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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)

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

counterpoint: no. i been in some pretty stressful environments and never reacted like that. same for most guys i know. maybe it's different where you are but i never seen it even in private like that or with close friends.

lots of men do the opposite of crying by reacting with some sort of anger/rage in whatever public outbursts (verbal or physical). I present my younger self as exhibit A to verbal stupidity and admit guilt to all charges in this manner. It wasn't until maybe 10ish years ago that I got tired of just being angry at everything. Maybe I could have gotten there sooner with professional counseling, but that wasn't the manly…

This. Patriarchy sort of collectively defines the "emotion" out of the ways that men act out. When women cry, they're being emotional, when men get angry, it's a rational response to people acting the wrong way. (Not to mention the fact that the idea of being "emotional" is itself, considered bad somehow!) When you start to notice the ways that men act out emotionally for what they are, it becomes apparent that men are easily as emotional as women (I'd argue much more so), it just manifests in ways that society has deemed manly.

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

#342

I recently discovered "systems" people via Reddit (r/SystemsCringe) will searching for systems engineering. The core belief seems to be that the individual has "multiple people" living in the same body. They've devised a whole language for talking about it as well[0]. This reminds me of the "otherkin" fad that occurred primarily on Tumblr about a decade ago[1]. It was where teenagers believed themselves to not be hum…

I think there are more charitable ways to look at this. Even if you doubt that some of these people don’t have the disorder they’ve self-diagnosed themselves with (thinking you’re a dragon is an extreme one), it’s clear that something about the situation requires professional evaluation. That, in turn, is made more difficult by clinical perceptions of MPD: many psychiatrists are openly skeptical that it’s a “real” di…

> it’s clear that something about the situation requires professional evaluation.

One of the problems is that the kids themselves are so awash in information and misinformation about this stuff, including awareness of how things are defined in the DSM-V, that they can muddy up your attempts at evaluating them.

It's kind of like if you take enough personality tests, like the MBTI, you eventually just sort of know how each question is being evaluated and you can, consciously or unconsciously, start optimizing your responses around the result that lines up with your narrative about yourself but isn't necessarily the most honest set of answers.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're a guy and play with a barbie... trans. Less horny, asexual. Setting aside, for now, the fact that these are things that people realize about themselves and not things people are diagnosed with by others... Why are you bringing them up in response to a comment about mental illness?

Because boys are allowed to play with dolls. And shouldn't think it indicates they are trans or have gender dysphoria. It's not a sign of anything. Please don't misinterpret the comment. *Edit: removed the word diagnosed as wasn't in the original comment.*

> Because boys are allowed to play with dolls. And shouldn't be diagnosed as being trans or having gender dysphoria. It's not a sign of anything.

Yep, I meant exactly this.

I mean... take the clothes away, and Action Man and (barbie's) Ken are practically the same doll.

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

#344
post #250

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It was never taboo to criticize pro-ana groups. Being lgbt isn’t a mental illness. Not medically speaking, anyway. Maybe they were considered such in the past. Go far enough back and we used bloodletting as a common treatment, our understanding generally improves with time. I have no desire to go back to an era where lgbt people were persecuted. With respect to your other point. “Children” is a broad category. Pre-pu…

> Being lgbt isn’t a mental illness. Not medically speaking, anyway. Medically defining what an "illness" is can get into a lot of squirrely philosophical questions that aren't really scientifically or objectively answerable. We basically just define a mental illness as something that significantly impairs your ability to function happily in life. If society, in general, is intolerant and hostile to you due to that o…

ADHD I have some experience with and can agree with you. I think it is mostly just a different mode of thinking that simply isn’t very compatible with sitting in a chair for hours listening to boring lectures. OCD is similar. The mental line between crippling OCD and a highly successful professional career with a reputation of being a “perfectionist” is a thin one. I’ve seen this line crossed, with tragic results…

All that said, I think awareness of mental illness and self-mis-diagnosis largely isn’t the primary problem. The successful person who became a crippling OCD shut-in was convinced OCD was a myth until it was far too late. If only they took it seriously while they still had enough functioning to follow therapy instructions, they might be in a much healthier state right now.

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

#345
post #7

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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?"

There are standard diagnostic tests to falsify whether you have ADHD, that give a binary result as to whether the patient has ADHD/ADD. It is very easy to take one of these tests and determine whether you experience the symptoms

There were rampant rumors in my HS and college of people memorizing a list of answers to get Adderall to help them study better, and this was 10+ years ago.

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

#346
post #15

For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to unt…

A tale as old as time.

So yeah, I struggle with that too. Here's the difference with it as compared to all of history: scale.

We live in a different world as it is radically connected like never before. Taleb refers to our current age as "Extremeistan" and the previous world history as "Mediocrastan". It's about power lawn distributions and this happens overnight now across vast swaths of the population. [1]

[1] https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html

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

#347

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Children literally don't have the developed cognitive capabilities to critically think, nor should they be making their own decisions every time. This is an absolutely inane suggestion. I don't know when it started happening, but why do we continue to let these companies off the hook for their absolutely terrible externalities? Banning these topics if your platform allows children, preteens, etc is absolutely an effe…

I feel like this falls on parents, once again. What is a valid use-case that a child/teenager requires a phone? I would argue that don't need unrestricted internet access too, but education has largely moved online.

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.

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

#349

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…

There's still a lot of discussion of this in the political discourse here in Norway, in fact I'd argue it's become increasingly more discussed as social media have taken over. Just recently, a law was passed requiring advertising that is edited to significantly change the physical appearance of people, to marked as such. One of the most common practices is editing to make a model's boobs look bigger, or her figure more hourglass-like. Removing skin blemishes is another. Details in the requirements are being ironed out right now, but I think this is a good example of a fairly simple regulation that should help improve things. It will become too expensive to try to do this kind of editing within the limits due to red tape, and the practice should go away almost completely in time. There's a lot more to be done in the ad, modelling, cosmetics, fashion, entertainment and tech(social media) industries to combat this though. But this kind of photoshopping practice is very harmful because it serves to amplify all of the other harmful signalling.

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

#350

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.

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If women yelled and threw their weight around in the office as much as men they’d be fired immediately. Being emotional isn’t a woman thing, we just react differently to string emotion from men than women.
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