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

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451–460 of 664 posts

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

#451

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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 ea…

Didn't facebook / instagram have to testify before congress only a couple of years ago about what they were doing to fight the body image issues that their platforms were causing in underage users?

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

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been on the receiving end of some physical and social/psychological bullying, I think maybe we've gone astray by suppressing the former in favor of the latter. The times I got into fights I was left bruised and humbled, but in all but one case I was able to bury the hatchet with those people. The rumor spreading is different. With social bullying there's no sense of finality after a fight, no reconciliation or…

Formalize it into combat sports, with rules, referees, and medical personnel on staff. Or just competitive sports in general. But don't permit physical bullying. Your experiences elide over cases where there was serious harm done to the victim, physical or otherwise, or led to disproportionate retaliation.

Heh, most of the fights I ever got in were in the context of a competitive sports team. There was always informal refereeing; other people on the team pulling the fight apart when they decided it was over. And there is an unspoken code of conduct; putting somebody in a headlock ended the fight, and you would never try to do something insane like gouging somebody's eyes out.

Of course sometimes a small minority of people are insane and decide to maim and murder people. But I don't think "zero tolerance" environments are good at suppressing that. These policies are ineffectual against psychological/social bullying; how do you prove anything about a maliciously planted word-of-mouth rumor? That stuff goes unpunished, and that sort of bullying does more long-term damage than a typical schoolyard fight. Those festering social wounds probably drive more people to homicidal insanity than anything else.

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

#453

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…

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

#454
Note for the hacker news comments: you'll see a lot of people not putting sarcasm markers next to what they say and then a whole bunch of replies thinking that person was serious and there's a whole lot of misunderstanding going on in a lot of these comments and that's a problem. Tone indicators are important.

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of money to be made from more diagnoses,

This and the parent’s statement is almost entirely wrong. Given 2 statements: 1) Americans don’t seek/receive enough mental healthcare 2) Americans seek/receive too much mental health care no one (other than the old school types who think mental health is simply something for weak people) would pick (2) as true.

This is a counterargument to something I didn't say.

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

#456
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's what they meant.

Thanks for the feedback!

Edit: The parent poster changed their comment entirely after I replied but nonetheless, feedback received.

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

#457
post #351

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The language has shifted as well. You’re not sad, you’re depressed. You don’t worry, you have anxiety. Depression and anxiety are medical diagnoses. The other are normal emotions everyone can, should, and does experience. If you don’t ever worry or get sad about anything there’s probably something else wrong with you. In terms of diagnoses, the DSM-4 included a “bereavement exclusion” from the depression diagnostic c…

It made us feel so insulted and betrayed that when my wife would cry in the NICU for any reason the nurses would tattle on her and she’d get a call from the pill pushers trying to prescribe her psych meds. It’s like look, my kid has literally been in the NICU for 6 months now (it ended up being 9 months total) and you’re strongly pressuring us to get her a tracheostomy (let’s not use medical euphemism here though, th…

I’m sorry for this entire experience that you’ve had. It sounds like a waking nightmare.

I’m curious, did any doctor bring up therapy?

I have major depressive disorder and I take antidepressants to help manage it. There was a landmark study a few years ago indicating that, while SSRIs/SNRIs are beneficial for people like me, they are no more effective than the placebo for people experiencing transient depression.

Therapy, however, would’ve been a sound recommendation for her. In this case it would have given her a place to vent and taught her some tools to cope.

Finally, you should consider whether you and your wife experience any post-traumatic stress from this experience. Your experience meets the qualifications for one that can lead to PTSD in DSM V. There are extremely effective therapy approaches that can put PTSD in complete remission.

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

#458

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"...a mandatory requirement that the condition has a significant negative impact on the patient's life." Lot's of things have negative impacts that aren't considered medical conditions, on the other hand Elan Musk says he has Aspergers. Nobody seems to doubt it. This shows that someone can climb to the top of the social world but still be told they have a disease supposedly associated with "significant negative impac…

And FDR had polio. JFK had Addison's disease and required regular treatment. Alan Turing revolutionised pretty much all of science and then committed suicide. Clearly someone can be pretty much maximally successful in their endeavours, and yet still have diseases that have a significant negative impact on their life, whether it's their sense of happiness, problems with interpersonal relations, or mobility. As for dou…

I don't doubt a mental health practitioner told Musk he has Aspergers but we've now moved the bar from medical issues being related to a "significant negative impact" on the patient's life to "...some interpersonal issues..." being sufficient to label someone with a medical condition.

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

#459
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone is literally only way how they can organize social life. Houses don't have landlines anymore. Teenager without phone means no socialization outside organized activities.

> no socialization outside organized activities The point of those is to restrict influence and keep an eye on things. Also, why can you socialize with the neighbors. Parents used to be super comfortable with "tommy is coming over for dinner or spending that night" Is that still the case? I don't have any anecdotes on this.

That assumes there kids of the same age in neighborhood with similar lifestyle. Which is quite a lot to ask these days.

There are less kids overall.

Kids today have more activities, so you won't meet them just by randomly going outside.

They do a lot more activities at home on computer, again you won't meet them randomly outside.

Parents are not even allowed to let their 6-7 years old outside alone, meaning they would had to be with them. Meaning kids won't get habit to he outside nor will find friends outside, even if some kids are around.

And if those other teenagers have phones, they expect you to organize it all by phone. They have own friends they socialize with and coordinate via phones. It is rude to just show up without calling first and you need phone to be reachable by other in the first place.

And other kids will not call on parents home. They are shy or scared.

When kids went to Timmy, pwople assumed landlines. Before landlines, it was accepted to just show up. Today, expectation is phone.

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

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language has shifted as well. You’re not sad, you’re depressed. You don’t worry, you have anxiety. Depression and anxiety are medical diagnoses. The other are normal emotions everyone can, should, and does experience. If you don’t ever worry or get sad about anything there’s probably something else wrong with you. In terms of diagnoses, the DSM-4 included a “bereavement exclusion” from the depression diagnostic c…

Just because it is a "normal" thing doesn't mean it isn't something that medicine can address. Many of the unpleasant things our bodies go through are "normal" reactions to events. The fact that bereavement may be different than other causes of depression may be a reason to treat it differently, but not a reason to ignore it.

But should we be treating those kinds of things with a medication or should we be treating it with education? Should we be more forgiving to people and allowing them the space they need to process life events instead of worrying about money or their jobs or all this crap.

The difference is handing someone a bottle and saying "here this will go away quick!" Vs just generally having a better more emotionally aware society.

Some processes that are brains go through should be allowed and it should be accepted that they run their full natural course given that the human that has the brain is also being cared for and guided in some sort of way during this process and not just isolated and shunned away.

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