diagnosis), and in my personal life with 4 step children, 3 of whom have ASD diagnoses.
For the vast majority who I taught, the diagnosis became their identity, rather than a way to understand their behaviour. Any disagreement with them was answered with "that's because I'm X". I can only recall one who approached it as a way to identify and understand their behaviour and experience of the world, and as a way to deeper understanding.
tl;dr: get yourself a therapist who understands that the most important questions for you w/r/t to your mental and emotional well-being are not whether you ‘really have’ social anxiety, or whether autism ‘really is’ just a disorder, or whatever.
> However, if having social anxiety becomes part of your identity, it becomes the lense that you see the world. TikTok makes it easy, but social media as a whole is identity obsessed by its nature,
I think this is as much a feature of that stage of personal development as it is of social media. Adolescence and early adulthood are periods in life when there's naturally a lot of focus on identity formation. I think the issue with diagnosis being taken as identity formation comes out of that background more than it does the nature of social media or out of medical diagnoses themselves.
It also (imo) comes from a scientistic approach to psychology: it starts with the premise that the diagnostic categories one finds in diagnostic manuals all correspond to real conditions in the world (realism) which divide the population into kinds of people (essentialism). But that forgets the purpose of those diagnostic manuals and their contents (to help mental health clinicians guide treatment plans) and the nature of the science and clinical practice here, which is driven almost exclusively using hypothetical entities we can't directly observe. The DSM's purpose is not to provide an ontology, or to identify essential features of the human mind, and certainly not to do so in a way with any kind of finality.
The other thing to think about is the kind of profound validation and relief that can come with gaining a ‘label’ for one's struggles, a framework for thinking about them, and references to communities where you can learn from other people dealing with the same things. That is huge, and it's really important to a lot of people when they first get diagnosed (whether with mental health or a chronic physical condition, for that matter). And it's natural for that to push one to see their diagnosis or the label associated with it as defining part of who they are.
That said, there are psychologists and psychiatrists who are also troubled by this, who are critical of ontologizing or essentializing approaches to their own fields. Go in with an attitude that you're looking for labels that are useful regardless of whether they're true, with an understanding that mental health exists not just in the patient but in their social relations to the whole of their society, that our diagnostic categories in 10 or 50 or 100 years will likely be quite different from the ones we have now, that many conditions with similar symptoms may be related or distinct in ways we don't yet understand, that as you work on things you might shed just enough symptoms of this or that thing to go from qualifying for diagnosis to no longer qualifying (despite the clear continuity in who you are, your personality and traits, etc.) and so on. You can find therapists who are comfortable taking an anti-realist, anti-essentialist approach which resists that mental habit of reification.
I have seen this first hand with a (non-teenager) family member. They self-diagnosed with ADHD over the past two years.
Then they paid to get a private assessment and sure enough got diagnosed with ADHD. Do I think they have ADHD? Nope, not at all.
So why the official diagnosis and treatment with pharmaceuticals? He learnt everything he needed to know to easily fool the doctor assessing him. He knew every test they would use and exactly how to respond. And as he is an intelligent guy he didn't go in there and flag every single thing but just enough to look like a legitimate person struggling with attention and executive function. He told me before the assessment he wants the medication and he got exactly what he wanted.
My son was diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago so I have seen first hand how the assessments work and it is a joke how much "flexibility" there is. It isn't like a blood or culture test where you can detect the presence or lack of some substance. It is mostly voodoo for want of a better word.
One question I ask myself is does he genuinely think he has ADHD or did he just want the meds and figured out a way to get them while looking genuine?
Some perspective from someone like your family member. ~2 years ago I self-diagnosed with ADHD and paid for a private assessment. I learnt everything about it before being assessed and therefore knew exactly how to respond, and was put on a prescription for methylphenidate.
The reason I went looking for the diagnosis was 10+ years of utter misery. I had been on various treatments for depression & anxiety, but found them minimally effective. I was getting by but was pretty apathetic about life. Over the years I'd investigated various other mental illnesses, but never came across one that seemed to fit me. I came across ADHD purely by chance, when an acquaintance was diagnosed and I looked it up. Previously I had probably ignored it assuming that it was just for hyperactive kids.
This one did seem to fit, and frankly I was desperate. The though of a pill that could actually fix some of my issues made it worth a try at the very least.
For the past two years I've been happier than any other time in my life that I can remember. Life was just easier. The most telling point for me was when I realised that I was no longer apathetic about life, I actively wanted to live, I had things that I wanted to do, goals to achieve - and I was actually able to do them.
I don't know if I actually have ADHD, I still question the diagnosis. It worries me sometimes that maybe I don't have it and that instead I'm just not very good at life. The truth is that it doesn't really matter, the diagnosis and treatment worked - If I payed for a placebo I don't really care.
Perhaps your family member is the same - maybe they have ADHD, maybe they just needed something to help them through life, maybe they had run out of alternatives - it just gets to a point where you wonder 'how much does it matter even if I'm wrong?'
My mother took me to a extremely expensive child psychologist as a child. I don't recall what she said exactly, but I think she inadvertently suggested that she "thought something was wrong". The diagnosis came, my mother ignored it, and I don't have whatever he said I had twenty years or so later (not a total waste of money, he did an IQ test, and a color blindness test, hard to fuck that up).
It is an industry. At the time this happened, wealthier parents were often taking their kids to these people so they would give a diagnosis for extra time on school exams (this is presumably why he diagnosed me with something, iirc my mum told him he was wrong, he said "what do you want me to do?"). Obviously, the medication is an incentive for some kids now too. And the industry does affect how people cope, everything is medicalised and diagnosed, that isn't very helpful. The fact that kids have so much knowledge is also impacting diagnoses because they know what to say (and their parents are concerned too, and maybe say "I think you have this" and they want to validate that).
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is really getting helped. More resources are going towards the trendy stuff, normal emotion is getting "diagnosed", and it is the same old stuff if you actually have something wrong with you (unemployment rates for people with autism are 80%, "mental health awareness").
People who have nothing wrong don't seek out labels and treatment. If he identified so strongly with the ADHD things being put out there (the vast majority of which at least rhyme with the official diagnostic criteria) that he paid for an assessment that came back positive* then it might be best to believe him.
* I paid for an assessment from a neuropsychologist that came back negative. I dug into their assessment and it was basically just wrong (self contradicting and extremely biased, I.e. I was "too smart" to have it). I went to someone else and they picked up on it immediately.
I've done the same to get RX to get through a particularly crazy college semester vs buying "focus meds" on the street at crazy markup, a long time ago. It was easy to figure out what the doc needs to hear from some light internet research and I even had calibrated my responses to get the drug of choice. Cost was pennies on the dollar with insurance.
The doc would encourage moving up to powerful doses in follow ups, even though I was barely taking the initial dose... I've since learned these professional drug peddlers often thrive on pushing habit forming drugs that require routine office visit to get a fix (refill).
The mind and body can manufacture so many things in general too. If you think you have ADHD(along with any other medical thing) it might just come to be in certain situations. Not saying it's a lot or anything, but could happen. When I was younger I would watch a pharmaceutical commercial and swear I had that disease. In fact I'm not sure why we don't ban those.
I do understand what you're getting at, but tests and assessments will always be gamed by some people. Yes, he may have cheated, but until there is a more objective way to diagnose disorders like ADHD, something like this is simply part of the whole thing.
Consider him a false positive. You certainly wouldn't prefer having false negatives instead.
Can I just put it out there how wild it is that so many people immediately assume people get ADHD diagnosis’s because they want to recreationally take stimulants rather than like, they have an issue they want treated.
It’s a lot easier, and to an extent cheaper, to purchase black market drugs. Yet people are always sceptical when people say they have an ADHD diagnosis, as if they’re just a meth fiend who wants a socially accepted reason to get high all day.
This line of thinking falls apart pretty quickly once you realise that ADHD isn’t socially accepted, as demonstrated by these kinds of comments you get whenever someone talks about it.
A third option is that he does have ADHD and you, a bystander, are doing the misdiagnosis.
IMO for disorders like this it’s almost better to view it through the lens of the available treatments. Is the treatment, on net and relative to other possible strategies, going to be a positive impact on this person? If yes, then whether they have apparent Disorder X (a figment of imagination) versus actual Disorder X (which is itself also a figment of our collective imagination) isn’t super relevant. Obviously in the case of ADHD the prescription drugs are pretty intense and have pretty severe negative consequences, so this framework in that case would probably even yield that people with actual ADHD but mild forms shouldn’t have those drugs pushed on them either.
Mental Health Diagnosis, even by longtime professionals, is notoriously unrealiable. Research keeps finding that it is determined more by the attitude, experience and values (ie. for example religious values) of the person doing the diagnosis.
In practice, the number of clients/patients complaining that their diagnosis was changed something like 10 times, with an ever longer list of ever more serious problems, while treatments don't work, but DO interfere with life. And then there are mandatory treatments that keep being researched as worse than doing nothing.
Add to that that everyone feels capable of making such diagnoses themselves anyway. In every ended relationship these days, it seems, the relationship ended because the woman was schizophrenic and the man nacissist ... or vice versa.
It used to be the case that if a person is "functional", which usually means able to hold down a job for at least a couple of months at a time, they were psychologically healthy.
So why not make mental health diagnoses on tiktok, in bars, in ... everywhere? Yes it's not very valid, but everyone's doing it anyway ... and the official way to do it is not much more valid than doing things that way. This way, hopefully, people can see mental health diagnosis as what it really is: 99% bullshit.
It’s not about the science, it’s about the social structures we’ve built around disability.
Call it bullshit all you want. I can climb on the rooftops and scream “mental health diagnosis is bullshit!” and at the end of the day I still legally have the diagnosis’s I have, I get social and tax benefits from being disabled, people whisper about (correct) rumours of me being disabled, I still belong to the disabled identity group regardless of the scientific validity of grouping us.
I’ve had similar “it’s all bs so why care about self-diagnosis” and there are good reasons. First physical health conditions can be misdiagnosed as developmental disabilities. It fucking alarms me the people with no childhood history of a mental disorder will self-diagnose themselves with it as adults. The second is there are some people who clearly aren’t all right upstairs and there is a risk of diluting resources. I honestly am fatalistic about the issue though and think eventually the mental health status quo will implode
I frequently receive psychiatric evaluations, and every time the doc justifies it to me, she (it is always a woman) she explains it based on my current affect at that time. Like if I am affable and outgoing, I receive a favorable diagnosis, but if I am in a bad mood, sort of standoffish, quiet or retiring, I receive a negative diagnosis.
Also since they are clinical psychiatrists I always 100% encounter them in a clinical setting where I already suffer from "white coat syndrome" so that just factors into the mess.
Sure it can be unreliable cuz we are dealing with the brain which as a system is less understood than a cyclone.
Its natural the pros will get things wrong cause of the complexity and dynamic nature of the issues, but don't kid yourself that your SO or family members or friends or work mates are going to do a better job.
If they have never handled the issue before it's almost guaranteed they will create new issues and then cry about or hide behind their good intdntions after things blow up in their face.
In the late 80s I noticed that I was mentally unwell. One day I went to library and they had some brochures on different forms of mental illnesses. I took one about schizophrenia and matched a symptom or two and assumed I was schizophrenic but I wasn't. I was young and had no guidance. It took over a year for me to realise that I wasn't schizophrenic.
Labels can be useful if you actually understand what they mean but most people have no training to do so. It would be better if we focused on symptoms that negatively impact people's lives than illness labels.
I have 15yo step-daughter and she has self-diagnosed herself through the whole DSM-IV because of TikTok. You have to walk a fine line between listened and supporting and calling BS. Spent thousands on a therapist to convince her otherwise.
Let’s ignore TikTok for a second. (This is a US perspective)
The last few years have been very rough. Then Covid came and made it way worse, destroying kids worlds.
Tons of people needed help. But that made everything worse if you tried to find help. At least in my area there weren’t enough psychiatrists and counselors before Covid. After it could be months to get an initial appointment if you could even find someone willing.
And cost is a huge issue. They’re teens. Care and meds are expensive. And many insurance plans don’t help as much as they would for normal issues.
So what are they going to do? Turn to what they know. Online stuff, especially TikTok.
I’m not saying any of this is good. But it seems symptomatic of much more systemic failures.
Isn’t this a bit like complaining homeless people keep sleeping on benches or GoFundMe has too many medical donation requests?
Even as an adult, it’s a challenge. I’ve had to find a new psychiatrist several times due to them retiring or leaving. Getting anything faster than 2 months is impossible. My latest one had to be booked four months in advance.
I really think this phenomenon is due to just how hard a diagnosis is to get in many countries.
Here in Canada you need a referral from a doctor (hard to get on its own), then you have to wait many months to years to see someone. Alternatively you can go private and spend quite literally thousands of dollars like I have.
Teens may recognize something is wrong, but simply not have access to the systems they need. We don’t want people to self diagnosing, but we as a society don’t enable them to get the help they need, so they turn to social media.
Half of them simply have tiktok addiction, and if they were to uninstall tiktok and go find some real friends instead of following semi-celebrities, the other mental health issues would probably subside too...
I like that this article bookends with the young person finding that the real cause of their symptoms was isolation from their peers. Not that it’s always the case, but, I hope it’s a common cure that more people seek out first
> the real cause of their symptoms was isolation from their peers
But who are their peers? Sometimes having a word for how you are can help you find other people you'll vibe with, even if it's technically a misdiagnosis. I've seen it both with neurodivergence and LGBTQ, with kids who arguably don't even fit the label but find and return great value in those communities anyway. I'm sure people here can appreciate how sometimes results matter more than adherence to inflexible rules laid down in some book.
The people in the communities believe in a moral right to having self-diagnosis believed. Having a diagnosis is almost considered a form of privilege reserved for wealthy white males, an observation rooted in scientific evidence of systemic under diagnosis for minorities and women.
It is a banable offense from disability communities to doubt somebodies diagnosis. I was told nobody lied about faking a diagnosis, so I faked a diagnosis under extremely suspect circumstances, was believed, revealed my deception, and was permanently banned. Regardless of the morality of my actions, the point is that people want to truly believe that everybody they meet that self-diagnose themselves with disabilities is valid, and anybody who attacks this delusion is an enemy to be expelled from the community, even if such a person is doubtlessly disabled. The way I see it, ideology has become more important for membership in these communities than actually having a disability, because somebody ideologically misaligned is a threat to “safety” or whatever.
I’ve seen people call for moderators to be taken out over “fakeclaiming”. I find the entire ideology espoused in TikTok to be deeply naive and grounded in a false implicit assumption that a label of disability will make peoples lives better and thus to deny them that label is some sort of cruelty. I’ve been in conversations where somebody asks “am I diagnosed”, they will describe something that disqualifies the diagnosis, I point out no they can’t be they don’t fit the criteria, and others in the thread will start saying “oh they must not have meant that they must have meant this” and I’ll just sit there stone cold fucking baffled. I wonder how many people will suffer untreated illnesses because strangers on the internet talked them into thinking they had a developmental disability when they really had hypothyroidism or something because they treat not having a diagnosis like failing to catch a Pokémon.
I see accepting self diagnosis online as a practical measure. Since it is not possible for an online community to ascertain wether someone qualifies for a diagnosis or not, discussing it is entirely unproductive and a wasp's nest. That doesn't mean everyone truly share's the same diagnosis, only that there's nothing to gain by doubting what they're saying.
A lot of people arrive at these communities due to their insecurities and personal pain, and it's not helpful to go around pointing fingers saying "you're not part of this group".
> The people in the communities believe in a moral right to having self-diagnosis believed. Having a diagnosis is almost considered a form of privilege reserved for wealthy white males, an observation rooted in scientific evidence of systemic under diagnosis for minorities and women.
This, in and of itself, would seem to warrant some sort of mental illness. Victim complex, perhaps?
I had interpreted this trend as something different. Kids wanting to be outliers because being an outlier is cool. Claiming some, realistically debilitating, mental illness makes you special (at least in the "different" sense). This gives lonely teenagers a sense of belonging and something that differentiates them. Most of them could probably be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder but I am not doctor. I suppose this isn't new. When I was a kid the kid in class that showed up with a cast was pretty cool for the time they had the cast. Everyone loves an outlier.
As someone who has struggled with a mild-to-medium form of ADHD, only getting a formal diagnosis late in life, I am baffled anyone would want to pretend to have a mental illness. Yet, here we are.
Teenagers are, by nature, trying to fit in. Because of the internet (and TikTok) they try to find themseves belonging to specific mental/physical disorder groups by faking the symptoms.
People develop the weirdest "alter" systems (faking DID), everyone seems to have self-diagnosed ADHD and depression or is on the autism spectrum. Tourettes is another faker staple.
For many it's just a phase and they figure out who they are (as teens do), but some go down the deep end and actually develop mental issues from faking having mental issues so long... Or it becomes a part of their identity and they find friends in the scene so they need to keep doing it.
I think a lot of this stems from how our culture treats diagnosis. There is a strong pressure to conform to normative ways of being, and diagnosis with a "mental illness/disorder" is often the only way for non-normative ways of being to be legitimised and tolerated. Consequently, non-normative individuals will often seek some mental health diagnosis in order to avoid social pressure and judgment.
Could we please keep hackernews free of this mainstream social media madness? I feel like about 50% of people in modern society are insane to the core, consuming whatever next "viral" thing is thrown at them, mindlessly.
I just need to point out the catastrophic effect of removing downvoting from youtube, and the subsequent proliferation of hoax and sensationalism in healthcare, exercise and psychology video content.
At what age is sensible to bring a kid for a diagnose on autism? I mean, I was told to bring in my 3 y old, but I find the risk of false positive is just too high.
As someone who doesn't live in USA, it's really disturbing the amount of mental health issues children and teenagers have in the USA. This seems abnormally common.
[+] [-] neonate|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meowfly|3 years ago|reply
It's perfectly possible that the environment that manifests something like social phobia can change, and a person who previously felt uncomfortable doing something can feel again comfortable.
However, if having social anxiety becomes part of your identity, it becomes the lense that you see the world. TikTok makes it easy, but social media as a whole is identity obsessed by its nature, and as the article illustrates is making this problem worse.
[+] [-] djaychela|3 years ago|reply
For the vast majority who I taught, the diagnosis became their identity, rather than a way to understand their behaviour. Any disagreement with them was answered with "that's because I'm X". I can only recall one who approached it as a way to identify and understand their behaviour and experience of the world, and as a way to deeper understanding.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pxc|3 years ago|reply
> However, if having social anxiety becomes part of your identity, it becomes the lense that you see the world. TikTok makes it easy, but social media as a whole is identity obsessed by its nature,
I think this is as much a feature of that stage of personal development as it is of social media. Adolescence and early adulthood are periods in life when there's naturally a lot of focus on identity formation. I think the issue with diagnosis being taken as identity formation comes out of that background more than it does the nature of social media or out of medical diagnoses themselves.
It also (imo) comes from a scientistic approach to psychology: it starts with the premise that the diagnostic categories one finds in diagnostic manuals all correspond to real conditions in the world (realism) which divide the population into kinds of people (essentialism). But that forgets the purpose of those diagnostic manuals and their contents (to help mental health clinicians guide treatment plans) and the nature of the science and clinical practice here, which is driven almost exclusively using hypothetical entities we can't directly observe. The DSM's purpose is not to provide an ontology, or to identify essential features of the human mind, and certainly not to do so in a way with any kind of finality.
The other thing to think about is the kind of profound validation and relief that can come with gaining a ‘label’ for one's struggles, a framework for thinking about them, and references to communities where you can learn from other people dealing with the same things. That is huge, and it's really important to a lot of people when they first get diagnosed (whether with mental health or a chronic physical condition, for that matter). And it's natural for that to push one to see their diagnosis or the label associated with it as defining part of who they are.
That said, there are psychologists and psychiatrists who are also troubled by this, who are critical of ontologizing or essentializing approaches to their own fields. Go in with an attitude that you're looking for labels that are useful regardless of whether they're true, with an understanding that mental health exists not just in the patient but in their social relations to the whole of their society, that our diagnostic categories in 10 or 50 or 100 years will likely be quite different from the ones we have now, that many conditions with similar symptoms may be related or distinct in ways we don't yet understand, that as you work on things you might shed just enough symptoms of this or that thing to go from qualifying for diagnosis to no longer qualifying (despite the clear continuity in who you are, your personality and traits, etc.) and so on. You can find therapists who are comfortable taking an anti-realist, anti-essentialist approach which resists that mental habit of reification.
[+] [-] satysin|3 years ago|reply
Then they paid to get a private assessment and sure enough got diagnosed with ADHD. Do I think they have ADHD? Nope, not at all.
So why the official diagnosis and treatment with pharmaceuticals? He learnt everything he needed to know to easily fool the doctor assessing him. He knew every test they would use and exactly how to respond. And as he is an intelligent guy he didn't go in there and flag every single thing but just enough to look like a legitimate person struggling with attention and executive function. He told me before the assessment he wants the medication and he got exactly what he wanted.
My son was diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago so I have seen first hand how the assessments work and it is a joke how much "flexibility" there is. It isn't like a blood or culture test where you can detect the presence or lack of some substance. It is mostly voodoo for want of a better word.
One question I ask myself is does he genuinely think he has ADHD or did he just want the meds and figured out a way to get them while looking genuine?
[+] [-] HansKerneue|3 years ago|reply
The reason I went looking for the diagnosis was 10+ years of utter misery. I had been on various treatments for depression & anxiety, but found them minimally effective. I was getting by but was pretty apathetic about life. Over the years I'd investigated various other mental illnesses, but never came across one that seemed to fit me. I came across ADHD purely by chance, when an acquaintance was diagnosed and I looked it up. Previously I had probably ignored it assuming that it was just for hyperactive kids.
This one did seem to fit, and frankly I was desperate. The though of a pill that could actually fix some of my issues made it worth a try at the very least.
For the past two years I've been happier than any other time in my life that I can remember. Life was just easier. The most telling point for me was when I realised that I was no longer apathetic about life, I actively wanted to live, I had things that I wanted to do, goals to achieve - and I was actually able to do them.
I don't know if I actually have ADHD, I still question the diagnosis. It worries me sometimes that maybe I don't have it and that instead I'm just not very good at life. The truth is that it doesn't really matter, the diagnosis and treatment worked - If I payed for a placebo I don't really care.
Perhaps your family member is the same - maybe they have ADHD, maybe they just needed something to help them through life, maybe they had run out of alternatives - it just gets to a point where you wonder 'how much does it matter even if I'm wrong?'
[+] [-] skippyboxedhero|3 years ago|reply
It is an industry. At the time this happened, wealthier parents were often taking their kids to these people so they would give a diagnosis for extra time on school exams (this is presumably why he diagnosed me with something, iirc my mum told him he was wrong, he said "what do you want me to do?"). Obviously, the medication is an incentive for some kids now too. And the industry does affect how people cope, everything is medicalised and diagnosed, that isn't very helpful. The fact that kids have so much knowledge is also impacting diagnoses because they know what to say (and their parents are concerned too, and maybe say "I think you have this" and they want to validate that).
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is really getting helped. More resources are going towards the trendy stuff, normal emotion is getting "diagnosed", and it is the same old stuff if you actually have something wrong with you (unemployment rates for people with autism are 80%, "mental health awareness").
[+] [-] zrail|3 years ago|reply
* I paid for an assessment from a neuropsychologist that came back negative. I dug into their assessment and it was basically just wrong (self contradicting and extremely biased, I.e. I was "too smart" to have it). I went to someone else and they picked up on it immediately.
[+] [-] propogandist|3 years ago|reply
The doc would encourage moving up to powerful doses in follow ups, even though I was barely taking the initial dose... I've since learned these professional drug peddlers often thrive on pushing habit forming drugs that require routine office visit to get a fix (refill).
[+] [-] dham|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbinv|3 years ago|reply
I do understand what you're getting at, but tests and assessments will always be gamed by some people. Yes, he may have cheated, but until there is a more objective way to diagnose disorders like ADHD, something like this is simply part of the whole thing.
Consider him a false positive. You certainly wouldn't prefer having false negatives instead.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jasongi|3 years ago|reply
It’s a lot easier, and to an extent cheaper, to purchase black market drugs. Yet people are always sceptical when people say they have an ADHD diagnosis, as if they’re just a meth fiend who wants a socially accepted reason to get high all day.
This line of thinking falls apart pretty quickly once you realise that ADHD isn’t socially accepted, as demonstrated by these kinds of comments you get whenever someone talks about it.
[+] [-] ethanbond|3 years ago|reply
IMO for disorders like this it’s almost better to view it through the lens of the available treatments. Is the treatment, on net and relative to other possible strategies, going to be a positive impact on this person? If yes, then whether they have apparent Disorder X (a figment of imagination) versus actual Disorder X (which is itself also a figment of our collective imagination) isn’t super relevant. Obviously in the case of ADHD the prescription drugs are pretty intense and have pretty severe negative consequences, so this framework in that case would probably even yield that people with actual ADHD but mild forms shouldn’t have those drugs pushed on them either.
[+] [-] candiodari|3 years ago|reply
In practice, the number of clients/patients complaining that their diagnosis was changed something like 10 times, with an ever longer list of ever more serious problems, while treatments don't work, but DO interfere with life. And then there are mandatory treatments that keep being researched as worse than doing nothing.
And, of course, there is the famous study of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
And it's more recent, less dramatic, but probably more valid cousin:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190708131152.h...
Add to that that everyone feels capable of making such diagnoses themselves anyway. In every ended relationship these days, it seems, the relationship ended because the woman was schizophrenic and the man nacissist ... or vice versa.
It used to be the case that if a person is "functional", which usually means able to hold down a job for at least a couple of months at a time, they were psychologically healthy.
So why not make mental health diagnoses on tiktok, in bars, in ... everywhere? Yes it's not very valid, but everyone's doing it anyway ... and the official way to do it is not much more valid than doing things that way. This way, hopefully, people can see mental health diagnosis as what it really is: 99% bullshit.
[+] [-] faeriechangling|3 years ago|reply
Call it bullshit all you want. I can climb on the rooftops and scream “mental health diagnosis is bullshit!” and at the end of the day I still legally have the diagnosis’s I have, I get social and tax benefits from being disabled, people whisper about (correct) rumours of me being disabled, I still belong to the disabled identity group regardless of the scientific validity of grouping us.
I’ve had similar “it’s all bs so why care about self-diagnosis” and there are good reasons. First physical health conditions can be misdiagnosed as developmental disabilities. It fucking alarms me the people with no childhood history of a mental disorder will self-diagnose themselves with it as adults. The second is there are some people who clearly aren’t all right upstairs and there is a risk of diluting resources. I honestly am fatalistic about the issue though and think eventually the mental health status quo will implode
[+] [-] Eleison23|3 years ago|reply
Also since they are clinical psychiatrists I always 100% encounter them in a clinical setting where I already suffer from "white coat syndrome" so that just factors into the mess.
[+] [-] gsatic|3 years ago|reply
Its natural the pros will get things wrong cause of the complexity and dynamic nature of the issues, but don't kid yourself that your SO or family members or friends or work mates are going to do a better job.
If they have never handled the issue before it's almost guaranteed they will create new issues and then cry about or hide behind their good intdntions after things blow up in their face.
[+] [-] richardjam73|3 years ago|reply
Labels can be useful if you actually understand what they mean but most people have no training to do so. It would be better if we focused on symptoms that negatively impact people's lives than illness labels.
[+] [-] willnonya|3 years ago|reply
Nothing stupid ever comes out of there.
Besides, kids today are just naturally smarter, just ask one and theyll tell you.
[+] [-] not_the_fda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MBCook|3 years ago|reply
The last few years have been very rough. Then Covid came and made it way worse, destroying kids worlds.
Tons of people needed help. But that made everything worse if you tried to find help. At least in my area there weren’t enough psychiatrists and counselors before Covid. After it could be months to get an initial appointment if you could even find someone willing.
And cost is a huge issue. They’re teens. Care and meds are expensive. And many insurance plans don’t help as much as they would for normal issues.
So what are they going to do? Turn to what they know. Online stuff, especially TikTok.
I’m not saying any of this is good. But it seems symptomatic of much more systemic failures.
Isn’t this a bit like complaining homeless people keep sleeping on benches or GoFundMe has too many medical donation requests?
[+] [-] kayodelycaon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanhoe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpsns|3 years ago|reply
Here in Canada you need a referral from a doctor (hard to get on its own), then you have to wait many months to years to see someone. Alternatively you can go private and spend quite literally thousands of dollars like I have.
Teens may recognize something is wrong, but simply not have access to the systems they need. We don’t want people to self diagnosing, but we as a society don’t enable them to get the help they need, so they turn to social media.
[+] [-] londons_explore|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] werber|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|3 years ago|reply
But who are their peers? Sometimes having a word for how you are can help you find other people you'll vibe with, even if it's technically a misdiagnosis. I've seen it both with neurodivergence and LGBTQ, with kids who arguably don't even fit the label but find and return great value in those communities anyway. I'm sure people here can appreciate how sometimes results matter more than adherence to inflexible rules laid down in some book.
[+] [-] faeriechangling|3 years ago|reply
It is a banable offense from disability communities to doubt somebodies diagnosis. I was told nobody lied about faking a diagnosis, so I faked a diagnosis under extremely suspect circumstances, was believed, revealed my deception, and was permanently banned. Regardless of the morality of my actions, the point is that people want to truly believe that everybody they meet that self-diagnose themselves with disabilities is valid, and anybody who attacks this delusion is an enemy to be expelled from the community, even if such a person is doubtlessly disabled. The way I see it, ideology has become more important for membership in these communities than actually having a disability, because somebody ideologically misaligned is a threat to “safety” or whatever.
I’ve seen people call for moderators to be taken out over “fakeclaiming”. I find the entire ideology espoused in TikTok to be deeply naive and grounded in a false implicit assumption that a label of disability will make peoples lives better and thus to deny them that label is some sort of cruelty. I’ve been in conversations where somebody asks “am I diagnosed”, they will describe something that disqualifies the diagnosis, I point out no they can’t be they don’t fit the criteria, and others in the thread will start saying “oh they must not have meant that they must have meant this” and I’ll just sit there stone cold fucking baffled. I wonder how many people will suffer untreated illnesses because strangers on the internet talked them into thinking they had a developmental disability when they really had hypothyroidism or something because they treat not having a diagnosis like failing to catch a Pokémon.
[+] [-] bananamerica|3 years ago|reply
A lot of people arrive at these communities due to their insecurities and personal pain, and it's not helpful to go around pointing fingers saying "you're not part of this group".
They're support groups, not medical boards.
[+] [-] Test0129|3 years ago|reply
This, in and of itself, would seem to warrant some sort of mental illness. Victim complex, perhaps?
I had interpreted this trend as something different. Kids wanting to be outliers because being an outlier is cool. Claiming some, realistically debilitating, mental illness makes you special (at least in the "different" sense). This gives lonely teenagers a sense of belonging and something that differentiates them. Most of them could probably be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder but I am not doctor. I suppose this isn't new. When I was a kid the kid in class that showed up with a cast was pretty cool for the time they had the cast. Everyone loves an outlier.
As someone who has struggled with a mild-to-medium form of ADHD, only getting a formal diagnosis late in life, I am baffled anyone would want to pretend to have a mental illness. Yet, here we are.
[+] [-] theshrike79|3 years ago|reply
Teenagers are, by nature, trying to fit in. Because of the internet (and TikTok) they try to find themseves belonging to specific mental/physical disorder groups by faking the symptoms.
People develop the weirdest "alter" systems (faking DID), everyone seems to have self-diagnosed ADHD and depression or is on the autism spectrum. Tourettes is another faker staple.
For many it's just a phase and they figure out who they are (as teens do), but some go down the deep end and actually develop mental issues from faking having mental issues so long... Or it becomes a part of their identity and they find friends in the scene so they need to keep doing it.
[+] [-] janef0421|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harha_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mikeb85|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rongopo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caseysoftware|3 years ago|reply
Are there other mental health issues being spurred on by TikTok? If so, which ones?
And then the followup:
Is it more beneficial to the individual to affirm OR challenge the TikTok-driven self diagnosis?
[+] [-] georgeplusplus|3 years ago|reply