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TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

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Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#251
post #234

I can't stop seeing the heavy gender skew in online communities centred around these topics. Both the sexual orientation as well as mental disorder communities like this seem to be most popular among teenager or young adult women. As a man I don't know how teenage hormones affect girls different than boys at that age, so I can't even give an uneducated guess as to what could be the source of this attraction towards q…

TikTok skews female very heavily.

i always thought the same for a while but apparently its not as much any more. my guess is kinda like ig theyre more likely to make content and post vs guys so we see them more. they do seem to be more active users by a huge margin tho.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#252
post #14
post #9

Related: medical students' disease! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease

One item in the article is: + Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1 at line 1392: bad argument #1 to 'pairs' (table expected, got nil). That's new to me. I didn't know wikipedia had adopted lua for its templates.

Supposed to be fixed now. A bad edit to a widely used module, of course.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#253

It feels as though our society has collectively forgotten that mental illness can be socially transmissible. I remember in 00s there seemed to be mainstream acknowledgement and concern that anorexia and distorted perception of one's body can be socially transmissible, ripping through teen social cliches particularly, and could be spread through the internet by "pro-ana" websites and chat groups. I don't hear much abo…

Allowing teens to spread mental illness on social media was less profitable in the 00s. There was a low cost to shutting down pro-ana tumblr accounts. Now, those sites are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Can't afford to do the right thing.

> Now, those sites are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Can't afford to do the right thing.

Which sites?

Tumblr was started in 2007 - it wasn't very big until 2009. I'm not sure why it's even in your comparison.

The only company worth hundreds of billions of dollars remotely relevant is Facebook and - possibly - TikTok. Are you implying that the majority of their business is promoting teen mental illness and eating disorders? Because it's not - especially Facebook. Most of the tweens have moved to TikTok.

Facebook's audience is like ~3% teens & tweens. And of that a small percentage is getting sucked into this strange & toxic echo chamber.

The reason this is mostly a TikTok problem is because Facebook can easily and did do things to prevent this. They could do more, and TikTok can certainly afford to do something about it. The impacts on the top and bottom line would be irrelevant.

I'll end by saying I find it odd we seem to be talking about this being a children only problem. Every time there's a new allergy in the buzz or a new condition - I have at least 100 contacts talking about how they're convinced they have it. This is just typical human behavior - trying to always be the center of attention. Should we be surprised kids want to special? No.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#254
post #201

I can't stop seeing the heavy gender skew in online communities centred around these topics. Both the sexual orientation as well as mental disorder communities like this seem to be most popular among teenager or young adult women. As a man I don't know how teenage hormones affect girls different than boys at that age, so I can't even give an uneducated guess as to what could be the source of this attraction towards q…

This is because women are under-diagnosed for most mental health disorders except for Bipolar and BPD, for which they are over-diagnosed. They build communities because their doctors aren’t helping them.

do you have somewhere where i can read more about this? i havent seen it before and am interested.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#255

My sister never had any facial ticks until it was popular on ticktok to have a facial tick.

Tics are socially contagious, more so if you have a close social connection to the person. It's actually really fascinating. A loved one of mine has tics and I occasionally pick up their vocal tics unknowingly.

There's an actual term for it but I can't find it for the life of me. I don't believe it is echolalia but it is a precise word for people 'catching' tics from loved ones.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's taboo to criticise such movements because by extension you criticise those that actually have the illness. And some movements have grown quite powerful politically. If you allude that it's problematic to let children change sex, you are painted as anti lgbtixxxx. Activism has won against science.

Quoted post unavailable.

Men cry in the office too, but they're better at hiding it because the social expectations are different. A few times during crunches I've heard men sobbing in the restroom instead of at their desk. Men get told to 'man up', so they bottle it up or hide it.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#258
post #7

Tik Tok is the reason I've been told several times I have ADHD. Pretty sure I don't! This phenomenon is so infuriating. The only half-convincing defense I've heard of it is that it could, maybe, theoretically, disseminate information about illnesses to people who don't have the money to see a professional, but the other effects are so much worse it doesn't seem worth it.

Tiktok and pop-culture generally make me very skeptical on "ADHD", the so-called "spectrum" and "neurodivergence" generally. I'm not saying these things don't exist, but much of it seems very difficult to falsify -- which needs to be the gold standard of determining these sort of things; e.g. "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"

I've spent a long time in disability communities, falsifiability gets very little respect, and "gatekeeping" is generally expressly or implicitly taboo.

So with Autism, probably the most common disqualifier in practice is that the disorder requires childhood presentation and a lot of people don't know this. So somebody will come in, say "oh I wasn't autistic at all as a child, but I felt very autistic as a teenager, so I asked a doctor, and he said I wasn't autistic". People will respond with "oh, doctors don't know anything about autism, they underdiagnose minorities and women all the time, that proves it" and "oh, women actually don't present as autistic in childhood, they can just be masking, but that doesn't mean they aren't actually autistic". This happens EVERY time, especially if a woman is involved, and means that you can't falsify the idea that somebody was autistic in childhood.

I have been banned once for saying that disabled people should doubt other peoples disabilities (on the grounds of preventing exploitation and misallocation of resources), I got told that I was spreading ableist myths that disabled people are responsible for other disabled people lacking resources, that I was reinforcing the ableist myth that disabled people are just exploiting non-disabled people (of course, disabled people do just as much for the able as the able do for them, and thus there is no advantage to faking disability), that it was inappropriate to talk about doubting disabilities on an autism community, and that they wished I had a number of painful disabilities that I couldn't receive pain medication for because I wasn't believed.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#259
post #134
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I use to experience slight hallucinations (mostly auditory), but that tapered off as I grew out of adolescence

I wonder sometimes how many adults experience slight auditory hallucinations, especially at night, and don't bother recording them. I live in a pretty busy area with lots of trains and emergency vehicles outside, and when I'm close to sleep but get jolted back awake, I sometimes remember things that don't make any sense.

Don’t worry, the auditory hallucinations that sometimes occur between waking and sleeping are normal and documented (see “hypnagogic hallucinations”).

I would start to worry only if I had them during the day while awake.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#260

I can't stop seeing the heavy gender skew in online communities centred around these topics. Both the sexual orientation as well as mental disorder communities like this seem to be most popular among teenager or young adult women. As a man I don't know how teenage hormones affect girls different than boys at that age, so I can't even give an uneducated guess as to what could be the source of this attraction towards q…

idk i always got the idea that at that age women can be more emotionally vulnerable to some stuff. same reason their bullying goes for social attacks, shaming, talking shit behind ppls backs instead of physical violence mostly.
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