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It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

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Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#621

Post by johnea »

This paper is written by a German psychiatrist, describing the emergence of this phenomenon in Germany, and across the first world.

They advocate naming this illness as a new type of "mass sociogenic illness (MSI) (also known as ‘mass psychogenic illness’, MPI) that in contrast to all previously reported episodes of MSI is spread solely via social media and hence is not locally restricted." "...we therefore suggest the more specific term ‘mass social media-induced illness’ (MSMI)"

‘mass social media-induced illness’ (MSMI)

I think they could have left the "-induced" part out of this name 8-/

The psychological effects on a person, in their opinions, "happiness", sense of urgency, priority of issues, etc, based on what that person spends their waking hours viewing/reading/listening to, is still a vastly uncharted territory. No doubt the CIA/FBI/Military could shed some light if they would declassify their records of torture and mind control.

But likely the worlds wealthiest people, via their corporations based on manipulating peoples mental state for the purpose of maximizing resource extraction, are already breaking new ground well beyond the now primitive efforts of "MK Ultra" etc.

The simplest way to minimize the effects of ‘mass social media illness’, is not to participate. Not only in what's typically labeled "social media', but in any form of internet media, especially video formatted, that is allegedly seeking to communicate information, or present an opinion/position.

READ if you want to learn, WATCH if you want to be manipulated!

With text, information is taken in at the speed and cadence chosen by the reader. When watching, a person is a passive subject to the presenter. Images and especially moving video manipulate each individuals psychology in ways that are largely not well understood, and certainly massively under appreciated by the overwhelming majority of this type of media's viewers.

To try to express how broad of a subject this is, one could compare this article on Twerk Tik Tourette's with the mechanizations of "surveillance consumerism", as well as the overwhelming variety of modern neurotic behaviors and anxieties experienced by those in continuous media immersion, thus primarily young people in the first world.

The most straight forward "cure"? GO OUTSIDE! Bathe your senses in organic images, sounds, and the ultimate high resolution, 3D integrated sensory experience!

In short, get up and walk out!

Best of luck in the new year and the ongoing disaster of the new millennium...

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#622

Post by educaysean »

zozbot234 wrote: post #595
robotresearcher wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it doesn't feel that way right now, but there is probably no time in history where racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, religious hatred, slavery, etc. were less normalized than right now. These things are sadly all too common, there's lots of work to do, and we must not be complacent about past successes. But when I was a kid, homosexuality was illegal. Twenty years ago gay fear and stupid women were typical…

You're looking at a tiny elite slice of the modern West (I mean, sitcoms? Seriously?) and taking it as representative of the whole world. There's probably a whole lot more homophobia, misogyny and religious hatred now in some highly religious countries than there was 25 years ago or so. And the Internet is even less representative.

You're curious about the non-western perspective? I can tell you that social changes are arriving at a much faster pace in Asia than what we're experiencing in the west. This isn't because the Asian countries are more progressive, but because the baseline was simply lower. The west is indeed in the lead, but most countries are following closely behind, and more importantly, they're all headed in the same direction.

Think about it. Everyone is now consuming the same Tiktok, reddit, Netflix, music, video games globally. Twitter isn't some hidden cove only westerners have access to. The world is following along as George Floyd is brutally murdered in the street. Have you seen Parasite or Squid Game? They deal directly with topics like class struggle / racism and they resonated with people all over the earth. The fact that South Korean media is even producing media such as these would've been unthinkable just 20 years ago. Annual gay parade have started take place in Seoul since 2015, and interracial marriage numbers have never been higher.

I'm sure there are outlier nations who have faced regression in their cultural maturity since, but they're anything but the representative sample and claiming otherwise would be disingenuous. So no, this isn't something cooked up by the bored progressives of the U.S. This is not some obscure domain reserved for the western elites. This is where the world is headed towards - the westerners simply got there before the rest of us.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#623

Post by autoexec »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #599
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite sceptical of these studies. I don't see how you control for the fact that couples who stay together are happier on average. That's why they're still together(at least some of the time), whereas divorcees are by definition not happy together. To have a proper comparison you need to compare divorced parents to married, but miserable parents. Growing up with the latter can be just as miserable or possibly even…

You don't need to control for that. We're looking at total outcomes, not individual points; it doesn't matter how it reaches the effect. Here's a proposition: Learning to make compromises and achieve partnership with your partner and growing into it is the behavior most associated with happiness of couples. Having removed the obvious necessity of it, we've created a society with much more focus on individual wants an…

> We can recognize that committed partnerships are healthy and encourage them without saying that any one individual is at fault if a relationship didn't work out.

Do we really need to encourage happy, healthy, and successful committed partnerships? Don't most people desire that for themselves? We should probably avoid outright discouraging them, but I suspect that most people are wanting a good, happy, loving, relationship and that if they divorce it's because they didn't have one.

I really don't think that it's simply a matter of most people seeing divorce as being so easy and consequence free that there's no value in putting in the effort to work things out with their spouses either. Especially not when children are involved.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#624

Post by stubish »

robotresearcher wrote: post #594
fleddr wrote: post #535

The times we live in, utterly bizarre. Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root. Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to ru…

I know it doesn't feel that way right now, but there is probably no time in history where racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, religious hatred, slavery, etc. were less normalized than right now. These things are sadly all too common, there's lots of work to do, and we must not be complacent about past successes. But when I was a kid, homosexuality was illegal. Twenty years ago gay fear and stupid women were typical…

Do you have any evidence that the denormalization of racism etc. is because of social media? Or that social media even helped? The ongoing fight to change the things you cite all predate social media by decades or more. Even with the Arab Spring, was social media helpful or just the tool used to coordinate? Would it have happened anyway without Twitter being there as a means to broadcast? A common criticism I have heard of social media is that it is so easy to just retweet/like and wave the flag that many people stop doing anything meaningful and visible outside the echo chamber entirely.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#625

Post by l3uwin »

fleddr wrote: post #535

The times we live in, utterly bizarre. Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root. Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to ru…

Challenging gender roles isn't a new thing. I assure you that not being able to inherit property, or other gender-based discrimination has had people questioning gender roles for a long time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#626

Post by l3uwin »

faeriechangling wrote: post #604
reb wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The times we live in are absolutely brutal for people who struggle with diversity of belief (wherever they are on the sociopolitical spectrum). Never before has an individual had so many perspectives to contend with at once. It breaks a lot of people in different ways, although I think people who can navigate the noise without losing their sense of self are better for the experience. Still, it's impossible to deny th…

I’ve absolutely met people especially with limited language skills who get confused and frustrated by all these complicated concepts they’re expected to understand to simply not be accused of being hateful. Not to be too Orwellian, but I’ve often wondered why nobody say, talks about removing gendered pronouns altogether in formal speech instead of adding 50 new ones for instance. People seem to only talk about adding…

nonbinary people have been begging peiple to use non-gendered language.

the singular they, 'my friend', y'all, fam etc... are all wonderful substitutes for a gendered pronoun.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#627

Post by robotresearcher »

mjcohen wrote: post #619
kaesar14 wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By an absolute quantity or an absolute measure? I daresay at least in India, the toleration for homosexuality, women, and general non-conformity is quite higher than it used to be. Casteism and religious hatred still exists in great quantity but has it improved relative to 1950? Probably? Things are not perfect but you’re underrating how awful they used to be.

Are you kidding? With what Modi has done and is continuing to do, India is becoming far more repressive. It is another one of the countries I would fear to visit because of reactions to what I might say.

Until just seventy five years ago India had been ruled for a century by an emperor in London and an occupying army, exploiting caste discrimination, religious sectarianism and regional rivalries to keep Indians subjugated for the profit of a racist colonial Empire. At partition, the rival religious hacked each other to bits wholesale.

So, despite setbacks, maybe there has been real progress in what is now the worlds largest democracy.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#628

Post by vinegarden »

Kye wrote: post #544
vinegarden wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ROGD is the term given to the phenomenon of teenagers with no history of gender dysphoria suddenly announcing a transgender identity, typically after spending massive amounts of time online, and often after a friend has announced that they are trans. Who would be better placed to notice this set of circumstances than their parents?

No, it's a term invented by a deeply flawed and thoroughly discredited study. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c... >> "The term "rapid-onset gender dysphoria", coined by Littman, first appeared in a July 2016 notice that was posted on four websites, recruiting parents to respond to a research survey that Littman described as "Rapid onset gender dysphoria, social media, and peer groups".[27]…

Littman's study hasn't been discredited though. It's been robustly critiqued, as one would expect for any research that advances a novel hypothesis.

The main issue that people have with her study is that it challenges the often deeply held belief that a person's gender identity is innate; it hypothesises that there is a population of trans-identifying people who have adopted this identity via sociogenic means. By doing so, it calls into question the affirmation-only clinical approach that has been so ascendant in recent years.

Challenging people's fundamental beliefs and practices on a topic is never going to be popular amongst those who hold such beliefs. This is why her research received such an intense backlash, and why activists are so keen to claim that it's been debunked and discredited, even when it hasn't.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#629

Post by blix »

tshaddox wrote: post #597
fleddr wrote: post #535

The times we live in, utterly bizarre. Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root. Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to ru…

> one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird Except for the ones that were widely believed and accepted, of course. Or are you excluding those via a somewhat circular definition of "extreme," "unhinged," etc.?

'Extreme' and 'unhinged' only have meaning relative to a baseline of what is widely believed and accepted.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#630

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

brnt wrote: post #319
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less than 1%. That's the number of people who detransition simply because they didn't feel it was the right thing for them. Of the less than 2% of detransitioners overall, the vast majority names reasons like social pressure, transitioning being too difficult, etc. Dunno what numbers you are talking about, but the ones I know certainly underline gender dysphoria being a very real thing and not some sort of "social co…

> Less than 1%. That's the number of people who detransition simply because they didn't feel it was the right thing for them. About 1% who do so through the hospital procrdures. About a third just stops showing up for followups and hormones. According to the detransitioner, who falls into that category, and has found a small community of similar people, this is what's wrong with the statistic: it's extremely importan…

Please share where you got those numbers from, I'm sure there's a good laugh to be had about how anybody got that "one third" figure.

A minor side note: Stopping hormones does not mean someone has stopped transitioning or is detransitioning. It just means they've stopped taking hormones.

Second side note: Detransitioning doesn't mean the person isn't trans either, it just means they've stopped transitioning.

Third side note: Just stopping hormones without talking to your doctor about it is a reeeeally bad idea. I'd be surprised if the number of these "under the radar" people was even on the same level as known detransitioners.

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