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This sure sounds like an argument that the truth can be bad for you.

Maybe having a reason can lead to complacency, but is a person like that going to be a huge success otherwise? With the right attitude, having a reason can lead to better understanding, greater drive, more success.

I don't think it's about having a label. It's about understanding what's going on so you can better accommodate it. Once you have a diagnosis, you automatically have access to a vast wealth of knowledge which can help you to cope.

Think of breaking your leg. Is getting it diagnosed as "broken leg" just a search for a label which will lead to complacency? Are you better off thinking your broken leg is an eccentricity which is some unique part of who you are? Of course not, you want to get it diagnosed as "broken leg" so you can bring all modern medical science to bear on it and get it fixed up so you can heal, and cope with it in the meantime.

Mental disorders are not the same as a broken leg, but they aren't so different, either. I think we'd be better off if we'd stop drawing this fairly arbitrary line between "physical" and "mental" problems.

> This sure sounds like an argument that the truth can be bad for you.

To me it sounds like the social construct surrounding the truth is harmful. That those with a disability should be coddled lest they offend. That we should be understanding, accommodating, that we shouldn't expect much or worse, that we should medicate them into normalcy.

Bullshit.

It's when your behavior is rejected, when you meet with poor results, that you have a true incentive to improve and push yourself forward. It might be painful and difficult, but the end result can be greater than what you would have had if you were born "normal".

The only thing this environment of diagnosis, acceptance, and tolerance is creating is crippling fear for the parents and an environment that coddles the child's disability, instead of motivating the child to overcome it.

> It's when your behavior is rejected, when you meet with poor results, that you have a true incentive to improve and push yourself forward. It might be painful and difficult, but the end result can be greater than what you would have had if you were born "normal".

Ridiculous. "Just cheer up, you'll see that depression isn't so bad."

Speaking as a formerly severely depressed person: yes, that fixes it.

I worked hard at it. I wanted to fix it. I didn't take any medications. It was very, very hard. I wallowed in it for a long time. I fixed it.

"Oh you weren't actually depressed then, you don't know what you're talking about." I was (severely), and I do.

I'm not going to say you weren't actually depressed, but your experience may not be representative. A broken leg may heal with positive thinking and effort, but most people will still want to get an x-ray and a cast.

It may not be very representative, I agree. I struggle with your analogy comparing broken bones to a broken mind. We have known for centuries how to fix a broken bone. We still don't have a 'cure' for depression. "Here, take this pill and feel numb for a few hours" doesn't really compare to an x-ray and a cast.

You're right, there's no obvious cure like for a broken leg. Perhaps cancer would be a better analogy. There are various treatments, sometimes they work, but they mostly suck and it's never certain. But regardless, "just don't have cancer!" isn't going to do it.

Is it really "truth"? Some call it mental disorder, but really, it's just another position on the bell curve and could just as well be labelled as another aspect of personality. When 11 percent of population have ADHD I can't say it's a disorder with a straight face.

Something like 8% of men (~5% of population overall) are colorblind, do you object to calling that a disorder? If not, what's the cutoff: anything over 10%? Myopia is up to 30%, does that make it not a disorder?

Clearly defining a psychological disorder is far more nuanced than colorblindness and myopia, and there is good reason to believe certain of them are diagnosed too frequently. We can acknowledge this without denying the existence of psychological disorders.

It becomes a disorder when it's detrimental to regular life. Many who have ADHD are incredibly frustrated at their apparently lack of willpower. It's not the rest of society pressuring them to come closer to the norm, they want to get themselves to the norm too. Perhaps it is overdiagnosed and overmedicated in some settings, (I realize you're trying to get conversation away from the more black and white physical conditions... myopia has always seemed a good analogy though, so I'm going to continue using it temporarily) but you wouldn't tell a shortsighted person that they're not that far off of the bell curve, just squint your eyes once in a while to make up for missing detail.

I was aware of this definition, and I have sympathy for those who are frustrated with some of their personality traits. Nevertheless, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that this frustration could arise because of circumstance, rather than as the result of some "organic" problem with the person. The idea is that it's more of a mismatch between the person and his or her environment, rather than a problem with one or the other.

I didn't suggest that it was easy or that it is always properly diagnosed, just that percentage of the population is possibly not a good metric to use for whether it's a disorder or not.

Understood. However, I think the commenter might have been making the point that we expect a certain degree of variability in personality traits, and that classifying such a large percentage of the population as having a disorder where the diagnostic criteria are somewhat vague makes him or her skeptical about the existence of the disorder. A person might also reasonably argue that hyperactivity and a broad attention span are advantageous in certain environments, just not the environments where we tend to educate children. Contrast this with myopia and colorblindness, where the diagnosis and disadvantages in every environment are unequivocal. I don't claim this myself, I just wanted to clarify a possible point of difference.

Is it a disorder to have no hearing? Too have so much hearing that your neighbors keep you up at night?

Is being very short a disorder? Being very tall? Having short legs with long arms?

'Disorder' will always be a nebulous concept because it's an abstraction that encapsulates a dissatisfaction with the fitness of a person's psychological complexion in the context of the person's environment. Hyperactivity and a short attention span might be a disorder for a student who must focus deeply on a single concept, but an advantage for a hunter-gatherer who must integrate a large number of shallow ideas simultaneously. Thus I will humbly refrain from taking a strong stance on your questions; I can imagine situations in which each would be advantageous and in others the opposite.

It'd be just a trait. You can have better vision than 20/20, does that make 20/20 vision a disorder? Truth is some people have below average ability to focus on far objects, but to go outright saying there's something wrong with their eyes or minds, I think is getting one or two steps beyond truth.

> Truth is some people have below average ability to focus on far objects, but to go outright saying there's something wrong with their eyes or minds

Well yes... that's why we have glasses.

People use sunscreen in the sun, take anti-ageing medicine, go bush walking with walking sticks, too.

"Disorder" is just a label. Does it matter whether you call it a "disorder" or some other word? The key thing is not that it's something wrong with you, but rather that it's something about you which is shared by a lot of other people, which means you can learn from their experience instead of trying to get by with just your own.

Consider: there are two diagnoses, OCD and OCPD. Both cover Obsessive Compulsive behaviors.

OCD is the Disorder where OC behaviors ruin your life and cause you distress.

OCPD is when you like your OC behaviors, but other people don't . It is a Personality Disorder, because your personality is socially "wrong".

People that don't suffer don't need help, but those that need help can't get it if they don't get diagnosed. My diagnosis (slightly different) came at 38 years of age, and in the few years since, everything has changed. I've lost so much to my disability that it's hard to process at times.

What I do know, is that before the diagnosis, before all the different kinds of treatment and support, I didn't understand what I was missing. While I like the eccentric me, I am no longer forced to only be that. I have forged a relation to my daughter in a way I didn't think was possible. I don't only exist now, I live. Everything I am is coalescing, solidifying. I'm finally me, all of me. I live in a different world now, a world I can finally understand, because I know in which ways it looks different to me. Each year now feels like several did before, my life suddenly became much longer.

So while it's all nice that people discuss the finer points of whether diagnosis is a label or not, but if those arguments leads to somebody like me not getting diagnosed at all, the effect on their quality of life will be devastating.

I was 38,but for the most part I was little more than a teenager, my daughter needed a father. I can be that now.

But, obviously, no-one should get sent to the doctor because they don't fit into peoples preconceptions or society's most shallow norms. Most medications influencing the brain are crude and comes with very real risks, they should be handled with care.

I have personally never discovered any real help beyond the label. All we have besides medicine is therapy, which I've found equally crude.

If all your life you've felt weird and broken and different, wouldn't it be so wonderful to be told that you're actually just like a whole lot of other people?

Better yet, there's a vast body of research on techniques you can employ to make your life easier.

That sounds pretty compelling to me.

"If all your life you've felt weird and broken and different ..."

Surprise: everybody feels this way.

Except autistic people are different in specific, objective ways as a whole from most of society that results in confusion and ostracism. Further, society usually tries to convince them that this isn't the case: they're merely normal people that are insensitive, weak, anti-social assholes. Or something like that.

Validation that one's brain really is wired differently than most with specific strengths and weaknesses is useful information. Lets that person chart a more effective path forward accepting their weaknesses rather than believing a lack of effort or whatever. The ability to send a link to people in the majority category explaining it to them and from qualified people is even more valuable. Sometimes, when people around understand, they change their reactions and how they associate with that person to work with the strengths and around the weaknesses.

All in all, getting a diagnosis like this must have been a relief for her which validated the coping choices she made plus led she and her husband on a discovery process that will continue improving their lives. Most people don't need it. People whose brains are hardwired in ways that puts them at the mercy of tyrannical majority do.

And in my opinion, one of the key moments of growth is when you finally realize that it's not just you.

I agree. From what I've seen, when a person allows their problems to define them it leads to a negative spiral that maximizes the impact of those problems. Would you rather be introduced as "the madaxe_again with a learning disability" or "the madaxe_again, who just can't sit still", which would you rather think of yourself as? Its unfortunate that the solution is often prescription medication rather than an education that better suits their learning modality.

However, in the author's case, its obviously helpful because it gives an explanation for why she's different after spending the majority of her life not knowing.

> Its unfortunate that the solution is often prescription medication rather than an education that better suits their learning modality.

Often the best solution is both. If I struggle to pay attention, am I really going to benefit from more lessons on how to work with myself? This is especially apparent with ADHD, since stimulant meds are not a cure-all. You still need to learn to cope with periods of time when you're not medicated (pregnancy, in the morning, before going to bed, on "medication vacations", etc). I'm sure for some it could just become an excuse, but that's not taking into account the internal frustration built up from not easily being able to "keep up with society". People take the trash out before it gets too full to close the bag? Do laundry before running out of shirts? Empty the dishwasher when it finishes?

As a counter-example, before I knew about Aspergers/high-functioning autism I was always frustrated and confused about my social difficulties. I forced myself to join social groups and do public speaking in an attempt to improve, but nothing made any difference at all.

I learned about Aspergers in my early 20s and very quickly a lot of my problems made sense. I stopped worrying about the social difficulties and started focusing on building skills where the condition would not hinder me. This is actually why I initially looked into computer programming.

A big problem with the discussion around mental health issues is the idea that your thoughts are a part of what you are, and somehow it is OK even if these thoughts become a problem for you. It turns out that what appear for us as thoughts are just complex chemical reactions occurring in our brain. You can definitely change this chemistry using substances (for the better and for the worse). The same thing also works the other way around: uncomfortable, stressful thoughts can lead to chemical imbalances in the brain, because they're just the same thing. We need to better accept this fundamental fact of science and use it in our favor, not fight against this as if we depended on our mental moods to exist as an individual.

I agree with your sentiment, but I'd point out that "eccentric" is just another label, and a much less useful one at that.

Dude, stuff is way harder for most people with Aspergers than it was for you. You might be the exception not the rule. Getting diagnosed was probably a huge relief for her.

Then don't think of it as people needing a label. Think of it as helping people understand themselves.

Consider that you are perhaps not justified in applying causation between your brother's diagnosis and medication to his outcome in life.

Like you, I am not as confident as some of the other commenters that a diagnosis is beneficial in all circumstances. The issue is not whether mental health disorders exist, but the difficulty in diagnosing them accurately and treating them effectively. Their definitions are nebulous, the symptoms are subjective, and some of them only exist within a certain social context. With a diagnosis, a person might find a treatment, or may become resigned to being a certain way. Subjective symptoms might arise as a result of belief in the diagnosis, thereby confirming it. Treatment options are often of doubtful effectiveness, and those that are shown to be effective are generally very blunt instruments. The fact is that our understanding of the human mind remains primitive, and we much approach this subject with humility.

I feel like I'm all over the place in this thread!

> Treatment options are often of doubtful effectiveness, and those that are shown to be effective are generally very blunt instruments.

I have to agree with this, but the alternative is often self medication. Before getting on ADHD medication, it was the norm for me to get a 2-liter of caffeinated soda merely to be able to focus on playing games or coding (for fun!) in the evening. Diagnoses have the potential to hurt as well as help, but IMO it's best that we can provide the tools for bettering yourself (also applicable to welfare spending, heh).

I am mildly colorblind. Doesn't really impact much in day-to-day life, but knowing it allows me to understand that the world I see is not the same as the world most people see.

I have no interest in a "cure" any more than I'd try to cure the colors of my eyes.

Diagnosis can alleviate the push to conform. With greater awareness of colorblindness most designers worth anything avoid creating problem color combinations (e.g. red text on a black background). Many video games even have colorblind palate swaps for problematic area.

This seems to be happening with the Autism spectrum. As more people realize that there are people who are just wired in their own unique way we are starting to see more organizations and groups learning to embrace different ways of thinking rather than requiring conformity.