Honestly: Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?
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commonsense.news
I would have been diagnosed on the spectrum had been born a couple decades later. My issues were blamed on being left handed, being "right brained".
I think when we live in a society where we have time to spend on social media sharing our mental health challenges in lieu of just trying to find food and shelter, it's a sign of advancement. I am also hopeful that the current pattern of glorifying illness and sympathy seeking behavior will diminish as we all become comfortable talking about it.
“…“the gentrification of disability,” how sickness became chic…“
is quite something.
This obviously does not negate my sympathy for those with the real disorders - I have some as well. It's enraging to see the real stuff be treated so lightly though.
“Teens faking mental illness” is a folk tale older than social media.
The closest allegory is that mental illness is having its “pride” where it’s no longer a big shameful thing, you’re allowed to have it be visible, and it doesn’t make you less of a person. And just like pride you get similar “teens faking for attention”, “it’s just a phase”, “trenders” or “ugh people make it their whole personality.”
If you want a not politically charged example of something being destigmatized suddenly increasing in prominence look at the graph of the percent of left handed people over time and guess when we stopped forcing kids to be right handed.
In totality this is probably just part of the pendulum swing, and as awareness of fake disorder cringe grows, and as mental illness actually becomes "just normal" we will also see this phenomenon slowly disappear.
I just hope that all this doesn't lead to over-diagnosis of various mental disorders, because that would be a horrible outcome. We already see this with ADHD and autism, since those diagnoses are so fluid, and the nature of the "spectrum" is inherently fluid.
Personally, I would not consider clout in mental health communities to be 'material benefit'
If your argument is “there exist people who purposely fake various disorders” then sure you’re absolutely right. You can find all breeds of crazy if you go looking for it.
But what isn’t true at all is that the noticeable uptick in people realizing they have and being diagnosed with things like depression, adhd, anxiety is just the result of people faking it.
> This is such the wrong take
And:
> "Teens faking mental illness” is a folk tale older than social media.
And I do not believe either of those statements captures the truth of the situation. Hysteria and group psychosis are also ancient phenomena, and not particularly well-understood, and so I think it's prideful and potentially harmful to preclude the current situation of mental illness, particularly when it manifests in hyper-connected online communities, from that possibility entirely.
I know you didn't really imply this in your post, but I can see in this thread others taking issue with statements like the above. Those opinions don't make me an opponent of mental health awareness, quite the opposite really. I just think we ought to be cautious and suspect when evaluating the current state of affairs, and not let current progress blind us of the potential for greater harm down the road.
Any source for that? With both being so often defined in terms of external behavior (usually from parents perspective), I find it hard to believe that ADHD and autism aren't severely under-diagnosed, especially with many people still not figuring out that their "quirks" and "problems" are completely typical autistic behaviors until well in their adulthood; and I know for sure that they're both still massively under-diagnosed in women.
If you go to the freakshow, of course you'll see some freaks.
I’ll get better or die trying, but there’s a lot of confusion as to what all this means by both those well meaning and those who are assholes.
Reminds me of Luis the 14th and his anal fistula [1]. Courtiers started faking anal fistulas after the king had an operation to remove his. It got to the point where they would get treatment for them, or fake getting the treatment, regardless of health. This was not a simple operation at the time. Chances of death were high, to the point where the first was performed on a condemned criminal who was pardoned if he survived.
[0] https://www.insider.com/who-is-youtube-star-nikocado-avocado...
> Around the Meiji Restoration, when everyone was obsessed with how great foreign stuff was, Japanese medical students went to Germany, learned psychiatry, came back to Japan, and told everyone they were neurasthenic. Being neurasthenic became first a fashion, then a class marker. The idea was that neurasthenics were people who were working too hard (good, admirable), and who were so smart and doing so much furious intellectual activity that it was straining their nerves (impressive). Also, they were probably sensitive souls too pure for this world. The most embarrassing extreme of this happened in 1903, when some photogenic Japanese youth carved a poem in a tree, went to a beautiful waterfall, and leapt to his death. Everyone praised him for how sensitive and artistic and neurasthenic this was, and turned him into a posthumous national hero. Meanwhile, “in 1902 an article reported that fully one-third of patients visiting hospitals for consultations were suffering from the new disease.”
> Eventually Japanese psychiatrists got fed up, and started announcing that actually neurasthenia sucked and you should not have it. From a 1906 Japanese neurology journal:
>> These days, young students talk about such stuff as “the philosophy of life”. They confront important and profound problems of life, are defeated, and develop neurasthenia. Those who jump off a waterfall or throw themselves in front of a train are weak-minded. They do not have a strong mental constitution and develop mental illness, dying in the end. How useless they are! Such weak-minded people would only cause harm even if they remained alive.
> Finally everyone struck a compromise and agreed that most of the lower-class patients weren’t real neurasthenics (hard-working, intelligent, sensitive, admirable), but had a similar condition, imitating the symptoms of neurasthenia, based on being too weak and pathetic to cope. This seemed to do the trick, and people stopped coming to the hospital with neurasthenia symptoms. Watters writes:
>> Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of limiting its adoption. By the end of World War II the diagnosis had almost completely gone out of style among both psychiatrists and the population at large.
> He who has ears to hear, let him listen.
Glorifying illness causes a lot of harm.
Or, to put it another way, they felt obligated to shame people into not seeking treatment, in hopes of not having to admit that they didn't know how to help their patients.
Fewer patients, happier doctors, better metrics. Everyone wins, right?
On the contrary, shaming people into not seeking treatment is how they were helping them. Prevention is the best cure, after all.
This is particularly likely to occur if the incentives are aligned to make the problem seem to go away rather than doing the hard work of actually fixing things. In other words, they may not have been preventing or curing anything (at least for the patients who needed the most help).
But that isn't the point. The point was to prevent people from engaging in pathological behavior by pointing out that that's not something you should do. It's an obvious-but-shouldn't-be-necessary correction to the earlier state where people were admired for being dysfunctional.
People have been making shit up for attention for at least the last 120 years.
And yet suicide contagion is one of the few statistically significant results in the social sciences. If people are willing to kill themselves because others like them did on the news what's convincing themselves they are really sad in comparison?
The reason I ask is I've read many books about mental health over the last couple years. The more modern ones are all about acceptance and wearing them as a badge of honor. The timeless ones tend to talk about overcoming/controlling them by having a sense of agency.
I'm not particularly proud or fond of wearing my problems as an identity. I think thoughts are more powerful than we believe. Sure we should absolutely talk about them openly, but how many people make themselves more sick because of their thoughts? I found myself in this pattern for awhile because I instilled the identity that I was sick.
We all face the vicissitudes of the human condition. We all get to choose how we perceive them.
However, any idea along the lines of "people need help, not acceptance" needs to be very carefully discussed, because in the world I grew up in, you didn't get help or acceptance: you got punishment, you got shame, you even sometimes got violence as "treatment."
A lot of people out there who will latch onto anything telling them they don't need to be accepting of difference.
For example, electroconvulsive therapy in its early days. To quote the Mayo Clinic [1]:
> Much of the stigma attached to ECT is based on early treatments in which high doses of electricity were administered without anesthesia, leading to memory loss, fractured bones and other serious side effects.
[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/electroconvulsiv...
Ultimately it's yet another "think of the children!" variant.
That's mostly still the world we live in, the main difference is that you can login to tumblr and find out you're not alone.
Which are basically Twitter, Tiktok, and various subreddits which repost those things to criticise them.
But it's not just the younger generation, you can go back a ways. I'm no youngster either.
My old uncle was a hypochondriac. Mom said he just acted that way to get attention.
One time he called and wanted her to fix him some chicken soup, and I ended up bringing it over to his apartment.
I asked him how he was feeling and it was headaches, tiredness, foggy mindedness, and overall malaise.
Doctor couldn't find a thing this time.
I asked him how long had it been going on now.
"In three weeks it'll be a month."
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-th...
However I've just read Dean Radin's Real Magic and now I'm not so sure.
It would seem, if the ANOVA studies referenced in the book are real, that there really is something unexplainable about mind over matter.
It's crazy yes. But all the studies are referenced in the book, and it sounds persuasive.