Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

freyaindia.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–537 of 537 posts

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#531

Post by ryuker16 »

hresvelgr wrote: post #53

The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.

Your leaving out that people with mental and even physical issues often were outcasts for revealing them to their family, friends, and community in the past.

Some of that supoort wasnt present.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#532

Post by LoveMortuus »

parpfish wrote: post #63

Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses. But there are a few things we can learn from this: - if you give people th…

I always saw these labels as limitations, like if you say that you're a vegan, you can't eat all the other stuff.

It was because of that point of view that I always avoided labeling myself or my behaviour, because (in my mind) I did not want to be limited.

But I guess I'm the odd one.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#533

Post by mapt »

Aurornis wrote: post #101
parpfish wrote: post #63

Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses. But there are a few things we can learn from this: - if you give people th…

> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it. This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok. There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Man…

There is a pervasive feeling in our complex postindustrial society that one thing we are lacking is a little fucking slack, the sort of thing that might be unavoidably extended on a very regular basis in the primeval human tribe/clan. We get it where we can.

Turning employment and education into an up-or-out pressure cooker that thinks nothing of, for example, firing the bottom performing 10% of people every year, or failing a student who's fifteen minutes late to a final exam, is not what we are built, cognitively/socially/culturally, to tolerate. These people are taking a norm that we DO make a formal attempt to force tolerance on, disability, and trying to extend it to get the system to treat them more like a human being and less like a competitor.

Let's take a more consensus trend: ADHD.

ADHD barely existed as a recognized social phenomenon until the 1990's.

> I didn’t realize how much of a psychiatrist’s time was spent gatekeeping Adderall.

> The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?

> (it’s because his colleagues are all on Adderall already – but telling him that will just make things worse)

> He goes on to give me his story about how he’s at risk of getting fired from his Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers position, and at this rate he’s never going to get the promotion to Vice President Of Staring At Giant Spreadsheets, so do I think I can give him some Adderall to help him through?

> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

https://youtu.be/xErFsi5AdQ0?si=x0OWNLy07fUr3Cry&t=702

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#534

Post by munificent »

cmckn wrote: post #57
munificent wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Seattle and have two teenaged kids. Every sentence of this article resonated very strongly with me and accurately describes much of the culture surrounding me and my family.

Seattle is brimming with “new money”. I think the article is describing a sort of quasi intellectualism that is common in circles of people who are more educated than some, and paid more than most.

I don't think money has much to do with it. My kids' social circle covers a wide socioeconomic range and this heavy use of psychology is pervasive across it.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#535

Post by Paracompact »

spicyusername wrote: post #514
Paracompact wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, though possibly for different reasons. Those support systems may or may not be weaker than they were in generations past, but they are certainly more likely to say "I can't help you, go get professional help" than in the past. In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression…

One thing that makes me nervous about a culture that is so quick to forward people to therapists, is that therapy is not some ironclad medical practice, like you might imagine heart surgery to be. Therapy, and psychology in general, is one of the weakest areas of science, still based mostly on mysticism, large personalities, and weak statistical correlations. And that is assuming you even can get a "good" therapist,…

Nature abhors a vacuum, and humans abhor problems without definitive solutions. I don't think there has ever been a moment in human history where a civilization, when confronted with a great societal ill, has sincerely admitted that they have no idea how to solve it. Before science, natural disasters were the punishment inflicted by displeased gods on humanity, and through piousness or sacrifice they could be averted, or through divination predicted. Incurable diseases, especially psychiatric, were explained karmically or by folk wisdom.

But while we might have science today, we still have disasters and diseases. Instead of shamans and religious leaders, now politicians and activists promise easy solutions that are within arm's grasp, "if only the people currently in charge weren't so corrupt and incompetent." But change is incremental at best, and where it concerns depression specifically, it appears only to be getting worse.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#536

Post by wirelessRice »

I think the author makes a good point. The more you label things, the more things become a race to the bottom so to speak with the lowest common denominator

If you go about life labelling yourself as ADHD or OCD, you are disavowing other richer parts of you and just saying you are this person with this symptom, and that denotion starts reinforcing that belief system when people associate you with that label

I think its best we didnt label things and just appreciate the beauty of things as they are - the good the bad the ugly

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#537

Post by Shypangz »

satisfice wrote: post #28
stanislavb wrote: post #17

I'd say - everybody has a personality which is not who they really are. The personality is "simply" the response and defence mehanism of the ego of trauma inflicted during the early formatory years during childhood. It's really interesting what an automatic-machine a person is. Unaware that he is acting machanically in most cases. Source - the Enneagram and Gurdjieff.

We all have a personality and it IS who we “really are.” We also all have the ability to construct personalities that misrepresent our inner lives. Doing so creates a certain kind of stress and relieves other kinds of stresses. Over the course of our childhoods we experiment with personality, and discover the elements that allow us to have stable and satisfying dealings with the world. We may cultivate several differ…

[dead]
Post reply on HN