Should Mental Disorders Have Names?

I think that's primarily because severe and enduring mental illness is still strongly stigmatised.

The public conversation about mental health is dominated by what I call "the narrative". We see a succession of successful and healthy people talking about how they had depression or anxiety, they plucked up the courage to ask for help but now they're OK. Our conversations about mental health are dominated by brief episodes of illness in the past tense.

That's not a terrible narrative and I'm sure it has encouraged a lot of people to seek treatment, but it's a very selective image of mental illness. We don't hear from people in the throes of severe illness. We don't hear from people who have struggled for years or decades and haven't found an effective treatment. We don't hear from people whose lives have been blighted by unmanaged schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. We don't hear from people who know they need treatment, but can't access it for financial reasons.

"There are effective treatments and you don't have to suffer in silence" is an important message, but so is "some people can't access treatment, some people don't benefit from treatment, so we need to work as a society to improve the quality and availability of treatment and help people with unresolved mental illness to live fulfilling lives".

Yay! You've overcome splitting! Now if the profession could achieve what they want from patients...

- must have tics that begin before he or she is 18 years of age.

In a medical standpoint that makes it different, but in any practical sense the name conveys all of the information people need, it is perhaps unusual in that it is also a condition that occasionally requires rapid explanation.

In many cases, these were Twice Exceptional kids who had started doing really strange things around the time they were toddlers or preschoolers. The strong negative reactions of adults around them then compounded the problem and made it an intractable issue.

I was often able to help parents back off from this dynamic so the family and child could get unstuck. I wrote an anecdote about that sort of process in January. It can be read here: https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-hand-li...

I'm a former military wife and homeschooling parent. People are quick to be dismissive and tell me I don't know anything about x, y or z, etc.

But my experiences suggest to me that a lot of mental health issues are rooted in relatively prosaic cases of "kids do weird and stupid things because they are kids, some kids do very weird and stupid things for various reasons, and parents often don't have effective tools for handling the situation, thereby compounding the problem." My experiences also suggest that a lot of this is fixable, without drugs or therapy, if you can help the family disengage from long-standing patterns of interaction and help the child in question understand where their dysfunctional behaviors came from in a non-blaming manner and give them some better answers and/or just breathing room to change on their own without interference.

I spent about two weeks writing the above piece and it's based on many years of education and experience. It got more than 60k page views and people are republishing it, some with my permission and giving me credit.

I would like to do more of that kind of writing, but it made me zero money. I am routinely told my writing has zero value and I should go get a real job. I'm not good at the self promotion thing etc.

I think I know some useful things that could help parents avoid becoming mired in the kinds of problems this man in the article has. But I have no audience and people who know what I used to do mostly are in my past or simply unwilling to vouch for me, including some prominent people on HN who knew of my work in that area at the time, to some degree or another.

I've largely made my peace with the fact that I can't afford to write for free and lots of people on the internet expect excellent content for free. They don't want ads and they don't want to pay anything for it either. No, they don't want to be a Patreon supporter.

So I content myself as best I can with leaving comments on the internet and generally being percieved as a blowhard and arm chair politician type who has an opinion on everything and zero credibility.

Que sera, sera.