TikTok trend that makes teens believe they have serious mental disorders
goodmorningamerica.com
goodmorningamerica.com
In some cases it's positive: I've seen a few people be convinced to seek treatment for anxiety and depression disorders after seeing people they trust on social media open up about their own therapy experiences.
But the worst offender (in older students, anyway) has to be ADHD right now. The sheer amount of bad ADHD self-diagnosis material on TikTok and other platforms is unbelievable. Influencers inherently want to reach the broadest audience possible, so they have an inherent conflict of interest to convince as many people as possible that they have ADHD. "Follow me for more ADHD tips!"
The result is a lot of TikToks and other short-form content that misrepresents ADHD as everyday struggles such as not being able to remember everyone's names at parties or forgetting to get all of the groceries you need at the store. Watch enough of these videos and anyone can become convinced they have ADHD. At one point, it felt like everyone in one cohort was convinced they had undiagnosed ADHD and wanted to discuss it in the Slack as the explanation for everything in their lives. It got bad enough that people were coaching each other about how to convince skeptical doctors to prescribe ADHD meds by exaggerating specific symptoms, at which point we had to shut down such conversation. Watching the ADHD self-diagnosis misinformation spread like wildfire was honestly one of my more terrifying social media experiences in recent history.
But it gets even worse: During COVID, the US government suspended a rule that required patients to have established a past in-person relationship with a prescriber before receiving controlled substance prescriptions. Several startups are capitalizing on this rule change with subscription services to send you Adderall prescriptions after a short 5-minute Zoom with a doctor. And of course, these ads are being served up to the people consuming the ADHD self-diagnosis TikToks. It's only a few clicks to talk to a pill mill that will prescribe you Adderall (for a monthly fee, of course).
At this point, I'm beginning to fear that so many young people are self-diagnosing ADHD from internet misinformation that we're heading for a reckoning with ADHD medication prescribing. It's starting to feel a bit reminiscent of the prescription opioid pandemic, where opioids were being prescribed to basically everyone who requested them. It wouldn't be good for actual ADHD patients if countries started severely cracking down on prescription practices.
It’s already affecting ADHD patients. Most ADHD medications are controlled substances, and the rules around getting prescriptions for controlled substances can be draconian.
As someone who has experienced this phenomenon in the US, outside the US is so much better. My doctor just prescribes me nice round numbers of pills, usually ending with two zeroes. I almost couldn't believe it at first.
The best suggestion I got was find a independent community pharmacy. Transfer scripts there. The staff will get to know you and when you say “my vacation is next week can I get my refill a week early?”, there is a good chance they’ll say “oh yeah, you mentioned that trip. I’ll get it filled today.”
You’re less of a number and more of a community member.
With the big chain pharmacies you’re fighting against them actually knowing you well enough to trust your request is legit AND the fact their hands may be tied by corporate.
At smaller pharmacies the pharmacist can often make the call themselves.
It’s really due to the opioid epidemic. Pharmacies were flagged as “you should have known it was inappropriate use”. It’s the pharmacist who will be questioned as to their judgement. If they can say “I’ve know Mr Smith for 10 years, he fills all his prescriptions here, has only asked for early refills 4 times in 5 years and each time was due to travel. In my judgement he was no misusing the controlled substance.”, then they’ll be happy to do it.
If they don’t recognize you and when they look you’re a new customer and your reason is the same one they hear all day long from obvious abusers, then they won’t put their ass on the line for you. Double so if they know corporate will say no.
And not just in the general sense of "this shit is dehumanizing", but in the sense that the added bureaucratic hurdles are specifically the sort of thing that an ADHD patient would have problems satisfying without access to the drug. It's like some kind of Catch-22.
Besides the medications, an ADHD diagnosis can also get you special academic privileges such as extra time on exams.
Not only ADHD: dyslexia too, and probably other diseases / disorders related to the mental and neurological sphere.
This is problematic, because on one hand it's not hard to fake a disease if you know the symptoms and on the other hand it's quite easy to be convinced that you have a disease if you read the symptoms online. And I honestly don't know if doctors are able to discern "fake" illnesses from "real" ones when the diagnosis is essentially 100% derived from patients reporting their symptoms.
This really explains a lot - I have been seeing a sudden surge of of ADHD "diagnosis" or ADHD related content on all the popular social platforms (including HN) in the past 6 months or so, and was pondering if it was a concerted social media campaign by some pharma company or fund managers.
For those of you wondering if you have ADHD, please be aware that the more common depression and anxiety disorder often share similar symptoms. Some personality disorders too may appear like ADHD to the untrained. It is very easy to misdiagnose yourself when it comes to such mental ailment.
Sucks that there's people milking it for clout or whatever but it makes sense it's a word of mouth thing, I was never made aware of its existence or it's symptoms in school or anything. If you go by my education the only mental disorder that exists is depression
As for depression that has seemingly turned out to have been a side effect of untreatment. I've been sad or unhappy and all the normal down emotions but the depression basically dropped to nothing. Anxiety is falling away slowly too
I'm in the UK too so it's like a tenner a month for the prescription, probably not a money thing here at least
Similarly to how self diagnosis isn't the way don't self-undiagnose yourself either if you're suspecting something, ask a doctor rather than a web forum
Medication should be the last resort, only for severe cases, or perhaps not used every day so that the brain can recover. 4 day on and 3 days off seem to be a popular dosing schedule by some mindful advocates.
Of course, it’s incredibly difficult to do all the things mentioned above to aid optimal dopamine levels.
The way our society operates, it’s much easier to take the shortcut and pop some amphetamine after you wake up to get your day going.
Exceptions apply to legit, severe cases.
Andrew Huberman has a good podcast about the topic. [0]
[0] https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-37-adhd-how-an...
We all take for granted that lifestyle changes can do actual change to our body, but for some reason the brain often seems exempt from this.
Obviously there are conditions, both psychological and not, where drugs are the best course of action, but lifestyle changes are not "wishing away" any more than trying to drug away an emotional distress due to life conditions.
* Sleep only 5 hours a day
* Spend 5 hours on TikTok every day
* Eat a diet of mostly processed carbohydrates
* Stay sedentary all day
Let’s see if this person starts showing ADHD symptoms after a week. Should we start medicating them?
I am not saying that there are no _legit_ cases of ADHD when it is indeed genetic or trauma based that cannot be easily fixed by lifestyle changes. There are people who really need the meds. But I am betting that that these people are only a very low percentage of the currently medicated ones.
Psychostimulants for ADHD are universally associated with better outcomes, even in people who appear to manage without them. They reduce depression, anxiety, drug abuse and mortality. Heck, a lot of people with ADHD even sleep better while on them!
Stop meddling in other people's evidence-based medical treatment.
When someone in the medical field starts talking about universal outcomes in relation to biological entities, my spidey sense goes crazy. As Eric Hoffer so eloquently put it, "We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand."[0] The pharmaceutical industry has strong incentives to emphasize benefits and downplay harm from drugs, especially in the long term effects[1]. That is assuming that the drugs are actually manufactured correctly[2]. And even drugs manufactured correctly can decay on the shelf into carcinogens at a million times the safe limit, and (almost) no one bothers to check[3]. I once sat through a doctor going through how to use the ADHD meds, and my head started to hurt. How to take one type before sleep so it kicks in just as the kid wakes up for school, but another works faster or slower, and on and on. And all of this from doctors (and medical students) who can tell you everything about how great drugs are but spend close to zero time learning about the uses of exercise in improving health outcomes[4].
[0] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/eric_hoffer_142924
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/jacob-stegenga-on-medical-nihilism/
[2] https://peterattiamd.com/katherineeban/
The sordid situation around generics manufacturing has no bearing whatsoever on the effectiveness of plain old dexamphetamine or methylphenidate in helping people with ADHD. The FDA approval process doesn't impact how drugs work, just how they're licensed. And just because one single drug contained a carcinogenic ingredient doesn't suddenly mean they all do.
I'll give you one thing though: exercise helps people with ADHD. In addition to psychostimulants.
Fixing these issues would thus reduce them. It's not quiet as easy to diagnose ADHD as you seem to think, so a lot of people just live unhealthy, which gives them similar symptoms
For far too long we've been __blaming individuals__ for their ADHD symptoms, and that's just created a broken system. And for far too long we've not taken ADHD symptoms seriously, and seen it as a phase.
The other point is, if people want to get these stimulants, why not? We actually understand them pretty well, and if they're not abused (e.g. you're not taking huge doses of them), they're fine.
And yeah, ADHD has always existed. But our lives weren't designed around making the symptoms of ADHD be something we have to deal with day to day. ADHD's impact is the worst on office based jobs.
--
Unrelated to the points I made above, but the recent more "understanding" of ADHD actually got me to go talk to a psychiatrist and got prescribed a stimulant based medicine for ADHD. I cried the first week I took it because it removed a fog from my brain that I had for my entire life.
I'm thankful that these discussions actually lead me to getting a diagnosis and medication.
> We've just...not addressed it and seen rising depression, anxiety, suicide rates.
People are not developing major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders from not being on ADHD medications, at least not on the scale you’re referring to. “Increasing” rates of those disorders has largely been due to increased awareness and discussion of them, as well as some of the very patterns happening to ADHD right now: pathologizing normal feelings, romanticization of mental disorders, and self-diagnosis fueled by online communities.
> if people want to get these stimulants, why not?
Because they are not medical professionals. What they want needs to be vetted and discussed with a doctor.
So your assertion that it's a "disorder they likely didn’t have at an extremely early stage in their development" seems to be totally off the mark. Speaking as someone who really wishes their parents had medicated them for their childhood ADHD diagnosis. It likely would have saved me a lot of pain, heartache and C's in middle and high school. Not to mention college.
It's easier for medical professionals to accept you have ADHD as an adult if you were diagnosed as a child, but that doesn't mean that all people with no childhood diagnosis cannot have ADHD.
He's claiming that childhood diagnosis is bunk. He's insisting that kids are unlikely to have ADHD.
I'm asserting that the behaviors for ADHD show up in children first and foremost.
I'm not saying that receiving clinical diagnosis as a child is the only way to have an adult diagnosis: In fact I'm not talking about diagnostics at all. It's that you _had_ ADHD as a kid, undiagnosed or otherwise, means you likely _have_ ADHD as an adult. I never once posited that someone with no diagnosis as a child is precluded from being diagnosed as an adult; however they should have had childhood symptoms based on the DSM as I understand it.
I'm arguing with someone who denies the existence of childhood ADHD in a naive "kids are just hyper don't drug them" argument.
Evidence for this? ADHD meds have completely made my depression/anxiety go away because I'm no longer fighting with my brain. This has been the experience for dozens of other people that I know.
> Because they are not medical professionals. What they want needs to be vetted and discussed with a doctor.
Yeah. It's a schedule 2 drug. Which means you *need* to discuss it with a doctor anyway.
I still disagree with it being a scheduled drug. I wonder how many people are in prison because of self medication?
Compared to 3 to 5% of the adult population in same estimation.
I think we need to start verbalizing the root cause of that statement and go all the way to ‘increasing rates has largely been due to increased pressure to succeed academically and professionally in knowledge based professions’.
You ain’t gonna just grind Leetcode all day without a little something.
If we followed the logic of the current social media version of ADHD diagnosis, everyone would have it.
People post things like:
> Short sentence. > Very very very long sentence dragging on for 20 lines in small font. > Haha you have ADHD if you didn't read the second part.
It's ridiculous, and it doesn't even touch the tip of the iceberg of what living like ADHD is actually like.
ADHD is an awful mental illness that attaching this warped definition to helps absolutely no one with. And I say that as someone who struggled for years to understand what my diagnosis actually meant because of this kind of vapid bullshit I seen pedaled on social media.
It's not just about misdiagnosing themselves, it's about people who have ADHD ending up with deep seated fundamental misunderstandings of their disorder is due to the constant bombardment of misinformation.
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Also a pill mill has nothing to do with capitalism. If you're going to use words learn what they mean first.
The idea of a pill mill is physicians will jump to giving you the pills with minimal establishment of history.
It's trying to undermine the controls around the medication in such a way that it practically becomes a (pay-us-to-access-it) candy jar
You're using a service that is literally selling itself as a way to get pills for a specific disorder with the absolute least amount of friction, that's barely a step removed from pill mill.
They're even putting mini-quizes up for people to know if there's a good chance they'll get their diagnosis. Since you don't see a psychiatrist before "passing", you're literally being implicitly "coached" on how to get diagnosed.
Most (good) psychiatrists will take multiple visits with someone who has never been diagnosed before diagnosing let alone giving you pills for it, meanwhile these people are advertising how in 20 minutes you can be getting access to pills...
There's even stories of them turning away people who might have more issues than just ADHD, that's how laser focused their "treatment" is. If you were being given the same level of psychiatric treatment as a normal psychiatrist it'd be absurd to be told "I won't treat you because you have depression", for example.
Researchers found by age 5, children who spent two hours or more per day, looking at screens, were 7.7 times more likely to meet criteria for a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, than children who watched screens for 30 minutes or less each day.
It's a substantial result. They talk about practical and ethical reasons they can't establish the causal relationship, too.
I'm guilty of being a little tongue in cheek, but I'd try to limit a kid's exposure to early screen time and ease them into things like TikTok.
You can have conditions exacerbate the symptoms associated with ADHD.
For whatever reason our society has a huge and totally inconsistent bias against medication/drugs to change brain chemistry.
To me, there is little doubt that people "self medicating" with coffee in the morning would never fly if coffee was just introduced to society yesterday.
We don't even bother to think about the unimaginable amount of good that has been done to society with people self medicating with coffee.
In the same sense , I can't imagine the amount of harm all this untreated ADHD that we don't take seriously will do to society in 2022.
Depression and anxiety feel like things that you might have a genetic tendency towards, but that a specific shared experience might bring out in multiple people and people wouldn't be surprised by that.
It feels like ADHD is being treated more as thing you have or don't, but is that correct?
One of the recommended things for ADHD is excercise, which kind of implies you could make someone ADHD by stopping them excercising.
If that's not real ADHD then how can excercising more help? If it helps, you've not 'got' ADHD, you just needed more excercise?
Simple stuff.
I'm glad I finally did. That one little pill makes me a better and happier person.
Even still, the stigma is reinforced by arbitrary rules that presume I am an addict: "You can only have a 30 day supply," "we can't fill the pending 'script until 31 days after you last picked it up," "no, you can't get it early even if you're traveling for over a month. You'll need to find a pharmacy there to fill it."
Then the burning pain started. So no more for me. I at least know what it’s like to stay on task. Helps some. Still a major struggle.
Even among those with an ADHD self-diagnosis, I don't think it's hugely related.
I take those 'online tests' for ADHD and pretty much always score as though I have it.
I can 100% see a lot of people reading about it, taking those tests and believing they have it.
Opium was seen as the main reason behind chinese inmigrants to the USA being better workers than whites (XIX), so it was outlawed. Of course, the narrative was that opium was evil (you can even read things like chinese men lured white women to opium dens to made them slaves).
I prefer to avoid drugs, legal or not. But the war on drugs, any drugs, makes zero sense to me. It's a shame that drugs that were known to treat e.g. depression were outlawed because "say no to drugs", and further research effectively halted for decades.
Even today, when a new substance is discovered and used for "fun" is immediately outlawed. If you want fun, your only legal option is alcohol, even when we know it's way worse than, say, ecstasy or acid.
No thanks.
Sure, but that doesn't mean childhood diagnosis, so I’m not sure how that's relevant to the discussion.
Source: I'm a doctor, also https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html
Specifically, it’s important to differentiate between symptoms “emerging” in adulthood vs. being identified in adulthood. What they wrote implies that most adult diagnoses are likely not ADHD if they did not get a diagnosis earlier in life.
I witnessed this in med school students trying to get an edge on their exams and competing against classmates.
Be careful abusing neurotransmitter altering stims if you’re neurotypical, you may just get exactly what you asked for…
I think there are significant classism issues around requiring expensive doctors visits for adults to be able to access these medications.
How many silicon valley tech people have questionable ADHD diagnoses, but get a prescription because it lets them code for 8 hours straight without taking a break? Because of doctor shopping, de facto state of this country is that it's legal for rich people to take amphetamines if they wish, but undiagnosed poor people risk prison and dangerous adulterants for the same.
Here are one of those ads :
https://www.reddit.com/r/fakedisordercringe/comments/rsbkah/...
Where do we draw the line between exposure to mental health issues and over-diagnosing? I can say that a lot of people who come to our service have legitimate concerns while others might just be teens with typical angst, except now they are told theirs is diagnosable as X.
DID = dissociative identity disorder
BPD = borderline personality disorder
(Cool it with the acronym policing. Both acronyms are referenced in the link. Reading comments isn’t the same as reading the source.)
ALTAOYT: acronyms lower the accessibility of your text.
The algorithm of giving you what you prefer when there are too many choices is inevitable. Alternative is a bunch of people deciding what it should and should not give you. It really doesn't matter who those people work for.[1]
Positive feedback loop and information bubbles are not great but "the algorithm" is really not worse in this regard than leaving in a small village.
1. The algorithm is still a bunch of people but that's orthogonal to your point. People will prefer algorithms fitting their needs better and they are able to switch (yes monopolies, but that's a different thread already).
As far as I remember standards were not higher. They were different.
Plus really, the cartoons I remember were full of stuff like find a sleeping pills in parents cabinet, give somebody as a joke, put a pin on a chair so somebody sits on it etc. Racism everywhere. Stuff that is even hard to find nowadays because they had to scrub it. Sexually suggestive themes, like have you watched lion king? Or anything really... it seemed to be way more explicit.
We luckily tend to remember past as better than it was. There's also nostalgia element and there's cultural difference. Just like there are different cultures around the globe and most think that other ones are gross, the same happens in the time dimension.
edit: to be clear, things could be better, we should point out what's wrong and try to fix it, but with some more decent optimization function than "proximity to good the old days"
This was not possible to do at scale 10+ years ago.
To me more fundamental is access to information that anybody has above certain age. Yes you still need to know how to interpret it, that's one of the most valuable skills nowadays, but in the past you had just no way of fact checking and doing more research on what has been given to you apart from spending hours in library which would not be very productive unless you were interested in some relatively popular chunk of history.
You get served stuff targeted at you but it's just information, and you have a way to put it in a bigger context. It was not possible before. The fact that you learn about unknown unknowns through a magic giving content box is also amazing. It is not perfect and have its issues, and I would love for everybody to just garden their homepages which I could visit like it's .. oh shit well 30 years ago, but I'm not sure I want to spend time on gardening mine when I can learn so much instead.
It's fascinating!
What the concern is has to do with scale, and whether this old problem is about to get a lot worse with new technologies. I tend to agree with this, I think the way information scales these days makes this much more dangerous a phenomenon.
It's very odd IMO. Feels a bit like religious evangelism.
My main takeaways are this:
* People with mental illness are finding each other, sharing their experiences, and it's enormously validating for them. The algorithm is bringing them together and it creates a lot of engagement because there's a highly charged emotional human connection thing happening.
* The short form recording/publishing experience on a phone is so accessible to people that we're getting totally new viewpoints. I follow a schizophrenic that draws the faces he sees. It's fascinating. I'm sure this content will be researched for years. It's a self-reporting gold mine.
* People are struggling, finding community, then seeking the help of mental health professionals. That's a good news story.
* There's a lot of actual mental health professionals on TikTok spreading good information. It's fairly obvious who's legitimate.
DID is an extremely rare disorder, and all of the videos I've seen seem very performative. I think the majority of DID tiktok probably doesn't have DID, but they found that it gives them attention.
I definitely worry that performing a mental disorder for attention for a prolonged period could lead to actual disorders.
Do you think that social media apps (not necessarily just Tiktok, but the lot of them) are contributing to an acceleration of this trend?
In a way, it's because the person and the content are merging.
So yeah, it's accelerating, but it's probably a good trend.
GMA spins it weirdly because they're a boomer outlet, but fundamentally it's a generation waking up to mental health issues because an algorithm is putting that content in front of the people that are likely to have those issues.
Personally, I never gave much serious consideration to the idea that I have autism. But after watching a lot of recommended content, it's pretty likely that I do and the algorithm was right in identifying similarities. I'm not going to get a formal diagnosis because it doesn't serve any purpose for me, but I have no doubt I could.
The algorithm also thinks I'm a communist lesbian, which is very far off the mark, but I can sort of see why it would have binned me that way based on the content that I find interesting.
For people that haven't directly interacted with TT, I'd encourage just because it's so impressive. It will find interests you didn't even know you had. In some cases, that might be how you figure out you have ADHD or that you're gay or whatever your special group is that you didn't know you were a part of yet.
I think we’re the same age, so keep that in mind, but I can’t help but disagree with the thrust of why you think this is a good thing. I think that increasing the efficiency of connecting individuals to communities based on real or perceived mental health problems creates new challenges that may nullify the positive aspects.
It's a good thing because it means that finally something is changing.
We're developing a shared language and having a discussion about these really prevalent untreated mental issues.
I'm watching people discover that they're actually not "lazy" or "stupid" or "not good enough" or "an introvert", but that they actually have "sensory issues" or "meltdowns" or "executive dysfunction" or "social anxiety".
Simply having the language to discuss these things is very powerful. It reminds me a lot of when gay people started labeling things and creating cultural norms. Or when "new atheism" spread through the internet and made not believing a mainstream acceptable position (well, mostly, we're getting there).
I remember the first time I met other atheists and realized that I wasn't crazy after all. Tons of people are having that moment now for mental health disorders.
Also, you might not realize the scale of the problem. The estimated number of just children suffering with mental health disorders is about 10% and increasing (primarily ADHD, anxiety, depression). The real number is probably double that.
Do you work for Tik Tok?
Self diagnosis waves on tiktok seem like the next evolution of this, but even faster and more globalised.
I've been wondering if this phenomenon could be harnessed to reduce the impact of mental illness: purposely spread content that encourages self-diagnosis with the mildest possible symptoms.
Incorrect diagnosis is already a problem in mental health-- attempts at self diagnosis typically only compound the problem. It's one of those areas where you really want patients to go and report unbiased experiences (in so far as that is possible even without preconceived self diagnosis)
While social trends and fads have existed/influenced before but I think people might be underestimating how addictive and pervasive tiktok is, especially to young impressionable minds.
There is already an epidemic of anxiety among younger millennials and gen z, I shudder to think what kind of end effects these depersonalization/loss of identity memes can have over the long term.
Wait, since when is 1.4% of the adult population "extremely rare"?
All according to quick Google searches, not deep vetting of the numbers.
0: https://www.google.com/search?q=borderline+personality+disor...
I've almost never seen anything actually interesting, insightful or even just fun with that stamp. Just a handful of times. So it looks to me like it's become the sewer of the internet. You might find a gold ring there but you have to wade through knee deep shit to get to it :)
Of course this is also the reason I've never even considered joining. Though I left Facebook too and have never been on Twitter.
It’s great. I think it’s more what you make it than any other social media platform. I watch videos and I get other videos that I’ll like. If I was interested in other things they would show up on my page, through the algorithm working really well. Nobody crowbars stuff in e.g. I don’t see any maga shit, I just see really entertaining content.
Obviously this self diagnosis is a very real issue, but it’s not caused by Tik tok. Tik tok is just good at surfacing the problem though
As a parent, I've experienced this in the last year. It was pretty easy to identify and correct for. Teens try out novel behaviors regularly. It's a good strategy for figuring out identity and maturing, but it does have these weird edge-cases that being on the lookout for and gently applying reality maintenance mechanisms corrects for.
1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201609/bri...
1 post on Facebook might reach 100s, 1000s of people. Rarely a page with large enough following may hit 100,000s of people.
1 post on TikTok from a moderate influencer can hit millions.
That’s not to say other social media forms haven’t had bad trends in the past, but TikTok has had far more and in a far shorter amount of time. People just don’t interact with other social content the way they buy into TikTok, which is dangerous and leads to far more misinformation — it was maybe not even 3 weeks ago I had a bunch of my friends sending me a bunch of popular TikTok videos and asking about how AI Transformers were here and taking over the world (they are, but transformers in AI have nothing in common with the movies).
ADHD is now the lack of motivation. OCD has been hit just as badly. It is being used synonymously with liking order and cleanliness (which almost every human does).
And the most bizarre out of the bunch is the pseudo-personality disorder community on tiktok. They come up with names like 'shade' and 'lucius' for their supposed 'alters', all of which have assigned functions like 'the gatekeeper' and 'the emotional supporter', and can of course be activated on demand in front of a camera.
And get this, none of them are diagnosed (only 'self-dxed') because supposedly the medical system is biased and treats them unfairly.
It's not clear how harmful any of this is but boy is it weird.
The difference comes in the utility of that identity. If somebody is latching onto something which drives them to believe that getting one particular type of medication is the one and only way to fix their life, despite not really fitting the diagnostic criteria for the associated condition, I'd say that's a problem. Getting a new label (like asexual) which lets you make sense of your life and probably doesn't change your existing behaviour at all, let alone make you want treatment, I'd say is beneficial.
If people really did have multiple personalities, it would be more surprising if they didn't come up with terms to describe them. I also don't see why it should be impossible for them to switch intentionally at least some of the time.
Perhaps a lot of these people are pretending, essentially acting the parts of imaginary friends. I honestly don't see a problem with that. A lot of people seem to benefit from talking to God, who I also suspect is imaginary, and that's fine so long as they don't harm others as a result. If someone feels better being "Alice" at one time and "Bob" at another, then I'm happy to accept them as such. And on the off chance that their mind really is split into multiple consciousnesses, then it would be really shitty to mock or marginalize them for it.
Or will result in doctors not taking people seriously because only a small percentage of their patients claiming to have a mental illness actually have one.
I can see it going both ways.
And, for what it's worth, a personal anecdote:
A friend of mine recently had her teenage daughter "come out" as autistic. Her daughter is... SO NOT autistic. She's a social butterfly who's extraordinarily empathetic, never struggled for a moment to make friends, never struggled with focusing, coordination, language comprehension, eye contact, reading facial expressions, or any of the myriad symptoms of autism.
But her daughter is quirky and artistic and sometimes gets a little anxious in large social gatherings. Due to TikTok, she became CONVINCED this means she is autistic. She was also furious at her mother for refusing to accept this diagnosis.
At first her mom kind of shrugged off the self-diagnosis as a goofy teenage episode. ...But then her daughter's school psychologist started recommending occupational therapy and medication for her "autism."
My friend demanded to know what symptoms the psychologist was seeing, and was met with the following: "She doesn't have any obvious autism symptoms, but girls can be very, very good at masking their autism. And she's saying she thinks anxiety medication and autism therapy sessions would be helpful, and people don't ask for those sorts of things if they don't need it."
Friend immediately took her daughter to see another psychologist (this one who specializes in autism.) This specialist said she didn't see even a hint of autism, and felt the anxiety was mild, normal for a teenager, and would be harmful to medicate.
Now here's the weirdest part: according to this specialist, she keeps seeing this exact same scenario play out. Mildly awkward teenager gets addicted to TikTok, becomes convinced they're autistic, and gets furious at their parents for "denying them treatment." Baffled parents ends up taking them to this specialist, who confirms their gut instinct that their kid is 100% neurotypical.
The scariest part of this, according to the specialist, isn't teens going down stupid rabbit holes on social media. It's the new generation of psychologists (like the young school psychologist) that emphasize "positive reinforcement" of identity. Teen says they're autistic? Then they're autistic! Simple as that. Now hand them some drugs, because they "wouldn't be asking for it if they didn't need it."
The good news: my friend's daughter saw a therapist for a few months, talked through her anxiety, is doing way better, and now admits she doesn't think she has autism after all.
The bad news: It's the job of mental health professionals to provide proper guidance when it comes to diagnosis, medication, and therapy. And at the moment, many of our practitioners seem to be failing at this, choosing instead to reinforce teenage fantasies.
(Sorry, it just had to be said.)
1. My understanding is that these videos often talk about very general symptoms, that could be caused by these mental disorders -- but also by a lot of other things.
2. The videos take on an authoritative tone, which does a good job of convincing people (especially kids). I've written about this phenomenon (albeit playing out in written form) on HN before:
> Welcome to the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment.
> The scary thing is that many readers will also often take anything said confidently enough to be fact. This is also basically how a lot of disinformation works. Say it authoritatively, and you'll become an authority on the matter to many people.
3. The 'nocebo' effect is very real! It's the opposite of a placebo effect, where if you believe you have an illness, your body actually starts showing symptoms.
4. I'd believe that in a lot of cases it's less about a kid consciously thinking "Ooh it's trendy to have this, let me say I do", and more like kids thinking "Oh this seems to be a widespread thing, and I experience these symptoms sometime (I space out! And I have trouble sleeping! And I have a jittery leg! and so on), sure seems like I might have this!"
5. Very important quote from article:
> "If you spend 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes viewing people talk about these disorders over and over again, that can make it seem like these conditions are a lot more prevalent than they actually are in the world,"
Repetition makes it seem like a bigger deal, and makes it stick around in the kids' head. So the next time they space out in the classroom naturally the thought might occur ("Do I have dissociative disorder?").
6. If lots of kids start showing up to doctors' saying they have (for eg) BPD when they don't, it'll be a lot harder for those with actual symptoms to convince doctors of their situation and receive proper medical care, which is very worrying.
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All this said:
1. I'm just a user of the internet - not a psychologist, nor someone with relevant formal training, so please take my hypotheses as just that -- hypotheses, not fact.
2. I haven't actually watched many of these videos, so if someone has links, please share them! I think a lot of people on HN might like to watch them and analyse what's going on.
Something like: you might not have asperger syndrome but you certainly have hacker news. You might also be suffering from tik tok, google and facebook.
I had a great suggestion for the mental disorder list:
You are suffering from something like SCROOGE or GREED when your wealth is greater than X but are unable to do anything with your life other than attempt to expand your wealth. This is an extremely serious issue with billions suffering for generations to come.
Any kind of non lethal forced medication would work really. Something to slow them down, something to make them suffer greatly, prayer, etc
If 'Goth' were put in a book as some kind of known identity that people assume, then kids would think they 'have' or 'are' ... 'Goth'.
That doesn't delegitimize the nature of real afflictions and identities etc. so much as it highlights how much power our minds have over reality.
I think this even overlaps into identities or 'self beliefs' such as being 'healthy and tough' or 'broken and in need'.
Some people I know never, ever get sick. I suggest they do, but they just 'tough it out' and don't talk about it. Other people I believe make sure everyone knows they are sick and like the sympathy they endear. The placebo effect demonstrates just a hint of the power of our minds, so I wonder how much this has to do with healthy wellbeing. I suggest the 'toughing it out' is probably a good mental state, until it becomes a problem with getting actual needed medical attention.
We really need to understand this a bit better.