Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

631–640 of 664 posts

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

#631

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.

I've noticed this starting to carry over. I watch some Mr Beast things after listening to an awesome interview with him. But his videos are almost unwatchable. It's like 20 tick toks strung together. They just edit it that way to get the tik tock crowd. Very infuriating. How do you learn or digest good information if you get blasted with 99% shit every 15 seconds?

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

#632
post #619
post #176

Quoted post unavailable.

Maybe not all religions are created equal; even if it's all made-up, the idea of a benevolent-if-aloof God who wants us to act in each other's best interest seems a little less toxic than losing 50 pounds in all the right places in order to gain approval for having the perfect bikini body.

I love stories. Some of my most transformative experiences were gifted to me by good novels. Metaphors and parables are powerful tools for conveying hard-won lessons.

Fiction can deliver truth. But presenting fiction as fact ruins the whole game.

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

#633
post #552

Growing up, my teenage friend group would frequently dive into mental diagnosis and personality assessments. This feels like a very common teenage thing to do and TikTok didn't invent it. At that age, you don't know who you are or why you do things you do and there's comfort in learning about this stuff. For that matter, it's a joke among psych students that you begin to diagnose yourself and your friends as you take…

"Personality tests" have been a thing for a long time. The difference here seems to be that we're talking about diseases and not just differences between people.

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

#634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not, I'm in no way saying that explicitly or implicitly. I do not even remotely conflate these two things. It is possible to show symptoms as a child, not get diagnosed as a child, and get diagnosed as an adult. I have zero issue with that. Here's the exact phrasing of the criteria https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html >Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period (but may not become fully…

There might be a difference between medicine as written and medicine as practiced. Suppose a psychiatrist talks to a patient and confirms they have every symptom. Clearly a textbook case, except the patient says "I was symptom free in childhood." Does the psychiatrist conclude the patient doesn't meet the criteria, or does the psychiatrist conclude the patient wasn't self aware enough in childhood to know if they exh…

Well no, the psychiatrist has options here, they could try to interview the parents or the teacher of the child and ask them what they remember. It's always helpful if a psychiatrist goes through the trouble of making a stronger case than "They must just not remember how autistic they were as a kid, so therefore, they had autism symptoms as a child". They're making a diagnosis with legal weight, a diagnosis that entitles you to various forms of government assistance.

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

#635
post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it fair to say that stimulants having a significant impact is an indicator for having ADHD? If it wasn't basically impossible to see a psychiatrist where I live, I'd try to get tested, because Armodafinil has completely changed my life.

> Is it fair to say that stimulants having a significant impact is an indicator for having ADHD? Honestly I'd say it's the opposite. Stimulants barely touch the sides with me, even the non-prescribed types a younger version of me may or may not have dabbled in were pretty ineffective.

This is the same so far for me - even mild stimulants like caffeine (I know, it's a different underlying chemical process) have less effect - I could drink coffee right before bed without much/any issue. And still trying to find a stimulant that helps with ADHD myself (only on my 2nd one (Ritalin, Adderall), and pretty mild doses so far). But that is also pretty common for me - I've always had fairly high drug resistance, as it were (need higher doses to feel any affect), so I don't know if that is at all specific to ADHD and those medications.

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

#636
post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of (religious fanatics + nuclear weapons) has greatly undermined the old 'utilitarian' argument about the social benefits of religion. For those who haven't heard it, that argument is something like 'yes, religious texts are just fairy tales, but religious belief leads to social cohesion and confers survival advantages on a society, so we should promote it, even though we don't believe in it ourselves.' A…

I buy that argument. I am a 44 year old atheist and even in my life I've seen the difference in society from when being a Christian in the US was just something most people did, to now where we're all much more secular. Religion's negatives get a lot more press than it's positives.

Promoting cults is all well and good until your neighbor is in the wrong cult and then suddenly it's a disaster. My experience has been that "is religious" is not at all a good predictor of whether someone is going to be a "good citizen." Instead it's "lives in a community with low socioeconomic diversity," where that last one is not "pakistani vs british" but way more specific, like "center-right environmentalist in the middle third of income."

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

#637
post #630

I've done a lot of thinking about this issue, and there's two topics I notice. First, disability has become a status symbol in certain circles. Second, the huge rise in self-diagnosed disability. On the latter point, these kids are acting out these disabilities with such sincerity and 24/7 consistency that they effectively are disabled for all practical purposes, it's just that the diagnosis might be different than t…

>self diagnosed I was listening to a cbc program about autism on adults the other day. One person being interviewed stated she "identified as autistic". She had done some online test that said she had 70 out of 100 autism traits or something. I was incredulous. Are these people for real?

There's people who are like this for purely practical reasons. It's either hard for them to get diagnosed, or they don't see any benefit to it.

There's people who are more like this for more ideological reasons. Some people feel doctors underdiagnose the poor, women, and minorities, and consequently, don't know why they should be obligated to fight an uphill battle to get diagnosed from a system not treating people like them correctly.

In any case, a fair amount of these "I identify as autistic after taking an online quiz" types actually are autistic. So my policy is to give any such person the benefit of the doubt, at least at first.

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

#638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this is not unique to ADHD. None of those other things I mentioned can be detected by a chemical analysis either. And morphine is as big - if not bigger - problem than amphetamines.

Nobody claims this is unique to ADHD.

And without any data on drug seeking behavior it’s a moot point, could be such a small percent of people who make it past detection, have no criminal records, pass 6 month urine screen that MUST show negative to a panel of illicit drugs + positive for amphetamine markers. Doctors are afraid of losing their licenses for prescribing controlled substances without covering their ass (e.g. illicit drug panel screen) and err on the side of caution.

It’s hard to make it past these hurdles and aren’t on other controlled substances, you are still rolling the dice of getting blacklisted in their systems if you ever get caught selling or testing positive for weed or opioids, etc.

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

#639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think you have more access to objective reality than others ?

Your right. Obviously we can't be sure birds are real, because some people say (without evidence) bird's aren't real and how can we say we have a better grasp of objective reality than them? Obviously, based on their absurd and evidence-less claims, we should forever question if birds are actually flying creatures and not government drones, regardless of our own experiences with birds and information provided by peop…

The comparison to birds is bizarre because they are a public phenomena that anyone can see and study, gender transitions aren't.

>our own experiences with birds

Which is none in the case of gender transitions, or very little for some people. But certainly nowhere near the experience of an average person with birds.

>information provided by people who study birds for a living

Which is not reliable in the case of gender transitions, because those who "study them for a living" have proven themselves to be unreliable and value-laden communicators who either has an ideology to push or are too timid to challenge those who do have an ideology to push. Don't forget the substantial material incentive for diagnosing people with gender dysphoria (months and possibly years of consultation and medical appointments, services and products), if ornithologists were similarly ideological and have reasons to benefit from denying that birds are drones, I would be skeptical of their claims too, until I see lots of birds and study them myself at any rate.

>provide me one documented case of a biological male being diagnosed with gender dysphoria

Diagnosis is medical data that is mostly non-public, so this is an impossible demand for rigor. And yet, here's[1] the next best thing, a celebrated psychologist with a long career in sex and gender research, editor for several journals, slandered and fired because activists are outraged he tries to encourage gender-non-conforming kids to be comfortable in their assigned gender instead of transitioning them immediately. So anybody who doesn't diagnose a barbie-playing boy with dysphoria and transition them is at risk of being slandered and fired no matter what their contribution or position is. I consider this pretty solid evidence for the original claim.

[1] https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-r...

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

#640
post #200

People are going to be blaming TikTok, social media, or whatever else for this, but it's important to note that this is not a new phenomenon at all. Tuberculosis was fashionable during the Victorian era and shaped a lot of our modern beauty standards today[0]. Is social media really to blame, or is a desire to be different just a part of being human? [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-tuberculos...

Exactly. Here is a story from 2010 where a storyline about a character's bi polar on a popular UK soap saw a doubling in the number of young people seeking help.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-10004491

Post reply on HN