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.
Now, more than two decades later, after a bit more life experience, I cringe when someone labels me as an introvert - they aren't wrong per se, but they also unload a bunch of assumptions attached to that label on to me, 90% of which are inaccurate/unrelated/tangential.
A good friend of mine told me that labels are useful, but warned me to not make them my entire identity. He turned out to be right.
Anyway here's the relevant trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MeasuringTheMari...
Because there's now a payoff for those. Those girls proudly display a whole slew of these on their 'bio' because the societal framework they live in 'scores' them on their 'oppression/victim' status.
I also found it ironic that part of the OP's argument was that nobody has personality anymore, they just have problems to solve, and this article seemed to be doing the same thing, but for culture at large; reducing it to a problem to be solved.
The absence of labels is just as much of a marketing gimmick as their presence. Even anti-identitarianism will be weaponized. Even nothing is something. Eliminate all the labels and concepts and redundancies, and you are yet left with a "natural, unspoken, normal default" state of being.
And as it turns out, there are plenty of forces out there willing to exploit that appeal towards the "the unspoken", for either financial or political gain. The question remains, then: who or what gets to determine this unspoken part of life?
Then when it came to 'targeted advertising', social media advertisers could just target the labels and reach a huge amount of people because those people had already fine-tuned and optimized themselves to be receptive to that kind of messaging.
Their personalities were homogenized to the point that the focus groups ended up being representative of the real people behind the labels.
There is a lot of this content out there about mental health and there is a lot of it that tries to explain everything people do. Much of the issue I see is that it is taken to extremes and is very much driven by algorithms pushing particular pieces of content. And if it is ambiguous enough it will reach a larger audience, a beneficial sign for the account posting it.
There's no room for nuance that perhaps the person who is generous both has qualities of a people pleaser but is a generous person because once upon a time they did a generous thing and it made their life happier. Where it becomes a mental health issue is when it starts to reduce the quality of your life and your relationships significantly.
The bigger issue is that each of these things seem to be labelled as problems and how they can be solved, not managed nor be normal human behaviors. At the extremes, yes perhaps they need to be managed to a higher degree, but everything else is still what makes up peoples lives.
I myself am swarmed with reels about anxious/avoidant attachment reels with any random man/women and their dog trying to talk ambiguously about human behaviors and providing an explanation for them.
For young people sitting on TikTok and Instagram late at night being bombarded with mental health related reels trying to explain your behavior and other peoples behavior you like or don't like. It's best to give that type of content a break.
For example, sometimes people talk about lowercase "t" and capital "T" trauma. Lowercase "t" is when something affects you enough that recognizing it elicits an emotion, e.g. some people fell uneasy when smelling saline because they associate it with getting shots when they were young. Uppercase "T" is when the emotion is overpowering, e.g. soldiers who wake up screaming or experience lifelike flashbacks when they see military equipment, or people who can't visit a location without panicking because it reminds them of a negative experience. Only uppercase "T" is diagnosed PTSD, although that doesn't mean lowercase "t" is never a problem, it's just not life-altering and can be worked around without medication or therapy.
We have regular adjectives for the manageable "lowercase" version of disorders. "Obsessive" for OCD, "antsy" or "trouble focusing" for ADHD, "strange" or "peculiar" for Autism. I do think someone can be "manic" or "depressed" without having diagnosed Bipolar or Depression. Unfortunately, language is defined by how it's used in practice, so if most people call themselves "ADHD" when they don't have real diagnosed ADHD, you'll have to use their meaning to understand them, and eventually it'll become the norm; but you can speak and write the non-disorder adjective to help counter it. Worst case, we still have "diagnosed X" to distinguish from "X" (unless people start using it like "literally" to mean figuratively...)
It's a shame that too many young people do the opposite and have bought so widely into a therapy culture of tagging so much of the complex human world into little boxes of psychological disorder (founded on some very, very shaky evidence and clinical understanding) to cause further internal trauma. This itself has become a bizarre and sickly fad but not an inescapable one.
For example, generosity is not the same as people pleasing. They can look the same, but one is born of love and one is born of fear.
We generally want to help people experience more love and less suffering. Give, not to please people, but to please yourself.
This is the rejection of science applied to a less common target.
>Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful
In the past from, say, 30-40 years ago, if you failed to arrive at appointments and meetings on time you probably weren't labeled "lovably forgetful," and you probably would face punishments for having certain personality traits. We're changing in how we understand those kinds of differences now, and it's not all for the better, but in general the discourse now is better than how things were in the past when neurodiverse folks tended to receive a lot of punishment, invective, bullying, and ostracism.
I've been autistic my whole life, but I'm from the older set where there was no understanding of such things, we used to get bullied a lot, sometimes quite violently, and social ostracism was typical then for folks on the spectrum. I'd be thoughtful about romanticizing the past or get taken in by the false feelings of nostalgia - it's wrong to imagine people used to deal with the neurodiverse in glowing light and thoughtful acceptance, no one ever said I was "lovably forgetful."
To explain everything shallowly by looking for direct cause and effect and not a multitudes of causes and effects. That complexity is too much to think through comfortably whilst living within it and having an unreliable experience of the self, especially in the younger years. Labeling causes with an easy broad moniker provides temporary comfort, relieving the individual of the burden of deeper reflection.
Moreover, a lot of things were simpler in ways that are becoming less and less ok. People now can divorce; marriage is not even need to start a family. Navigating relationship dynamics was simpler in the sense that there were (more or less) specific roles each gender should abide. Many marriages were arranged, especially if "it was taking you time", thus you did not have to figure out dating yourself.
I don't think that therapeutic discourse is a good strategy. Medicalising personhoods and relationships is bad, but going back to a (romanticised) past cannot be a solution at all. Raising to a higher consiousness would be an actual, good solution, but that takes time. It is uncertain if we have that with the speed that things move nowadays.
While I agree about the over-labeling (which is a way to be sortable by algorithms that need to push or penalize our social media presence) I wouldn’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. There is a difference between being generous and being a people-pleaser, and it’s an important one to know for people with this trait. Years ago you would have never thought of this as a (mild) neurosis, but it can totally be. Being aware of it can help immensely in leading a more fulfilling life. This is true for all the other examples mentioned.
That said, the piece should just be: social media has polluted and ruined mental health awareness in the same exact way it has ruined and polluted so many other aspects of the public discourse.
I'm quite certain the author is a Starfleet captain. So few things make me as excited to be human.
It can still be endearing to have quirks, but I think there is still value in awareness of yourself and your patterns.
Instead, I lay blame at several altars of the modern world:
* Late stage Capitalism desperately trying to source novelty and products by convincing everyone they’re a “brand” to be marketed and sold to others
* Social media algorithms forcing people into bubbles for the sake of advertising revenue and data harvesting
* An “awakening” of modern mental health awareness (especially post-pandemic) that’s both (likely) engaging in overdiagnosing while also laying groundwork to understand people for who they are, rather than trying to shove them into neat little boxes of compliance
* The internet and free exchange of information enabling a lot of disparate researchers and experts to realize that these issues aren’t unique to a single cohort, but are likely environmental in nature to some significant degree
Add it all together, and you’ve got the current “label” era of personalities - shorthand for how you’d like others to see you and explain your quirks or eccentricities, but of questionable health if not accompanied by actual therapy (pharmaceutical, medical, behavioral, or otherwise).
2. Personally, I think the being more knowledgeable about (and conversant in) common psychological issues is great. Much better if we have a label for "depression" rather than just thinking "The world and everything is awful and I'm the only one who feels this way." Same for anxiety, attachment, all of that.
3. If young girls happen to co-opt it in a way you find self-absorbed, get over it, stop trying to police it and make a fake moral panic over it. It's no worse than astrology or whatever other loose avenue of self-exploration would be otherwise happening.
It to me sounds like the author fundamentally misunderstands the whole thing, this just is soaking in boomer energy. That is -- the premise that recognizing these trends is somehow shaming/bad and it's "better" if we all use loosely-defined unscientific terms like "nice-person" rather than looking at and challenging our overly intense and dysfunctional people-pleasing or whatever.
The way gen-z uses these terms, is that they aren't some hardcore disorder, but as a common parlance for real and addressable things to change about oneself (e.g. that talking on the phone can be uncomfortable, or making an appointment is stressful). Like gen-z may say "Oh I have insecure attachment" and they just mean "Sometimes I'm afraid to reach out for fear of rejection" and that's a healthy thing to talk about, even if the term they used is used a different way in the DSM.
Some people have made free lecture series on the topic, like this:
https://rickroderick.org/300-guide-the-self-under-siege-1993...
Psychology is a means to an end. But some people are attempting to make it an end. I do feel a cathartic release to get a 'diagnosis', but this catharsis is transient. There is infinite sub-categorizations to achieve infinite catharsis, but each further division, brings diminishing returns.
I hope that this trend is going to burn itself out. There is no promised land in medical psychology as popularly experienced. It can be used as a scaffold to leap into a higher self-awareness, but then it must be left aside.
People who aren't that interested in talking about themselves just have other interests and don't want to engage in the shallow philosophy of psychology of the social media gen-z class.
You can have great self-understanding and self-realization about your childhood, your parents opinions and personality without letting it define your life.
You should not blame the analysis itself, but blame the projection of your personality to the result of it, which it encouraged by platforms that make money of it, like TikTok or BetterHelp. It can be fun to do an MBTI or Big 5 test to see common patterns in oneself, it does not mean that you have to structure your personality around the outcome.
To me, it sounds like the author is vouching for being unthinkingly driven by biology, tradition, and impulse in a society where most of this is also commercialized. Your govt wants you to have children to supply pensions, your impulses are driven by the advertisements that you have been bombarded with during the day, there is extreme prodding towards certain kinds of sexual looks or behaviors that influence what people find attractive. You are as much of a product when you follow the impulses than when you dont, the only thing is that with self-reflection you have a small change to question and think about why you want a certain thing.
I personally think that people living by the authors suggested way of living in a western societal moment of individualism have a maximum chance to regret their life at the end of it, doing everything "default" that society and tradition has taught you is "natural and human" instead of living the journey on your own terms and doing what you actually like.
Identity is a seductive illusion. It promises meaning, coherence, and comfort. Yet beneath this comfort lies a quiet tyranny. Once we define ourselves, we imprison ourselves. The fixed “I” we cling to doesn’t stand scrutiny, not scientifically, not philosophically, not psychologically.
Consider neuroscience. The self, the stable “I,” is nowhere to be found in the brain. What scientists find instead are fleeting processes, overlapping patterns, temporary states. Neuroscientist Anil Seth, in his book “Being You,” argues convincingly that the self is a kind of ongoing hallucination—a comforting fiction the mind generates moment by moment. There’s no stable core beneath it, only fragments, constantly rearranging.
Philosophy has long understood this. David Hume, centuries ago, searched for the self within consciousness and found only sensations, perceptions, shifting sands. Nietzsche echoed this idea, mocking the notion of a stable self as merely a trick of language, a grammar-born illusion. Ludwig Wittgenstein, too, dismantled the belief in private inner truths. For him, meaning emerges not from introspection, but from the shared dance of language and action. To think there’s a stable self hidden deep inside is to misunderstand how language, thought, and reality interact.
Freud, despite the distortions of modern therapy, never saw us as coherent beings either. For him, the human psyche was a theater of conflict, desires clashing beneath consciousness, forever hidden from full awareness. Freud’s contribution wasn’t mechanizing the mind, but revealing its profound contradictions. Unlike later theorists such as Lacan, who mistakenly reduced humans to mere patterns of meaning—Freud knew that beneath our carefully narrated lives lay irrationality and mystery, impossible to tame fully by analysis.
Yet today’s therapeutic-industrial complex tries precisely that. Therapy, once an exploration of human depth, now resembles a dating app business model. Platforms like BetterHelp and Talkspace profit not by curing distress, but by prolonging it. You pay, endlessly, to decode yourself. Success for them isn’t resolution, but endless self-inventory, endless labeling.
This is where the concept of “mental health” itself becomes subtly oppressive. It implies an ideal state, a normal range, a standard we should measure ourselves against. Ian Hacking described this phenomenon as the “looping effect”: labels shape behaviors, behaviors reinforce labels, and individuals get trapped in a feedback loop of self-pathology. When identity becomes a medical diagnosis, we surrender our autonomy, our ambiguity, and ultimately our freedom.
Trauma, too, has morphed into social currency. It’s become the dominant metaphor for interpreting every aspect of life: attraction, friendships, career choices. James Davies, author of “Cracked,” highlights how the psychiatric model strips our lives of meaning, reducing complexity to clinical symptoms. But not every strong feeling is a wound; not every quirk a disorder. Of course, painful things do happen—sad things, terrible things—but we speak as if these things always happen to us, placing ourselves at the center of a chain of causality and consequence. In reality, events simply happen. There is no inherent meaning, no cosmic intention. How we weave these accidents into our personal story is entirely our decision. How we let them shape or influence us is our choice alone. It is precisely here, in this decision, that our ultimate freedom lies.
Here’s the core of the matter, the radical truth that’s rarely stated plainly: there is no fixed identity to discover, no true self hidden deep inside. Identity is a myth we invent because life feels safer if we pretend there’s something stable beneath the chaos. But life resists stability. We are never fully known—not even to ourselves. The moment we accept this, the instant we let go of trying to pin ourselves down, we become free to live.
Happiness is not the reward of endless self-exploration. It’s not a puzzle we solve or a mystery we decode. Happiness is a decision, a leap, an act of rebellion against the tyranny of labels, against the logic of suffering. We don’t find happiness by understanding every trauma or categorizing every impulse, but by letting go, by accepting uncertainty, by choosing desire, will, and joy despite everything. This is what Kierkegaard called the leap of faith—not into religious belief necessarily, but into life itself.
Ultimately, identity is not something we have. It is something we do, something we perform, something we constantly recreate. The human condition is not static being but perpetual becoming. Nietzsche said it best: we must become who we are. And in doing so, we reject the cage of identity entirely. We are not diagnoses, symptoms, or personalities. We are simply alive, driven by desire, moved by joy, ever-changing and never fully defined.
Yet this does not mean giving up on growth or self-improvement—quite the opposite. It is precisely because we are not limited by a static identity that we can truly act, improve, evolve. But nobody can do this for us. Nobody can save us from ourselves, not a therapist, not a romantic partner. The responsibility for our existence and happiness lies entirely in our hands.
By letting go of identity, we open ourselves up to genuine change. Free from the suffocating need for recognition, our relationships become richer and more authentic. Most relationships are neurotic precisely because they are driven by demands for validation rather than true acceptance. When we stop begging for recognition, when we let go of the myth of identity, we allow ourselves, and others, to exist in all our beautiful complexity. Relationships cease to be transactions of self-worth and become genuine encounters: open, curious, generous.
In the end, perhaps the bravest act is not endlessly “working on ourselves,” but simply living—boldly, messily, without apology or explanation.
On further thought, not sure if this would solve the problem or exacerbate it...
I find the article to lack nuance, but it is time that this hazardous trend stops, and if it needs to go through social media shaming for some people to realize this sucks, then I am all for it.
My 6-year-old is a pain in the ass (got thrown out of 2 schools already). His psychologist says he has a hard time controlling his emotions. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who suggested he has some form of mental illness (OD, ADHD, ASD, we’ve heard it all). Thankfully, here in France, both his psychologist and his teacher are really wary of the trend, and are very careful not to put a mental health label on a kid who doesn’t have any other problem than being a pain to adults.
See the main problem is the question of suffering. People would say: but your kid suffers from being a pain to adults. Wouldn’t you want to help your kid not suffer?
Well yes sure, but the suffering is society-induced. It’s not that his personality is a medical problem, it’s that he doesn’t fit within the expectations. If he’d been born the son of a monarch, it would be accepted that he talked back to adults and throw tantrums, and he wouldn’t feel like shit. And I am not trying to say my kid should be allowed to yell at his teacher, but all of that setting isn’t natural - as in primates don’t go to kindergarten - so who’s to say what’s normal?
It is the same for what the person describes in the article. We live in a society where people do suffer from not meeting society’s expectations. The suffering is real, and so the diagnostic is often oozing.
But when 10% of children are diagnosed with ADHD and given amphetamines so that they can get through the day, we should probably ask whether it’s not the society that’s sick.
As people learn there's something gravely wrong with how they interact with others, struggle with social situations, etc. — and they validate that by observing enough "normal" people interacting or watch enough Hollywood entertainment depicting perfectly rehearsed conversations — in desperation, they seek a remedy in everything from personality systems ("everything must be labeled and explained") to psychiatric treatment just to cope with the lack of frequent, validating, normal interactions; and in many cases, aren't improving because of how isolated their lives have become.
This is something I've observed in my own life and in friends who share similar challenges.
> now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.
To be clear about my comment: I am not trying to be anti-women here, just point out a trend that I see.
When the article got to using a pros-cons list for having kids, that’s where I found the "put away your calculator and enjoy the beautiful sunrise" moment. You can systematically think about things and still have a personality especially for something as important as having a child. :)
I think a lot of this boils down to that not everything is black and white in life and it sucks to think that way, like assigning labels and using therapy speak this way. Which I very much agree with the original article on.
Otherwise-comfortable people searching for anything in the “matrix of oppression” to cling to. Because for the past decade and a half that’s been the easiest way to insert yourself into the attention economy.
The author obviously adds some exaggeration to get the point across
I don’t think they actually think everyone does this
Knowing you have ADHD, childhood trauma, attachment issues, etc. is useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action or if you don't intend to take action.
Unless you just enjoy the learning for the learnings sake, seek to learn so as to plan and execute.
This is an old observation. The only change was that we started to attempt to diagnose and some people find it useful, some harmful and annoying.
I don't remember past "acceptable" pathologies, or what was considered a pathology back then, it included being gay. It you have a pathology, then you are mad, and if you are mad, then you lose your rights, at best, you are considered like a child, at worst, you end up in a place worse than prison.
Now, if you are diagnosed with an "acceptable" pathology, you actually get some advantages, people are expected to tolerate your quirks and you get full freedom like normal people, you may even get some welfare benefits as you are considered disabled.
To summarize:
Before: You are diagnosed as autistic, you end up in an asylum and lose your freedoms. No one wants that, so you avoid the label, it is just a personality trait.
Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits and people find it cute on social media. You want the label.
> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.
This is almost the opposite of what we can learn about this, and the article does a great job at pointing that out. It's a very recent social phenomenon. Yes, that contradicts your abnornal psych class, but think about it. 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)? In elementary, middle and high schools, at the workplace, in other majors? IME absolutely not, very much the opposite. The only ones who did so were the diagnosed, and then only mentioned it when very relevant. Let alone 100 years ago. Let alone the massive differences between different regions/cultures in desire for uniqueness, both historical and uniqueness.
This is a massive sociocultural phenomenon, absolutely not something inherent to the human psyche. Almost no one is born this way (strong desire to make themselves feel unique).
Bayesianism helps but isn't taught well enough in school. Basically, we fail to handle the false positive and false negatives into the calculation, and this happens a lot with psychologists as well. This is really the point where people say untrained 'professionals' are dangerous - they can't evaluate that inaccuracy of the diagnosis itself.
This is the best explanation I've seen so far: https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-...
One is - everybody thinks they have disorders, so just ignore that feeling it'll mess with you.
The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more
Of course a self-diagnosis is not enough. I discovered my condition while it was still in the early stages of research. I signed up to be a guinea pig for researchers, and got paid a handsome £20/hour to undertake various tests (including brain scans - I still have a 3d image of my brain stored in a box somewhere) to help people better understand the underlying causes of the condition. It was fun for a while, until some of the tests got more disturbing. I also got to learn about the coping strategies I had already developed, and how to use them in better ways to help lessen the impact of the condition on my social interactions.
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.
If labels make you uncomfortable maybe that aversion itself is something worth holding and looking at.
But if we drop the false nostalgia and think of about the overall "we think too much and feel too little" sentiment - i can relate to that.
It’s possible to apply systems, frameworks, or categorizations that are actually wrong or overstated
I was a perfectly fine and productive remote worker before the pandemic. Now, every bit of energy I have goes towards "no, really, I'm alright" and the leagues of hustlers.
Some of that supoort wasnt present.
Anecdotally, the people I know who have become most immersed in therapy speak are also the most socially connected. The therapy speak and associated language have become tools for establishing themselves within their social support system, communicating cries for help, and even trying to use therapy terms to shield themselves from accountability for their actions by transforming it into a therapy session.
Knowledge almost always results in some for of action.
Fore example if I know I have schizoid personality, I don't need to stress out about getting to know people just in case I might at some point start needing human contact. Because I know I won't.
20 years ago you didn't open your phone to see videos by anyone that called themselves a therapist or psychologist say you might have ADHD if you have these xyz common signs. Or if you struggle to have difficult conversations with your partner you might have grown up in a chaotic household.
All very loose, quick and ambiguous explanations that do not provide any balance.
If someone sees it and goes "Oh gosh that loosely explains why I do xyz" they will take it, because is confirming something or its providing an answer to something they deem they struggle with that they didn't have any answer for before.
It's part of the human psyche to try and understand and answer things and we have a confirmation bias that limits our ability to think of both sides of the coin, not just the one that's constantly popping up on our mobile phones from so called therapists.
100 years ago we used to often arbitrarily decide what mental conditions people have and then proceed to extract out parts of their brain to try and fix it to disastrous effects.
The same story has been repeated dozens of times; An individual is bullied/ostracized for some hobby or characteristic, years later they find the same bullies now going all in said hobbies and characteristics.
The labels people use follow trends. Labelling (self or others) as autistic or on the spectrum is relatively new, but there have been trends for other disorders in the past. Neurotic, depressed, anal retentive, even phrenology - people worrying that the shape of their cheekbones mean they must be genetically stupid, or applying that to others. We have evidence of such trends going back 100 years at least, and probably more.
For sure, social media has amplified and homogenized things, as it does. But it's not a new phenomenon.
Obviously, if your deficit appears only when it is socially advantageous and disappears when disadvantageous, it is something else. But it was a thing.
In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression, the "help" out there is criminal. It is not a disease we have a cure for, in fact it's not clear to me it's even a disease in most sufferers, but a healthy and rational response to societal decay. I do not believe some disorders will ever be satisfactorily explained by individual-centric medicine, in the same way history will never be satisfactorily explained by great man theory.
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.
I disagree! There was never a good support system at all. We used to just man up and live with it. Now that stress is reaching it's new heights. We can't cope with it.
I wish I lived in this reality. It sounds like a utopia over there.
That’s not actually true, and misses the point.
Knowing you have ADHD, alone, helps you stop blaming yourself and hating yourself for those things that are caused by the ADHD. It doesn’t excuse it, but understanding that those things aren’t moral failures are a huge deal to those who actually struggle with ADHD.
Moreover, most people with actual undiagnosed ADHD have spent their entire lifetime building coping mechanisms to manage it. Recognizing those does help build others in the future, even if just knowing changes nothing right then.
The “Aspie programmer” meme has been around since the turn of the century (at least)
https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/
I’m pretty sure people made reference to it when I was at Cal in the 90s but I can’t prove it. (The prevalence of social awkwardness, eye contact avoidance, hyper-interests, etc.). I don’t think it was as much about people wanting to feel special as trying to find explanations for the overall environment.
Time as in evolution?
I think this is subtly incorrect. I would phrase it this way:
> everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do... And they think that makes them different and therefore deserving of special treatment.
We all live on continuums of mental health, and reflecting on that is important. But it's unrelated to what's happening here, there's not much reflection, just self labelling and demanding special treatment based on these labels.
Someone strongly on the autism spectrum absolutely needs special treatment, some just a little, some a lot.
But somebody who watches a TikTok about autism and recognizes, or thinks they recognize, similar behaviors in themselves, does not need it (except in the few cases where it is actually undiagnosed autism, of course, but that's a very small minority).
The big issues is the prevalence of so called therapists and psychologists putting these labels on social media in such an ambiguous way that draws users.
Our kids should have mental health professionals talking to them about their struggles and helping them identify these things. Not 100s of instagram or tiktok reels algorithmically sent to us every night.
By definition roughly half the population in any society must belong to a below average family and/or below average communities.
And it seems pretty likely that those with below average capacities at handling, processing, reflecting, etc., on these issues would be concentrated there.
Almost every day of my whole career I've worked with people who were missing social cues and being disliked because they were misunderstood. I think an engineer is MUCH more likable if they genuinely say "Sorry if I'm loud, and I don't mean to interrupt, sometimes when I get excited I accidentally do this, I don't do it because I think my ideas are better than everyone else's."
Now obviously if somebody exaggerates a trait they don't have, says it in a self-important way, and isn't remorseful at all about the effect it has on people around them, and isn't trying to change it that's a shame.
But frankly imo the balance of that in software is I've met 1/2 in my whole career who came across as self-important about their conditions, versus against maybe 20% (dozens and dozens) weren't able/willing to communicate their oddities.
This often seems to come with some assumption of moral superiority.
But under the label many of them are absolutely mainstream people. Their posts aren't genuine spontaneous comments - they're calibrated and calculated as a marketing exercise for "engagement" and to promote a product, course, Insta lifestyle, and so on.
I realise it's tough out there and everyone has to hustle. But there really aren't many who acknowledge the gulf between the vocabulary of rebellion from the reality of "Please buy my course on how to be anticapitalist." (Actual example - not made up.)
If I looked I imagine I'd find a mirror image of hustle conformity and superiority culture on far right boards, only more so.
It's all quite weirdly Social Media™.
Edit: to add, I'm not criticising specific subgroups. I'm very aware the US is a dangerous place and being certain kinds of person significantly decreases your life expectancy.
It's more how social media has somehow distorted the online experience of those subgroups away from straightforward human exchange into commercial opportunity without people being aware of it.
Or maybe this is just how young people think when given access to this type of information.
Especially with children and teenagers - which is why labeling them early can be so bad (or good, if used sparingly).
I dislike the "you don't have adhd, you live in capitalism" meme in general, but there is a big difficulty in knowing how much you might be overloading yourself, trying to get to an unattainable normal because your actual material conditions are not normal.
If you're working 60 hour weeks for most people there's not much saving you from having a very messy life! But your peers might all also be in that environment, and you will see people who navigate that somewhat successfully.
Of course you could be working much less and simply "be lazy" and suffer downstream of that. You might be two mindset changes away from being a lot less stressed.
Or you might have a medical condition that makes certain things harder! Or you might not.
At the end of the day there are medical conditions that exist and are fairly scientifically proven to exist in some form and have treatment. And plenty of people who spend time saying that stuff doesn't exist, so there's vocal pushback against that which rubs some people the wrong way.
But there's also just human introspection (which is part of how we grow). The new thing is that this introspection often happens more in the open, a lot of times with the whole world watching.
Even 20 years ago you might talk with other people around the world but it would at least be in more closed spaces.
Over the course of our childhoods we experiment with personality, and discover the elements that allow us to have stable and satisfying dealings with the world. We may cultivate several different personalities— each of them the real us in some respect.
Of course there are many elements of personality that are autonomic or otherwise habitual. That doesn’t mean personality is somehow not real.
A con artist or an actor can don a fake personality, but all that means is they are telling a kind of systemic lie to the world. This requires a lot of energy to maintain. Your real personality is that which minimizes required energy.
What if the first part of this is true (we all have a smattering of disorders), but thinking about them more just makes things worse?
It's been very helpful for me to pay attention to and think about how my own personality compares to others'. For example, I tend to be a people-pleaser, but I used to think that everyone was just as people-pleasing as me, which only reinforced the people-pleasing because I didn't feel right putting my own needs first when everyone else was already sacrificing their own needs (or so I assumed).
At the same time, medicalizing these things paints them as "abnormal" disorders that need to be "cured", overlooking any of the positives these traits bring. When it comes to my people-pleasing, I like it about myself that I care about others. As long as I recognize that it sometimes comes at my own expense, I can begin to make more conscious decisions about when to allow the people-pleasing to flow versus when to try to subdue it.
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.
The views of people you are trying to label as fascist are more accurately described as individualism vs welfare state.
Therapy, and psychology in general, is one of the weakest areas of science, still based mostly on mysticism, large personalities, and weak statistical correlations. And that is assuming you even can get a "good" therapist, and not some schmuck who just happened to nab the degree.
I would go so far as to say that 90%+ of problems that are served in therapy sessions are better served by the regular participants in an intimate social network, friends and family, than some "expert" who is incentivized, knowingly or not, to send you into the pharmaceutical pipeline or, as this article describes, hand you a bunch of random labels you can forever use to psychologically handicap yourself with.
The people who, according to your theory, want to reverse the tolerance trend and slide towards fascism/authoritarianism didn't pop out today. They existed and lived in society in the 2010s too. So, from a logical standpoint, what changed?
I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.
Not sure how, since as long as I can remember I thought all people are different, so it's just about finding some that you like and that can also accept you. I don't want to force my quirks and preferences on others, but they don't get to do that either. Of course that can mean some periods and/or situations when you are not part of "the group", but looking back, although it did not feel cool all the time, that was mostly beneficial, got to know more people and do more stuff while looking for people I like.
There has to be a happy medium. I have some neuro issues, and yet I understand that while I may not be able to control the issues themselves, only me is responsible for my own actions. That is lacking in many folks who share my diagnoses. We dropped the ball somewhere and I don't know where, to be honest.
But the idea is: in current society, for some pathologies / personality traits, you are better off with the label than without the label, so people will seek the label rather than avoid it, they would be crazy not to...
Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can: "Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1]
i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too.
If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual.
I think a lot of societal change these days can be summarized by the idea that self-labeling is seen as transforming something into "everyone else's problem".
The feedback of reality will fix it, like for all young people.
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.
i don't think it's unreasonable, particularly when she qualifies gen-z, to conflate tiktok and society.
it's really out of hand. the brain rot, beyond just the psych labeling she touches on, is crazy.
Why is it everywhere now? Because we diagnose and treat it. In the old days what did we do with ADD kids? Hit them. What did we do with ADD adults? Call them stupid and lazy.
Therapy is the second worst thing in my life to happen to me. There were the tens of therapists who put me down or told me my life experience didn't constitute "real trauma". By remaining in the therapy system for so long, years and years, and chasing support I could not actually be offered, all I received was a slew of new trauma (of once again having my lived experience denied) and a hole in my savings. Not kidding, I could have set all that money on fire and have turned out better than I did.
But far more damaging than that was how I was pushed into seeking out labels and spurious diagnoses that only covered up the true causes of my shame - my caretakers and the medical system that acted as their apologia. The idea sold to me (indeed sold, with thousands of dollars of uninsured medical practices) was that with an ADD or other diagnosis under my wing, I could start "really" healing, that the "true" causes to my dysfunction were finally in front of me after being lost for so long.
I now disagree. I was goaded into believing I was a product of unfortunate circumstances instead of malicious incompetence or the just plain abuse and neglect I really did suffer. I was bucketed into the same labels everyone else uses to navigate their problems without regard to their appropriatness and was told it was ME and MY condition that was the beginning and end of the problem. Instead of providing a cohesive narrative, that only served to alienate me further.
We need to stop treating symptoms as labels to be celebrated. Therapy-speak needs to be societally ostracized and die out. My label was the consolation prize to the unfairness and abject cruelty I was subjected to in life. Nothing could be more insulting to the fiber of my being. I am now just myself. I refuse to be medicalized any longer.
The media apparatus in America has split into a center and left, and then a right wing which has different norms and produces its own products.
That in turn has created a durable political coalition that self referentially calls itself when it needs to support its descriptions on reality.
It’s significantly more effective at producing narratives, and moving ideas from the fringes to the main stream news channels.
Since it has little traffic with the left and center media channels, it avoids counter claims and norms on journalistic standards.
So you can now primary Bipartisan politicians, and then the ideas that gain media attention are the ones that reinforces party talking points. Counter views simply do not get air time.
What we are seeing today, is the progression of those forces, as the narratives are never challenged.
The algorithms are promoting those views?
My classically-autistic son who needs a lot of support apparently has the same disorder as a nerdy guy who comes across as a bit abrasive, doesn't understand the point of small talk, and would rather work on Linux kernel patches on a Saturday night than hit the town.
Combined with the change in society where most active jobs are being replaced with sitting down at a computer.
Because "disorder" may be on a spectrum, because "negative" and "impact" may be on a spectrum. Conditions like depression follow a bell-curve, there's no clear line between depressed and not, and we can draw a line in the sand, but statistically there's no justification for where that line falls.
One way to try to draw a line is "the point at which a certain intervention is no longer effective."
For example studies find CBT therapy reduces depression scores for depressed people ~.8 standard deviations (for a while).
But why not try CBT therapy on happy people? Maybe it's even more effective on people who are already happy. Well the reason why not is likely just because of the clumsy nature of healthcare -- interventions are thought of as "treatments" for "conditions", even though that lens doesn't always make sense.
It sounds like you're presuming those who put a label on themselves don't want to change themselves at all; one could also imagine that those who put a label on themselves want to change themselves most of all
I still go to therapy. It isn’t helpful.
But while we might have science today, we still have disasters and diseases. Instead of shamans and religious leaders, now politicians and activists promise easy solutions that are within arm's grasp, "if only the people currently in charge weren't so corrupt and incompetent." But change is incremental at best, and where it concerns depression specifically, it appears only to be getting worse.
I've been thinking about an escape hatch here:
Imagine that all philosophical notions of free will were incoherent. In that case non-philosophers' use of "free will" would either be a) inherited from this philosophical incoherence, or b) pretentious/ambiguous nomenclature that reduces to a more practical, well-defined term-- e.g., self-determination, freedom from tyranny, etc.
In reality, it seems like in the vast majority of non-philosophers mean "free will" as a short-hand for one of the more practical, workaday terms. The only edge case I can think of is the use of "free will" in the history of Christian theology, but I very rarely see that come up in non-academic situations.
If my supposition is right, then we can practically swap out nearly all instances of "free will" for the relevant non-philosophical, well-specified lay terms. And the continue to hold people responsible for their actions based on the centuries of case-law, common law, social history and medical knowledge that led up to our modern era. Perhaps more importantly, we can incrementally level up our understanding of responsibility/justice based on modern research into human behavior, while completely avoid digressions into philosophical determinism.
In fact, I'd speculate that college philosophy "free will 101" classes are a kind of unwitting bait and switch. I bet if you did a survey, most prospective students would be expecting a class that sharpens their teeth on one of the workaday synonyms, most often something like "self-actualization." But that has about as much to do with "free will" that as "coffee bean calligraphy" has to do with Javascript. (Alternatively: it would be a fun prank to do a "free will 101" class that teaches students to stand up for what they believe in, resist tyranny, etc. :)
Edit: clarification
Here in the Netherlands, there isn’t any such thing as an ‘autism benefit’ or ‘ADHD benefit’. Only if your condition is so debilitating as to make you unfit for work, then there is a benefit that you could apply for, but not in all circumstances, and only if an unemployment doctor is convinced by your case.
Whether this is best described as "learning", or as "internalised <whatever>", or as "trauma", is left to the reader.
From my understanding, compatibilism boils down to accepting that everything may be pre-determined, but people are still free to make choices as long as they are uncoerced.
The argument from that quote above is a little bit subtler and aligns with my thinking. I don't believe we have free will in any sense, either everything is pre-determined, or it is random, and I can't even think of a definition of free will that would make sense (just like the compatiblism one does not to me). But clearly there is a feedback loop going on, and so it is inherently in the species best interest to hold people accountable for their actions, because the act of holding them accountable forms part of the inputs that lead people to make choices. Not doing this is not a great survivability trait overall. Doing so, we survive a bit more.
But I'm not sure that is strictly necessary to call oneself a compatibilist.
Decades of studies refute this.
It is amazing how upset even the most decent and understanding of people can get when they feel you've slighted them in some way. Having someone (you like/respect/love/etc) screaming abuse at you in the middle of the street because you failed to respond to their greeting, because you didn't recognise them and realise they were saying hello specifically to you ... is humiliating. Not knowing why this situation was happening on a regular basis - can you blame me for thinking that it was my fault? That I wasn't a reasonable, decent person? That the things being screamed in my face were accurate?
Hence my relief when discovering there was a label for my condition. Though, sadly, no cure.
And it is more important to not stigmatize talking about it at all than it is to optimize for some people not using it as an excuse.
Surely this is trivially "yes". If their actions are deterministic, then your responses to their actions must also be deterministic, including holding them responsible (punishment, firing, etc).
This is a good example of where over-thinking a topic in abstract terms causes some people to lose sight of the big picture.
Take a step back and think about what you’re saying: If nobody could be held accountable for their own actions, does the concept of accountability disappear? It’s a farcical claim.
But you’re right, this is essentially what is being argued: By invoking therapy speak and formal sounding labels, the person wants you to kindly box up any accountability or consequences under the label and direct them at the abstract notion of the labeled condition, instead of the person responsible.
This is why I experienced so many people getting worse at punctuality after learned the phrase “time blindness”: They used the therapy speak to transform themselves into the victim, at which point the pressure to improve their situation diminished because they believe victims couldn’t be blamed. The temptation becomes strong to label everything negative this way as it’s a nice escape hatch to externalize accountability.
By "being" the label, one has little to no agency over it. Without agency, there is no responsibility, nor incentive to change. Without responsibility or incentive to change, there is no problem for the individual; rather the problem is everyone else.
This isn't just something that a person can do to themselves- it's something society can do to people. The phrase "bigotry of low expectations" describes a behavior of assuming that a label identifies a person, and that they have no personal agency to overcome it. The behavioral shift of everyone around that person molds the image the person has of themselves to a limited, restricted version of what they're actually capable of.
It is trying to remove the shame from the equation, because it is not a productive emotion. It makes people postpone and avoid steps necessary for treatment.
Western society has basically built a hyper capitalist system that creates individualistic consumers, but has failed to hold individuals accountable to minimum standards.
The bar has never been lower and we just sort of amble on as a lonely, isolated society so long as the stock market grows quarter to quarter.
TL;DR: It argues that what comes after "God is dead" (Nietzsche) is "the soul is dead" (or less poetically, "the self is dead"), i.e. we become convinced we have no agency, but mere biological and environmental automatons with the concomitant lack of moral accountability.
(Credit to earljwagner's 2023 post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37950313)
Speaking as one with a huge challenge in this space. No one is going to go “oh, you have ADHD, well, I guess you don’t need to fulfil that expectation…”
The problem is that many people incorrectly self-diagnose as suffering from conditions like time blindness. Which they do for a variety of reasons: To externalize accountability for why they're late, to feel special, and so on.
A comparison is the large number of people who claim "gluten sensitivity" and maintain special diets. Now there are serious medical conditions like celiac disease that require one to avoid gluten. But the vast majority of self-diagnosed "gluten sensitives" do not have such conditions. Researchers conclude that for many of them there is no physical basis for their self-diagnosis.
Among other things this phenomenon makes it harder for people with actual conditions to be taken seriously, because there are so many impostors.
The first sentence claims that it’s something people with ADHD might experience, not a specific condition. In other words, it’s just the therapy-speak way of saying “chronically late”.
Note that the date on the article is also very recent: Only a few months old. This date is after the trend was popular on TikTok. It was likely written in response to the trend, as a way of capturing search engine traffic from people searching for it.
This is representative of the issue I was describing: There’s a sense among some people that using the therapy-speak terminology for something transforms it into a different type of personality attribute, for which they can’t be held responsible. Saying “I have a problem with being on time” and “I have time blindness” are functionally equivalent, but some people want to believe they the therapy speak labeled version warrants different treatment.
"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.
So is Munchausen syndrome, but somehow people don't self diagnose that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
tlb or pg has a pithy saying that I can't find now goes smth like
"we should avoid labels [on people] not because they are useless (they aren't) but they are hard to get right. Adding the cost of being wrong to that makes them not worth it"
There's some connection to the "build skill or taste?" dilemma threaded earlier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469163
You can make proper use of labels-- that requires taste. To build skill, you try to find new labels that can go viral ;)
E.g you combine them like Hobart :)
Most people suffered, and made the ones around them suffer as well. On top of that, you are in no position to move to an “average” position on the behavior spectrum, because it’s fundamentally outside your biological operational parameters.
There are TONS of relations which were kept in place, because of society, keeping people who made each other worse, in permanent proximity.
Survivorship bias is real.
We’re the ones who inherited the world with more knowledge than past generations, it’s up to us to do better with it. This will include getting better at diagnosing.
For self diagnosing, I have no idea what to do.
what you're describing is survivor's bias.
1) the most talented people with cognitive differences made it out for sure. But not every person on the spectrum is "amazing with technology" in a useful way. But not all are, and the ones that weren't just didn't make it. Today they do.
2) those people still needed luck. Luck that they were able to come up in a society that didn't expect more from them than to perform a "function". Things like meeting a spouse were "easier" because there was a more rigorous social structure. Depending on which society this was in, potentially to the detriment of your grandmother who didn't have a lot of choices.
2b) and luck that the community around them accepted them. That wasn't JUST because he was a farmer, it's also because he hit the other markers of inclusion whether he wanted to or not.
People in that day and age were not cognitively free. Is cognitive freedom preferable? Well that's the question of our age. We weren't supposed to just kill god and stop. We were supposed to replace a new humanist secular philosophy to replace the theology to find purpose to humanity.
We didn't, society is now full of anxiety and malaise, and the right wing is rising promising to fix it by a RVTRN to the old ways regardless of who they harm.
Stress is caused by our internal perspective of our problems, not by some external unchanging measure of it.
I mean sure, but that's also not what ADHD is. It's how ADHD gets described, by medical professionals too, but in my lived experience the attention deficit part of ADHD is the least bad part.
It's the executive function stuff that's real fucked up. You know how if you gotta do something you don't reaaaally wanna do it's kinda hard to get started? Imagine instead if it was nigh impossible. Imagine if it happened with things you DO want to do. All the time. On the outside you just look lazy, while on the inside you're screaming at yourself to go do the thing for hours. Imagine being unable to attain your goals specifically because they are your goals.
Imagine the only way to keep your house even slightly clean is to wait for the planets to align and give you the power to even start cleaning. Half the time it happens at 1AM, but you can either clean until 3AM and be completely fucked at work the next day or just not clean at all until the next time the planets align, which might be the next day or next month.
Imagine being told your entire life you're a lazy fuckup that's not living up to their potential.
Yeah not being able to do boring shit for 8 hours straight is normal. Not having sufficient executive function is a real handicap and being told that it's a moral failing repeatedly will really fuck up a person for a good long while.
Maybe that wasn't the intention but label does shape perception.
In my perspective, it's less about what you should or shouldn't do; its about making sure that question is down to your individual morality.
No but you certainly are your own skin.
If his parent were supportive, it would not have been a "i am wrong" situation, but "someone is being an ass to me".
Would your grandfather have been so well integrated if his problems had not been offset by such ability?
Regardless of how bad things are, we still have hope, both as individuals and as a civilization.
Very anecdotal which makes me think this: immediate physical stressors like exercise are uncomfortable but I get through them fine. Chronic stressors like climate change are totally ruining my quality of life.
So if you "really actually" have ADHD[0], that isn't just manifesting in not getting work done, it's manifesting in saying things before speaking, issues with addiction, issues with self-management leading to hygiene issues etc.
Loads of social effects that go beyond "don't want to work".
Me having a job or not isn't what's causing me to insult a friend by snapping back at them in a way that I _know_ is wrong. It's not causing lasting damage to social relationships because of my behavior. Capitalism isn't causing that.
And hey, meds help my management of those things. Even if I had all the money in the world these are things I would like to continue managing.
Bit of a glib opinion, though.
[0]: Not a doctor, etc.
There’s a meaningful line in the sand for treatments with major side effects. CBT therapy may be “fine” for normal people, but the most effective treatment for depression is ECT which has major side effects. Including a ~1 in 50k chance of death.
Saying something is a bell curve distribution is an approximation, it doesn’t mean there’s actually a continuous function out to infinity and negative infinity.
This is not the same thing as what you show to the world. "What you show to the world" implies that personality is merely a veil that covers stuff. It's not a veil at all. It's an interface. The "real you" that acts through this interface is beyond words, personality is not "showing it" because it can't be shown, but rather mediating it via actions.
ICE engines heat up because they burn fuel, but if it’s overheating in normal operation that’s from something else breaking down.
Not that people are so simple, but that transition point to disorder often represents a meaningful transition.
You don't even get social benefits, no one excuses your behavior just because it has a label. You get told it's your fault for not managing your disorder properly. Have you seen how we treat people with visible, obvious, undeniable disabilities? Like shit.
I personally think that shows hidden issues in said people - at least that they take things too personally and do not have some emotion control. It can be horrible for the people they get upset on, but there are many reasons why this can happen even without considering prosopagnosia. Me personally I think 90% of the times I am the one noticing people I know on the street. I never got upset and just think that most people are absentminded or tired to check people (I lived mostly in medium/big cities so it gets tiring).
I definitely don't blame you or the condition, but the social construct that makes you wonder if you are not a reasonable person if you do something "different". I would hope in a civilized society, the instinct should be to wonder why something happens and try to understand (ofc there are always assholes, but hopefully not the majority). Screaming/blame/ridicule make me wonder if there is not some structural issue...
Like "unwell"*, "uncool" or "has bad taste"
In the barbaric old days, like you mean, there was racism (no longer objective)... Nowadays you can deny my suggested labels are cruel, plausibly, even in court!
*"Sick" is now a term of endearment, alas
It's harder to escape from "has bad taste" than from "irresponsible" :)
>Bad taste leads to crime
Useful reminder (originally Stendhal's, that Lead poisoning is always indirect)?
OT warnings
You're so ignorant.
Especially when it comes to alcoholism. As if the soviet union was a bastion of soberness with a high bar or something.
And yet people are using things like "time blindness" as excuses.
Sadly this doesn't really work due to the current state of psychiatry where many people with legitimate issues are being denied a diagnosis and treatment (see for example: trans healthcare and gatekeeping, adhd healthcare, etc). It is even more weird because often when you go to two different doctors you will get different results.
Not to mention that usually to even explore the idea of getting an official diagnosis you start with a self diagnosis.
> But the vast majority of self-diagnosed "gluten sensitives" do not have such conditions.
If you believe that you have celiac but for whatever reason you haven't been able to test it yet, then there is no harm to try going glutten free. The real issue is how many people deny the very existence of glutten sensitivity and put these people in danger. If you look at communities of people with the disease you will see what I am talking about.
neurodivergence can and frequently is a real debilitating disability. it is really fucking hard to cope with in a society that actively punishes it, and is full of perspectives like yours that invalidate these very real conditions.
i understand it's a difficult thing to wrap your head around. it isn't super visible like someone missing their legs. it's a really complicated, nuance spectrum of problems that are also really difficult to understand by people who don't have it, and frequently the people who do have it also don't know they have or understand how it impacts them
I haven't read much psychology, but this article suggests a lot of psychological diagnoses are just labels for symptoms:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the-mind-in-the-whe...
Imagine that your car breaks down and you bring it to a mechanic and he tells you, “Oh, your car has a case of broken-downness.” You’d know right away: this guy has no idea what he’s talking about. “Broken-downness” is an abstraction; it doesn’t refer to anything, and it’s not going to help you fix a car.> Often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities (e.g., difficulty managing sequential tasks; difficulty keeping materials and belongings in order; messy, disorganized work; has poor time management; fails to meet deadlines).
The DSM doesn't list all minutiae of every general problem.
Your advice is as ignorant as saying 'just do more fun things' to someone with depression.
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.
But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.
Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement ? Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power? Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with? Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Again, I agree with you that some are hiding behind these things in order to deflect blame, but let's not pretend that the young don't have every right to be mad at us.
I guess pg is Paul Graham. Who is tlb?
No we don't. Evidence: falling birthrates is the society collectively deciding that live ain't worth it. Personally, I think this is the real reason why we don't see aliens - any advanced civilisation will eventually reach a point where it realizes that life ain't worth it.
ancient men and women coped with existential fear by either embracing that everything is a cycle, or inventing some semblance of immortality by raising children or believing in life after death.
I guess I have no stress about climate change because it seems very normal to me that society and biosystems occasionally collapse. The stress comes from thinking there's something that can be done to stop it, and feeling that you're unable to achieve it. Maybe that's me throwing my hands up and accepting death instead of trying to stave it off, I just want to throw out there that the stress is self imposed, not environmental.
These don't mean the same thing. You can be the thing you are and not be helpless. For example, if you have ADHD that's just a part of who you are. That doesn't mean you can't take medication or form processes to help yourself and mitigate the effects of ADHD.
Also, in my experience, people who choose to never label themselves are not better off. They typically do have some sort of condition, sometimes multiple, and they actively choose to do nothing about it because they're in extreme denial.
I see this with parents all the time. "My kids doesn't have ADHD! Stop trying to label him!". Okay great, but little Timmy is about to flunk out at fucking third grade. Let's do something about it.
If they're faking it for benefits they are REALLY committed to the bit.
capitalism is the thing making too much choice, and to many choices over time.
capitalism set the context for you snapping at your friend, where you are doing work you dont want to to avoid being homeless, while they are doing different work and you feel like its unfair that their work is different from yours.
if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them
My partner is disabled and her transplanted kidney is failing. She will, in the next year or two, need dialysis and then a kidney transplant. Her Medicaid will be cut. The hospital she goes to will be closed. Both as a result of a bill that just passed. The average kidney transplant out of pocket costs $250,000, and because her first transplant happened before she met me, my insurance will deny her coverage because it's a pre-existing condition. We are in the process of trying to move to a different location, get her a job while she's going through kidney failure (not easy since nobody wants to hire a sick person, and definitely not at a workload that would give them benefits), and I'm in the process of trying to move us out of the country (I'm a dual citizen, she is not, so that's holding things up).
At what point in that is despair not a logical emotion, even when we're doing something about it? What is illogical about being so overwhelmed with circumstances that it makes you question whether waking up tomorrow is a net positive or negative? Please explain.
Slightly more seriously, things will be on an upward trajectory until they aren’t. There are some decent reasons to think we might be nearing the peak.
But yeah it's an interesting question, and with the Internet as well. The 1980s world I grew up in as a kid (in Czechia) was more dangerous than the Internet-focused world of today; yet young people seem to be more stressed by the latter.
Economic anxiety could be the big one, and people don’t see the end of the tunnel.
As the guy said, if you think you hear voices but they tell you to go to sleep on time and do a good job at work, you probably don't need treatment.
I believe your analogy is flawed. Can you restate your first statement in any other way?
That might be a projection; just a punctual person peeved off with the chronically late; but I was just adding the point that being challenged in this area isn’t an excuse.
I’m on-time for work stuff; I’ve figured out how to compensate. Personal life, ok, different story, but the responsibility has always rested with me.
Most restaurants have menu items with zero gluten, so eating out is hardly difficult. Not much gluten in a plain steak, potato, and vegetables.
You just made one hell of a strawman argument about what GP said.
He merely stated that “the vast majority of self-diagnosed ‘gluten sensitives’ do not have such conditions”, as you quoted. This comment jibes with my experience.
The two folks I know who have full-blown celiac end up projectile vomiting for hours if they consume even small amounts of gluten (e.g., gross contamination in a fryer or on a cutting board).
The two folks I know who have milder versions were able to figure out that they needed to be tested in fairly short order due to “digestion issues” when they ate gluten.
On the other hand, the dozens of other folks I know who claim to be “sensitive to gluten” have no real basis when saying so. When I mentioned to them that I have friends with celiac, and I empathize with them, and I suggest they get tested if they haven’t yet (undiagnosed celiac is real), the answer I get are nothing short of glib - “oh, I’m just on a keto diet, and this is an easy way to do it”, “oh, I just found that I feel bad after eating things like cake” (sugar crash? diabetic?), or “oh, I’m fine, I just want them to make a fresh one (of whatever) for me”.
Your defense of folks who claim a problem that they can (often) fairly easily determine that they don’t have is enabling those folks’ dysfunction — that is, lying to themselves and (per this thread) using labeling as a defensive tactic.
People who actually have celiac need very specific accommodations. But the multiples of people who claim “gluten sensitivity” when they don’t actually have it causes large swathes of the general population to disbelieve the folks who really do have it.
It’s ok to call out the poseurs for what they are while still looking out for folks who have celiac or might have celiac and don’t know it yet.
But yeah, let's be stupidly early. I think part of accepting that you have a mental condition means that your life will simply not be optimal. Which is harsh to accept in a society which values efficiency above all else.
Who said they should? Nobody should ideally, but that's the way the world works: shit rolls downhill. And being a cheeky little shit at work, will not result in a revolutionary change at the top of corporations leadership the way you imagine, but will just result in your direct manager's career being at risk due to your behavior, so you're giving him no choice but to cut you because they're not gonna die on your hill for you. Cultural changes take a long time and need to involve 90%+ of the workforce, not just a few.
>Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
You know why. Because the rules are made by those in power, and people choose to rise to power in order to make the rules by which others are held accountable.
That's why young people are engaging in the "lying flat" or quiet quitting movements, and voting outsiders of the establishment like Trump, Mamdani, etc. They want to flip the monopoly board over because they know they were dealt a shit hand. And while I'm not that young anymore, I totally support their movement.
As young adults always had, since the dawn of time.
And as they've received and comprehended the answers, most quickly stopped asking.
That is part of what becoming an adult, without the "young" bit, means. It's not like these things are unknowable, or that the "system of things" is secretive. It's all rather obvious - it just takes a little time and experience to figure out the questions and notice the answers.
----
> Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement?
Because that's how it works. It's not that different from asking, why should they suffer the consequences of a tree falling on them and crushing them? Because they happened to stand under it at the time, duh!
Society and civilization aren't fixtures created by nature/God - they're built out of human interactions. People pursuing all kinds of interests, alone or in groups, navigating around each other, cooperating, convincing or coercing each other. It's all abstract systems created and maintained by strangers. And the unfortunate reality is, someone screws up somewhere badly enough, everyone downstream of it suffers.
The sad irony is, the consequences they ask about come from mismanagement of systems that were created in the past to shield people from consequences of failure of earlier versions of the same or similar systems! That's what civilization is, in a way - stacking systemic solutions to problems of previous systems!
The silver lining is in hoping that every iteration makes less people suffer consequences and to a lesser degree.
> Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?
It is invoked much more often than they think, but they're not able to recognize it - it looks different than with people not in power. And it needs to be different, because the situation is different too.
> Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with?
Why is it OK for them to yell at old disgruntled people for things they have nothing to do with? Yelling is easy. Understanding that almost no one individually has much influence on how things are, that can unfortunately take a lifetime.
> Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?
Because that's how life works. It was the same for us when we were young, and for our parents when they were young, etc. Young people don't know shit about life, and don't even realize that yet. Over time, they acquire knowledge, experience and relationships, and various kinds of power - and along the way, they are treated more and more seriously, until they themselves become the people "running things" and start hearing the same questions they used to ask from the next generation of kids.
----
To be clear: I'm not saying that things are all ideal, or even perfectly fine. I'm just saying that the answers to those questions aren't mysterious, and figuring them out is exactly what growing up to be an adult in a society looks like. It always has, which is why you can see the exact same complaints about "kids these days" and "old farts" showing up in every period in history, all the way back to ancient Greece and earlier.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
'Trevor L. Blackwell', co-founder of YC
Pls help
Or they could try to start a revolution, but frankly most of them are too weak and fragile to attempt anything that involves real sacrifice and risk.
In my parents’ time in a (then) Dutch colony, nobody was diagnosed with anything (that was only for crazies), but all the men knew how being hit with a belt felt (daughters were spared, from what I’ve been told). Self-medicating with alcohol and beating your kids if they ‘misbehaved’ was just the done thing, as far as I’ve been told.
This is to say that anyone who showed (what we would now identify as) neurodivergent behaviour probably would’ve been beaten, but this then wouldn’t have precluded them from going on to start a family and business (and maybe beat their own kids).
Actually, this is probably still how it works in many parts of the world. Even here in the Netherlands, beating your children was only outlawed as recently as 2007.
These interactions are not in that sense, they are in the "I say some stupid unvarnished opinion first and immediately realize there was a better way of saying it" variety. It is not downstream of me being stressed out about money or work or whatever. These are things that happen when I am in a perfectly normal mood, not thinking about how to pay rent or whatever.
I have plenty of social failings that are very much unrelated to capitalism. I have also had bad social interactions downstream of money/capitalism/etc too! But that's its own thing
Maybe you subscribe to some grand unifying theory here but I don't. Social structures and norms existed before market capital, and they exist in spaces fairly separate from the economic sphere ("those don't exist!" you might say, but I believe they do exist, at least in a time-and-space limited fashion).
Subsuming all of my issues to capitalism is unsatisfying. Thinking about the texture of it all (and potentially identifying some things that really are linked to that, and become as solvable as gravity[0]) is more valuable to me. I think it's also valuable to others.
[0]: or political action or whatever
Economics is intertwined with every other study. We can't pretend socio-economics isn't real, social interactions fuel the economy and the economy influences our social interactions.
Also, making connections to way capitalism might fuel addictive disorders, such as, say, talking about advertising of alcohol and tobacco, does NOT mean that we are saying communism is perfect. Communism fuels disorders in other ways. It's actually quiet childish to take any analysis of capitalism as a praise of communism. It's the sort of "team sport" mentality you see in politics among the most uneducated and reductive among us.
Still down a bit and you’ll find plenty of vagueness with mechanics. “You have a bad tie-rod end.” Ok, cool. What caused that, why did mine fail when my buddy’s didn’t, how can I avoid this? Shrug. Once you’ve got it down to a part, you just replace it with a new one. Can’t do that with mental health. “Your time management unit is bad, we can replace it with a manufacturer part for $2,000, or an aftermarket equivalent for $1,500.”
Having a single symptom does not mean someone has the condition. The diagnostic criteria for the condition for which you took that quote (out of context) is more comprehensive. It’s not a simple matter of doing Ctrl+F on the DSM and seeing that something can be a symptom or something else.
This is more obvious when you start thinking of other conditions: Feelings of sadness are a symptom of depression, but not everyone who has feelings of sadness has depression.
The misuse and misinterpretation of the DSM has become commonplace in parallel with the use of therapy speak.
I think the only source of disagreement is in the way you chose to frame it in absolutes, i.e., "all such people" instead of "people".
Framing anything in absolutes counts as a strawman argument, because all you need to do to refute it is find a single case, no matter how isolated it is, where it doesn't apply.
“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.
Speak for yourself. I've seen 2 year olds being able to choose their clothes and if they don't get their way, they throw a temper tantrum so bad they vomit.
And I fear, the child will turn into another Cartman. I.e. spoiled beyond any belief.
Also, being able to Google a TikTok-famous phrase and get hits from SEO-targeted blog posts like this doesn’t really make it official nomenclature. They’re just trying to capture traffic with trending keywords. This is a very obvious SEO article.
Saying “I have a problem with being on time” and “I have time blindness” are functionally equivalent. Applying therapy speak doesn’t change the situation.
This is all very much missing the point, though. Someone who believes they have “time blindness” should recognize that they have a higher need for additional measures to address their issue, including more use of time keeping aids, alarms, and even accountability from external parties. Trying to use a labeled condition to escape accountability for one’s actions is not only unhelpful, it goes against the entire purpose of therapy.
The problem becomes more clear when you imagine the same idea applied to other issues: If someone is constantly lashing out and yelling at people, they don’t get a free pass for saying they have “an anger issue”. They’re still accountable for the consequences of their actions, regardless of what name you put on it.
Adopt absurdism. Nothing really matters and it's grotesquely hilarious at the same time. That might cheer you up. Occasionally.
Some of my language patterns come from watching and interacting with my stepfather. He was big man with a loud voice and an iron work ethic. I didn't get along with him when I was a kid-- in fact had to leave home after threatening his life-- but as I became a man I decided that I was going to force the world NOT TO IGNORE ME. So I tried on his tough-talking, Navy veteran persona and found that it fit me. Now I'm 275 pounds and have a loud voice and I know how to use it.
I'm not PRETENDING to be something I'm not. I am using a style of interaction that fits the "real me." I AM a man, and I SPEAK as a man. And my template for manliness is my stepfather. At the same time I'm also an intellectual, and I adopted certain patterns from my biological father. I also borrowed patterns from the writings of C.S. Lewis and Tolkein. Sometimes I channel Gandalf and sometimes Boromir.
Children have become adults in this way since a million years ago. There's nothing false about it.
Which also brings us to an important point that is totally missed in the article and most of the discussion imo: maybe one of the (many) things that have changed is that lives are more negatively affected by stuff nowadays (or more reported to be so). We live in increasingly complex societies, we have to socialise with more and more people and navigate more demanding and fluid social dynamics. Traits that can be advantageous in a certain context can be disadvantageous in another (and affect one's life negatively).
OCD, clinical addiction, etc are all more involved than just feeling the desire to do something. The lack of control is the issue not just the momentary impulse.
Intrusive thoughts are fine, acting on them isn’t.
Turns out that the poorer a nation is, the less reported autism they have. That could be because there is no benefit to the diagnosis or it could be because they have less healthcare in general and a real diagnosis can easily take 4-8 hours of clinical time.
Interesting either way.
yes ADHD is better recognized and better treated these days. but as this entire comment section shows, there is still tons of stigma, misunderstanding, and a lack of compassion for a real disability
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.
If you imagine it from the perspective of aliens with very different biology, it’s kind of crazy that this important and difficult task is given to people with zero training or qualifications.
I'm not sure why you're attempting to discredit it, was the Masters in Science of the author, and the review by a doctor not sufficient for you?
I never missed your point, I made no comment on people failing to hold themselves accountable for their behaviour. You certainly seem unable to comprehend that not everyone experiences time as you do.
They simply stated that time blindness is a real issue and linked to an article which acknowledges exactly what you are describing: "Many people with ADHD struggle with a lesser-known but deeply frustrating sign called time blindness." (emphasis mine)
Any idea whether or not their characterization of psychological diagnoses is mostly correct?
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.
Is time blindness a disability that requires accommodation? To what extent, and who decides? If not, what makes it different from other disabilities that do get accommodation or some kind of protected status?
(These are meant to be rhetorical questions, but I’m sure someone has a direct answer, so I’d be interested in that too, because I really don’t know)
"You have an unlicensed condition, citizen!"
here's the real thought process (edit: the writing is all over the place but im not gonna spend more time editing)
it's the night before, you know you need to leave at 7am, you pick up your phone to set alarm, and you see a text from jimmy, you spend 3 minutes texting jimmy, put your phone down, and move on to something else completely oblivious to the fact that you didnt actually set an alarm. i never CHOSE to text jimmy, there was zero percent of my brain that said "i see a text from jimmy, but i should set my alarm first because i might forget otherwise, so im going to set an alarm and then text jimmy just to be safe". this is what it means to have lack executive functioning. I will find myself making actions i did not make a decision to do, and the smaller the action it is the more likely i will do it without having ever decided to do it. for example, i will be focused writing software at my desk. 30 seconds later im standing in the kitchen, looking in the fridge, pulling out a sandwich, and it occurs to me: i never decided to stand up and go to the kitchen. the decision making process literally never occurred. I have to literally TIE MYSELF TO MY DESK to stop myself from doing stuff like this.
luckily, you wake up accidentally at 6am. crisis averted! you still have 20 minutes before you need to get out of bed. no problem, scroll hacker news. it's now 6:35am and oh shit i should have been out of bed 15 minutes ago, i didn't set an alarm for that because i didn't think i would lose track of time when im literally staring at the time in the corner of my screen, i rush out of bed and jump in the shower thinking this will take a couple minutes, no big deal. however adhd makes you chronically underestimate how long something takes, because im generally really unaware of how much time elapses when i shower because i have time blindness. it's not 6:45am and i need to be leaving out the door, but my shower actually took 10 minutes, and im now soaking wet and still have to get on my clothes.
but wait, i need to take my meds, i really really cannot forget that. so i go grab my meds, but then wait i need water. so i go fill up my water bottle for the day like i always do, but its dirty, so i need to wash it first, and at this point im hyperfixating on doing what feels like a necessary step because part of adhd is losing bigger picture context and longer term rewards, my brain told me "i hve to take meds which means i need water which means filling water bottle which means washing it" and my brain literally doesn't ever take a step backwards until it's now 6:55am and i finally took my meds and FUCK i'm not 20 minutes late.
repeat at every single step of every single day for the rest of your life. this is also why people with adhd have the stigma of being lazy. the reality is that we can and often get less done when it's not something that intrinsically motivates us (most things) because everything is THREE TIMES HARDER. we're constantly stumbling, constantly having to set a million timers, having fatigue of so many timers, so sometimes we're over confident in not needing them because it's not reasonable to set 40 freaking timers every day, but then one in five times we slip up, and now im 5 minutes late for a meeting, and i show up and my boss is being pissy because he thinks im some self diagnosing tiktok idiot because has no idea what this looks like and how it impacts me despite trying really really fucking hard and absolutely hating it
50% users under 30 (gen z). only counts 18-30, estimate as you will for those under 18 (to be fair she only referenced gen z): https://explodingtopics.com/blog/tiktok-demographics
total users in US is 170M: https://backlinko.com/tiktok-users
your call on if 85M users 18-30 is "[gen z] society".
There is a significant meaning to my claim, which is that it's unconvincing to make exactly the sort of "it has always worked out before" argument that you're making here.
The 2nd sentence outlined when it would be considered and implicitly when it would not.
You seem to believe some cases of depression warrant ECT. Some do not. It's subjective at the margins. But don't call it a spectrum!
Addendum: I believe I’m close to figuring out what you are communicating but for me it’s not working.
I’m reasonably sure we’d agree that neurological conditions are complex and that labels only tell part of the story.
With how widespread it is, labeling, self-diagnosing, inquiring about yourself, is kind of normal human behavior. It is everywhere, and has been historically. Putting it like it's just 'labels for significant things' and then 'normal', and that these things would stand far enough apart to actually make a clear distinction without dismissing people in between is pretty much just wishful thinking. There's way too many things and even more combinations of then. It's gotten so complicated and convoluted only because it is that way. Wishing for a binary clarity in a complex world.
I don't get it, because we do this with other stuff all the time. I program in C#, guess what? I have plenty of critiques of C#. That doesn't mean I want C# to go die, I love C#. It seems to me everyone understands this... until it's capitalism. And then, suddenly, it's our first day on Earth.
Also capitalism, like everything, is not just one thing. It's a complex beast and there's infinite possible implementations of a capitalist economy. Nobody actually wants raw, unregulated capitalism because that sucks major ass. Yes, that's a technical phrase.
Meaning, we can, and should, be looking to progressively improve our economic system. I mean, it's what we've been doing since forever.
What issue would that be? People falsely claiming they suffer from conditions they do not have? Or is it when they claim they struggle with a condition they self-diagnosed but somehow don't even bother to seek medical help not even to verify a diagnosis? Because if there is something that harms those who actually have to endure these conditions is people making fraudulent claims and trying to capitalize on everyone's goodwill.
> I mean, I can sympathise with the frustration of people somewhat 'giving up' after labelling their own issues, but it's not a logical conclusion to assign it all to a trend.
Is it "giving up", or is it just abusing a label they clearly know doesn't apply to them? You're somehow avoiding the elephant in the room and the whole point of this thread, which is the problem created by fraudulent claims by attention seekers.
It is treated with stimulants, but if you give those same stimulants to a non-ADHD person you will see very different results
There are things we're good at and things we need strategies to mitigate. I may not have ADHD but I have friends and family that do, so I'm familiar enough with it. What steps in a routine are needed to leave the house? Find your keys and wallet? Always put them in the same place. Go to the bathroom and maybe check how you look? Set that timer I talked about 3 minutes earlier. Other people with your condition can handle it; so can you.
Seasonal affective disorder and bereavement-related depression may have similar symptoms on the surface, but there’s different treatments due to differences in underlying causes.
Some conditions may be a continuum with the same underlying cause taken to different extremes, but that continuum need not be continuous down to normal human behavior.
Just saying "I'm time blind, sorry not sorry, deal with it" is not an appropriate reaction to causing trouble to your surroundings.
[1] https://askjan.org/limitations/Managing-Time.cfm?csSearch=10...
Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
Deciding not to get a drivers license is fine, being unable to get one because you can’t leave your home is an issue.
Yes you did. You are an adult human being with free will.
Spectrums extend continuously from normal to disorders. So if you believe depression is a spectrum you must also believe that no treatment is necessary for some people with depression. However if depression is a disorder there may be some cases that are on the margins that aren’t quite depression that still warrant some forms of treatment.
Also, saying “regardless of diagnosis” is invalidating the real need for accommodations. People with ADHD often require not just personal effort, but systemic support, whether that’s in school, work, or healthcare.
Usually such techniques tend to not work when they are suggested by people who haven't experienced the consdition and haven't put serious thought into them.
Not everyone's experience is the same as yours. Denying that only makes you look like an idiot.
Whoa now. That may be true within a strict scope of the "arithmetic mean" definition of "average", however, the idea of average as a 'concept' is much older. As an easy example, early references to agrarian yields (crop farming and how much food they produce) talk about average size of crop harvests, etc. Early tablets from Mesopotamia talk about average yield size, and those are dated 700ish BC.
this lack of executive functioning is a cornerstone of ADHD. this isn't a controversial opinion, it's universally accepted fact of the disorder
Who defines conditions, says that ADHD is real, for example? It wasn't in earlier generations. The are terms of social (group) art - special names that are generally accepted as meaningful.
The “full range” is anything that doesn’t cause you or another significant distress, major impairment, or prevent functioning in society. Eating hot sauce is uncomfortable, amputating a limb is several steps beyond uncomfortable.
> Can normal not be defined?
It’s defined by what it isn’t. There’s ~8 billion people in the world and the majority of them are functioning as should be obvious by our societies continuing to function.
https://www.ifeet.org/files/DSM-5-TR.pdf
DSM V has depression as depressive disorders, but lists “Schizophrenia Spectrum” and “Autism Spectrum” so I invite you to consider what distinction for spectrum is being used.
That would depend on the jobs requirements, wouldn't it? In some roles that might be a complete deal breaker. For example, anything customer/client facing. If you can't perform the jobs duties with reasonable accommodation, maybe you should find another job?
Similarly, if you are 3 feet tall you'll likely never be the worlds slam dunk champion. Not even if they provide you with a step-stool. It's not your fault, or the employers. Sorry, I guess.