Comment by skim_milk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skim_milk | Hacker News Reader

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Political data would suggest that we aren't actually being more empathic or accommodating, actually, the exact opposite!

Online communities are extremely disproportionally composed of people who fall into the Cluster B/emotionally dysregulated/CPTSD spectrum.

Internet addiction or "Internet Use Disorder" is nearly entirely composed of people in this camp. Same goes for trans people - this isn't an insult but an objective observation that these people need mental health help. To drive the point home - my ex-girlfriend worked at a mental institution for children and the majority all of them were trans and/or had BPD/Cluster B/CPTSD etc etc. At one point, all 5 children in their unit were trans!

Leadership should not use Internet communities as the north star for guiding the culture shifts of wider society, it will obviously lead to (to use a British understatement) social friction. We risk crumbling the institution of science and higher education due to catering to the wants of Cluster B, all just so these people can move on to the next subject to split into good and evil parts.

The focus should be on providing help to Cluster B, NOT about letting them take control of society and crumble all of our institutions to pieces over dissociative morality plays, making everyone's health worse in the process.

> this isn't an insult but an objective observation that these people need mental health help. To drive the point home - my ex-girlfriend worked at a mental institution for children and the majority all of them were trans and/or had BPD/Cluster B/CPTSD etc etc. At one point, all 5 children in their unit were trans!

What exactly are you saying here? That all the trans kids had cluster B personality disorders? You said and/or but the rest of you post seems to be implying that all trans people have cluster B personality disorders. There are lots of other reasons to be a psychiatric inpatient that are not cluster B personality disorders, and CPTSD is also not a personality disorder of any type.

It's not particularly suprising that trans kids end up as inpatients in psychiatric wards. My experience with them is that they know that the vast majority of the world absolutely hates them. I mean, I heard about this one internet comment that implied that they all have cluster B personality disorders. Absolutely shocking.

Your whole thesis reads weird. There are estimated to be about a million trans people in the US. You really think that many are "extremely online?" Do they all have cluster B personality disorders? Are none of them living quiet lives?

Do you do this with all minorities?

Essentially the point was linking the available literature and data on IUD, Cluster B, trans-people, and power struggles together. We are, after all, in a thread about making sense of how a population the size of a rounding error got to rewrite the literature on birth.

No judgement, I don't judge people on mental health. Unless someone is calling to make institutional changes that undermine the public's trust in it, then I will exert my right to judge these people's character.

> Essentially the point was linking the available literature and data on IUD, Cluster B, trans-people, and power struggles together.

You didn't do this though. You just said that your ex-girlfriend worked in a psychiatric ward and there were lots of people with cluster B and lots of trans kids. It was honestly just a mess of associations.

Psychiatric comorbidities in transgender people are reasonably well studied so you don't have to guess here. There are a number of small studies involving presentations to psychiatrists, but this is no longer the way that most trans people seek care, so the results are biased to complicated cases. Here is a large study comparing gender-minority coded files in a group of 53M patients:

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/trgh.2019.0029

As you'd expect, depression and anxiety are extremely common. Cluster B personality disorders are at a prevalence of 3.4%, though again, attention must be paid to the limitations of the study which fails to capture transgender people seeking care outside of this system. While it's certainly elevated of the general population, please internalize the fact that 96-97% of transgender people do not have a cluster B personality disorder.

As I've pointed out above, minorities are medicine's business. We absolutely write things in a way to include everyone, because we definitely want to get the most at-risk people out there. I don't care what you think about transgender men, you should want them to seek reproductive care if they are pregnant, because there is potentially another person involved or not, depending on what they choose to do.

Like I said above. There are about 40,000 people living with cystic fibrosis in the USA, about 1/3200 live births. It's really expensive to keep these people alive, with replacement enzymes, biologics, very, very frequent hospital admissions to the point where pediatrics calls them "CF tune-ups" and eventually lung or possibly multi-organ transplants. They do, however, have intrinsic human value, so we like to keep them alive. I don't think changing literature is a huge ask here, especially given that in a care context we still say "pregnant woman" when it's specifically a woman that I'm talking about, even though we say "pregnant people" in the abstract.

> I don't think changing literature is a huge ask here

That's the assumption that is (indirectly) being questioned here. I don't have strong opinion either way, just trying to show how to steelman better.

Politicians, like many performers, are addicted to attention. Perhaps as much as they're addicted to power. The Internet is irresistible catnip for them and part of the reason why the chronically online are able to have so much impact on our 'leaders'.

I agree with everything here but the presumption that "Leadership" is taking its cues from "internet communities" does not compute for me.

I for one am not so sure this so-called "leadership" cares for family, as a social unit. Accordingly, there is (for me at least) the possibility that this "leadership" is using a pretext to achieve related but orthogonal goals, since purely on rational, moral, and ethical basis, causing this much social division and disruption over this niche issue does not make any sense.

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