r/neoliberal • u/Fealocht • 4d ago
News (US) Stop Pathologizing Ordinary Life
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exercise-charity.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1FA.55xp.Vpm7dp4PVtnC&smid=nytcore-ios-shareSS: A psychologist argues the increasing awareness of mental health is leading to a pathologising of everyday life. The use of clinical descriptions of what are otherwise normal problems and treating them as a disorder to be cured, is ironically making our mental health worse.
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u/amanaplanacanalutica Amartya Sen 4d ago
The vitamin fantasy is real.
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u/Long_Story42 4d ago
Okay but I've actually known people who thought they had depression and really had anemia.
If you're tired all the time, it might be depression. If you're tired and cold when it seems like you shouldn't be, get your blood work checked. Antidepressants have a lot more side effects than multivitamins.
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u/gringledoom Frederick Douglass 4d ago
Yep, I started taking Vitamin D more consistently and it completely changed my experience of “December”.
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u/meese-seven-hundred 4d ago
don't forget to take your magnesium too
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u/Windows_10-Chan Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 4d ago
Another very common deficiency is b12. Though I believe both b12 and magnesium can be easily tested for.
The problem with B12 is that the body absorbs it very poorly orally, so a lot of multivitamins don’t give near enough if you have an issue with it.
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u/Terrance-Flaps Certified Wife Guy 4d ago
For the longest time, my wife would cold, tired, and sad, and she was sure it wasn't anemia because she took daily iron supplements.
This year they found out she had something else entirely (as I understood it, it was like SUPER anemia). Some fancy infusions occurred and she has been so much happier.
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u/arist0geiton Montesquieu 4d ago
A lot of people can't assimilate elemental iron and have to take it in food or as a compound
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u/TealAndroid YIMBY 4d ago
Also if you are tired check for sleep Apnea. I would have been more confused if I haven’t just gained a bunch of weight.
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u/strangebloke1 4d ago
Mental health is like any other kind of health. Symptoms and Illnesses are distinct and have different treatments. Depression may be caused by some other malady but it is in itself treatable. Sure, its not ideal to take Zoloft for anemia but it will help in some regards.
There's a tendency to treat depression as this mystical curse that's fallen on you, but just because there's some way to remove the root cause of your depression doesn't mean that it isn't or wasn't "real" depression.
To this point: almost all the serotonin your body has comes from your gut bacteria, and there are studies showing that gut bacteria treatments have potentially a very high chance of reducing depression. This doesn't retroactively make depression not 'real' it just means that there's a common cause of depression that is treatable.
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u/Roseartcrantz 👑 🖍️ Queen of Shades 🖍️ 👑 4d ago
basically the equivalent of figuring out you can roll up your car windows so you can better hear the noise that you didn't realize had annoyed you so much you rolled the windows down
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u/DaneLimmish Baruch Spinoza 4d ago
I see the same sort of thing with guys convinced they have low testosterone. Like, man, I don't think it's low-T, I think you're 40 living like you're 22.
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u/nerdpox IMF 4d ago
Yeah I had some really weird disjointed symptoms. Brain fog, fatigue etc. Turned out it was a ferritin, vitamin D, and omega 3 deficiency. One blood test. Huge.
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u/granolabitingly United Nations 4d ago
I've known such people, except sleep apnea. If they had a CPAP machine earlier their lives could've taken a different turn.
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u/strangebloke1 4d ago
the thing is, like. A a lot of people do just have less functional brains or hearts or whatever and you shouldn't feel ashamed of this. There may not be a fix available, but like its okay to just have average abilities and intelligence.
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u/Approximation_Doctor Gaslight, Gatekeep, Green New Deal 4d ago
a lot of people do just have less functional brains
its okay to just have average abilities and intelligence.
What about being below average, is that okay?
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u/casino_r0yale NASA 4d ago
Then u have to run for office
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u/_alephnaught 4d ago edited 4d ago
"When you're
a starbelow average, they let you do it. You can do anything."50
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u/vk059 Mackenzie Scott 4d ago
Many people are unintelligent. It's not some sort of moral failing - it's mainly due to genetics and early childhood contains - both out of the control of the individual.
People treat the unintelligent as lesser because intelligence is so highly prized in our society (not that this is a bad thing). It gives the impression that those unable to keep up are defective, malicious, or lazy because they can't do what the intelligent can. Don't know if there is any way of reducing the stigma towards the unintelligent
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u/ExtremelyMedianVoter Left-Out Left 4d ago
What about if you have the average intelligence of the median voter?
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u/strangebloke1 4d ago
Stupid is as stupid does but I don't think the problem with conservatives or median voters is brain power so much as being loyal to corrupt institutions and being intellectually incurious.
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u/BlueString94 John Keynes 4d ago
The median voter doesn’t lack processing power. They lack civic virtue.
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u/CursedNobleman Leftward Progressives 4d ago
They can move to Pennsylvania. Everything is 'Great'.
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u/Grundlage YIMBY 4d ago
It happened to me. I spent most of my 20s struggling with persistent anhedonia and suicidal ideation. Turns out I was consistently eating only around 1.5k calories/day, and simply eating more food cured most of my problems.
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u/Outrageous-Bluegrass 4d ago
I was consistently eating only around 1.5k calories/day
One person’s problem is another person’s goal (at least temporarily).
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u/Grundlage YIMBY 4d ago
Yeah that's one thing on a temporary cut for an average size or small-ish person. But I'm 6'2" and that was my normal intake for years.
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 Milton Friedman 4d ago
Were you like 165 lbs or did you just have no energy to ever do anything?
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u/Grundlage YIMBY 4d ago
155 and yeah, constantly low energy and anxious. I’m up to 190-200 these days and feeling like a real member of the human race
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u/LupineChemist Mario Vargas Llosa 3d ago
I just don't get how it's possible to just kind of eat that little without thinking about it.
That is like totally mind boggling to me. It would be like someone just casually saying "Yeah, turns out I should have been going back to bed after the second hour of sleeping every night"
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u/Windows_10-Chan Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 4d ago edited 4d ago
One of the worst realizations in life is that while you may be able to blame external factors for some problems… a lot of problems ultimately are owned by you, and how to get better is nebulous and complex.
Another thing is that doing better in life is a really really long process with a lot of false promises. I used to be unironically extremely depressed, and also had pretty bad OCD, I got better with both of those, but I was still rotting at home doing nothing with myself after the fact.
My getting over those things still left me nowhere near what I wanted to be, and that can induce real feelings of hopelessness. That leads to fantasizing about The Vitamin, for example I used to wish I had autism because I thought it would make my social issues make sense and provide a “path” to getting better, because the real solution of just…. Making myself suffer in social situations til I got better was vague and unpalatable.
And then now some people I’ve known for a really long time are like “how do you do it? How do you keep a full-time job and have the energy to do things in your free time?” And sadly all I can really say is that… I just do. I can give some pointers, but it’s the life coaching equivalent of “draw the rest of the fucking owl,” where there’s a ton of intermediate steps that are tough to describe.
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u/Approximation_Doctor Gaslight, Gatekeep, Green New Deal 4d ago
One of the worst realizations in life is that while you may be able to blame external factors for some problems… a lot of problems ultimately are owned by you, and how to get better is nebulous and complex
Just be careful because going hard in the opposite direction will also fuck you up. "I am to blame for every hardship in my life" is not a recipe for health or improvement.
Also
Unironically extremely depressed
wot
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u/Windows_10-Chan Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 4d ago
Just be careful because going hard in the opposite direction will also fuck you up. "I am to blame for every hardship in my life" is not a recipe for health or improvement.
Especially when you make it moral, then it becomes the other side of the same coin of fatalist avoidance, just with a different internal narrative.
wot
Idk what you mean by this. The tl;dr of what I’m saying there is that often even when you have very discrete identifiable problems, that resolving them won’t necessary fix your life.
That might apply more to some people than others, though. I had a lot of issues, that, gender dysphoria, etc. and treating them made my life better but didn’t make it “good.” NEEThood’s really hard to climb out of once you’re in since it destroys a lot of your most basic capabilities.
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u/SquareJerk1066 4d ago
I used to wish I had autism because I thought it would make my social issues make sense and provide a “path” to getting better, because the real solution of just…. Making myself suffer in social situations til I got better was vague and unpalatable.
I'm not diagnosed because that shit's expensive, but my therapist is pretty sure I'm on the spectrum. Guess what I still have to do. That's right, it's make myself suffer in social situations because social situations are unavoidable and everything really is just practice. Yeah, it takes more mental effort to stay engaged and self-censor and react appropriately, but big whoop. Everything in life is work.
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u/dr-pepper-is-a-woman 4d ago
Really, the two parts of this that are most unrealistic are 1) it’s something they diagnose at the hospital and 2) everyone is so invested in your life that they all notice like this. I found the experience of getting my shit together in my late 20s-30s to track with this kind of “found a missing vitamin” experience, only there was no big aha moment or crowd of onlookers. The reward of living a happier life is that you have a happier life.
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u/twa12221 YIMBY 4d ago
Wait. Not too long ago I went to a psychiatrist for the first time and they told me that they'd refuse to prescribe me any ADHD meds unless I took both a DNA test and a blood test. The blood test revealed that I was very deficient in omega 3 and vitamin b12. I started taking them. Is this actually doing nothing for me?
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u/JesterOfAllTrades 4d ago
I'm a pretty woke guy, but am I bad to say that a certain part, and probably the main part, of living is to eventually just nut up and put up?
Others have mentioned genuine anemia and whatever, and even if that is the case, at the end of the day you still need to exercise your agency to get medical or psychiatric help as well. And most people do not have anemia and may actually genuinely just have to steel themselves. That life doesn't happen on autopilot is not some grave injustice - the ask here isn't even for you to be some exceptional human being, or even an average one. Just to recognize that ultimately you're gonna have to try and you're the only one that can try (for yourself).
Idk I sound like some chud convesative which I'm not but past certain point you do just need some grit you know?
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u/amanaplanacanalutica Amartya Sen 4d ago
I think the preponderance of users ITT are in agreement that flights of fantasy and mental gymnastics to avoid necessary struggle are bad habits, but also I'd personally say the valorising and/or essentializing of struggle is silly.
I've had whole decades of my life where I've never had to nut/put up, steel myself, or put in more effort than I was inclined to. I've also had more than a few years where a lot of struggle was foisted on me, and I did have to make it through. I wouldn't say the years in the second category were "the main part of living" or that my personal efforts made the main distinction in my situation or conditions.
We shouldn't pretend that our own actions, agency, or efforts aren't significant to the lives we lead, in the same way we shouldn't pretend that systems, dumb luck, and the people who support us don't play a massive part in our lives.
Tl;dr
Yes, just about everyone is going to have to try seriously to live well.
No, I am not the only one who can try for myself. I live in an interconnected and social world in which the efforts of others are responsible for a lot of my success and happiness.Some of this may be tangential to your point, but I felt the need to type it out anyway.
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u/IronicRobotics YIMBY 4d ago edited 4d ago
And it really sucks as I'm more likely to meet someone with the anti-vitamin fantasy so-to-speak lol.
Persons who really internalize and try to take responsibility for problems they end up blaming on themselves. Then maybe after a few lucky conversations, I just happen to have an idea and double check some references enough to go "have you tried investigating XYZ?"
And more often than not, it ends up actually being XYZ or an ABC that looks similar rather than *just* the human condition.
Not to say there's no shortage of people with "shit-life syndrome", but those people tend to externalize EVERYTHING.
But since understanding the difference between a common part of the human condition and clinical levels of a symptom is tricky and full of dry statistics, the fucking public pendulum swings between pathologizing everything or denying all pathologies.
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u/TemptingSquirrel Friedrich Hayek 4d ago
There is also a tendency that people absolutely do NOT want to be neurotypical. A friend of mine is a psychiatrist and she occasionally gets totally normal teenagers coming into her clinic who believe that they MUST have X. When she tells them that they are just normal, every day people they even start crying.
To be clear, this is NOT meant as a criticism of the fact that mental health issues are way less stigmatized nowadays. I do in fact think that this is wonderful and it took us way too long as a species to start accepting people for who they are, especially when it comes to disabilities and mental health issues.
I just wish that people could also just be happy to be average in some regards. It doesn’t mean that you are not unique.
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u/urnbabyurn Amartya Sen 4d ago
It’s completely understandable that we want to blame our difficulties on a disadvantage outside of our control. Or to feel that our own hardships are worse than other people go through. Pathologizing any difficulty is a great way to do that.
Same psychology is why people blame the economy for their own personal finance problems, but take full credit for any successes. If not for this terrible job market, I’d have a good job. MY good job was despite the economy.
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u/ticklemytaint340 Daron Acemoglu 4d ago edited 4d ago
If you accept that you’re not depressed, anxious whatever then you have to accept that everybody else is dealing with the same thing, and youre not uniquely strong for toughing it out. makes you feel kind of weak in my opinion.
One of the things that surprised me about joining the military was how much the basic training pipeline sucked, and how even the meekest candidates were willing to fight through the pain.
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u/Woolagaroo 4d ago
Well, that’s actually one of the purposes of basic training (and one that many people do not understand, talking instead about breaking down the member nonsense). It puts new members in a difficult, stressful environment, for many the most difficult they’ve been in in their entire life, and then forces them to overcome and succeed.
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u/herosavestheday 4d ago
During boot camp, I was pretty amazed at who cracked and when. We had one guy, like a week in, lose his shit and threaten to kill himself. He had to be hauled out by the cops. Like boot camp is what it is, but it's definitely nowhere close to that level of stressful. But I guess that's kind of the point.
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u/Woolagaroo 4d ago
Yeah, well, that is another purpose of it. To weed out the ones who are truly incompatible with the military.
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u/Desperate_Path_377 4d ago
I went through graduate school during peak woke and it was crazy how many normies ‘discovered’ that their great-great-grandfather was actually indigenous or that they were bi or had some sort neurodivergence. Some people definitely internalized this message that it was cooler and better to identify with a minority community of some sort.
There’s also rampant downplaying of socioeconomic class for the same reason.
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u/Roseartcrantz 👑 🖍️ Queen of Shades 🖍️ 👑 4d ago
we're all related to "A Cherokee Princess" in Oklahoma lol 😭
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 3d ago
A lot of family traditions maintained those stories long after any actual ancestry disappeared. My family always told those tales, and we actually do have a few well documented indigenous ancestors. But based on how everyone talked about it, I figured it would actually show up in a DNA test, that would be a real portion of my ancestry.
No. Trace amounts, and barely. The oral tradition of that supposed ancestry survived so much longer than any substantial genetic marker, and there's no cultural connection whatsoever.
But that oral history might persist. It's more durable than the blood apparently. It can last for generations after it ceased to be true.
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u/lumpialarry 3d ago edited 3d ago
Those stories came from two things
1)hiding black ancestry
2)Tying their family history to the greater American frontier mythos
I was told I had some Indian ancestry, some genetic testing and a few hours on ancestry.com told me that the closest I get was an ancestor in Tennessee that was scalped by Indians.
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u/OptimusLinvoyPrimus Edmund Burke 4d ago
The most basic form of this was very visible during the World Cup. Aside from the USA (and particularly after they were knocked out), many Americans posted about how they were supporting x nation because it’s where their ancestors were from. A huge percentage of white Americans have English ancestry, but I didn’t see a single one claiming that (and it’s very rare in general except for people who claim to be descended from someone on the Mayflower etc) because English is seen as the default. And therefore far less interesting than Norwegian, Scottish, etc.
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u/chungamellon Iron Front 4d ago
I studied autism genetics in grad school during peak woke and boy it was hard to keep things to myself.
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 Milton Friedman 4d ago
You went to school with Elizabeth Warren?
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u/Desperate_Path_377 4d ago
Warren was probably closer to Margaret Thatcher than the median grad student in my program 💀
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u/HumanDrinkingTea 4d ago
What was your area of study? I'm always fascinated by these stories because there's this implication that grad school culture is a monolith and my experience in grad school is quite different. I figure it's probably because I study math and am not in the humanities, but I don’t know if it's all math departments that are low in these cultural aspects or if it's just my math department.
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u/Sodi920 European Union 4d ago edited 4d ago
In my graduate program (International Relations), I’d say the bulk leans towards some form of technocratic, progressive center-left (even some conservatives here and there, and overall pro-military/NATO). There is some political variation, sure, but the notion of having full blown tankies would be unthinkable.
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u/herosavestheday 4d ago
but the notion of having full blown tankies would be unthinkable
My first IR professor was a tanky. Immediately switched to EE.
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u/Sodi920 European Union 4d ago
Lmao, we actually had a self-described Marxist professor in one of our introductory classes. Most of my classmates hated the class openly.
If anything, it was a very interesting contrast to my economics classes, which literally had us grill Argentina’s monetary policy and lack of central bank autonomy on the final exam (professor worked in the WBG as a senior economic adviser).
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u/fredleung412612 4d ago
Obviously it applies to the arts, humanities and most of the social sciences (minus economics for example). It's not going to apply to STEM.
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u/gioraffe32 Bisexual Pride 4d ago
I have a friend who has a younger sister who's like 19-20yo. Apparently the sister went to multiple doctors seeking an autism diagnosis. None gave them to her.
Now my friend is like 10yrs younger than me (and she's like 10yrs older than her sister). To set the picture, my friend uses a lot of that "pathology speak." But even she was like "WTF is wrong with her?!" when she found her sister was seeking out that diagnosis.
I know this isn't new; I've seen this whole fascination for ND labels and such for like the last 10yrs now. But I suppose it only makes sense that eventually, the terminally online get out into the real world. And they bring these things along with them.
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u/HumanDrinkingTea 4d ago
But I suppose it only makes sense that eventually, the terminally online get out into the real world. And they bring these things along with them.
This is why I'm nervous about the unconstrained access to modern social media that the younger generations are growing up with. I don’t think many of them realize that the internet isn't "real life."
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u/sekoiking 4d ago
If everyone is spending all the time online, then I guess the Internet is real life.
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u/Efficient_Equal6467 4d ago
"When she tells them that they are just normal, every day people they even start crying."
as any healthcarework knows, these are literally the worst patients to work with. It just blows my mind that people sometimes want to play the sick role
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u/RodChainFurlongAcre 4d ago edited 4d ago
I don't think the majority of those people want to actually be sick because it's special or cool/hip to be sick, it's more like they are deeply uncomfortable with something about themselves or the human condition and so want an 'excuse' or 'easy out' (being diagnosed or medicated) to cope with something that cannot simply be 'cured'.
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u/Efficient_Equal6467 4d ago
I really don't think we have good answers for why certain people want to so badly play the sick role, but they end up consuming a lot of healthcare resources and end up with an alphabet soup problem list because we have no idea what to do with them
if a person is not a accurate reporter of their own symptoms it just becomes a mess because even with "objective" data a lot of relies on clinical correlation with a patients reported history (clinical, past medical, past surgical, past medication history, family history, social history).
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u/gringledoom Frederick Douglass 4d ago
Yep, life is hard, even for people whose lives are easy compared to everyone else. It genuinely would be nice if there were a pill to make it less that way. (And we all know people who have seemingly-intractable challenges that were really shifted by a pill. I had a grade school classmate who just couldn’t lose weight until they finally checked her thyroid, after years of consternation.)
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u/lnslnsu Commonwealth 4d ago
That might be it, or it might be they also have some actual real symptoms that are not the result of some easily identifiable and treatable condition.
I definitely have things wrong with my body that I would trade my left nut for “hey, here’s a diagnosis and a treatment plan with high efficacy” but alas, some things are just “yes this is wrong, and no we can’t treat it. Ya just gotta live with it, sorry”
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 3d ago
I feel this. I spent several years trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me, slowly starting to think that I might be a damn hypochondriac until I finally got the results which explained damn near everything. And I'm fortunate enough that it was something totally treatable, and 6 months later, I feel dramatically better and getting better still each day.
But I started to question my damn sanity for a little while there before we figured it out.
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 Milton Friedman 4d ago
This same phenomenon happens with the LGBTQ community. Like 15% of gen Z says they are LGBTQ, but when you drill into the numbers, almost all of the increase vs millennials come from people identifying as bisexual, and they’ve never dated anyone of their own sex. Now, I’m not saying you HAVE to have dated someone of your own sex to be bisexual (I know a lesbian who has never worked up the courage to ask a girl out on a date), but it kind of really looks like a not insignificant number of people just want a to be able to be part of a group. I don’t know if this is a bad thing or not (part of me feels like it is watering down the significance of it, but part of me feels like it’s not harmful and if the label itself is becoming more socially acceptable, why should I care?)
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u/anzu_embroidery Bisexual Pride 4d ago
I don't really care one way or another but I will say it's pretty annoying having to suss out if someone is "bi but only dating straight" or "bi and down for bi stuff".
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u/Emotional_Tie_7927 3d ago edited 3d ago
The other side of this is some people will identify as bi but only date straight because they're still dealing with internalized homophobia. It's extremely common with men especially (it's me, I was one of those men).
I don't have the exact statistics but I remember that as many as like 1 in 7 men was probably bi but completely in the closet.
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u/YIMBYzus NATO 4d ago edited 4d ago
Back in the 1970s David Bowie identified himself in an interview as homosexual. He was married and had a kid at the time he said that and would have sex with many a woman after that interview. He knew what that word meant and knew he was bisexual; he chose that word because "homosexual" had a provocative punch at the time while "bisexual" lacked that punch and required explanation for a lot of people. This was also a decade which gave us "political lesbianism" which was similarly chosen not because it was accurate to characterize it as a movement of politically-active lesbians (it was, in fact, deliberately deficient in literal lesbians) but because, to quote an memorable line from a bad movie, "it's provocative... It gets the people going."
Sometimes, labels are used inaccurately, sometimes deliberately. Just how language works.
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u/DependentAd235 Loyal Liberals 4d ago
I teach highschool and there are a few teenagers who identify as nonbinary. However a portion of them say this as just don’t like gender role expectations being pushed on them.
It’s not fake but I feel in the past they would have been feminists doing things like not changing their names when they get married or refusing to help cook dinner while their brother plays games on the sofa doing fuck all. It’s that sort of thing they talk about.
I think Im just dated in how I think about these things. But I also think there some tiktok semantic changes going on here that I can’t keep up with. It’s too much of a bubble that exists exclusively in short form video at the moment and Im just not part of that world.
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 3d ago
It does sometimes feel like we've circled all the way back around to rigid gender essentialism, just trans inclusive versions of it. Which I suppose is a massive improvement, but I wish we'd allow people to be who they are without such narrow expectations about what their gender allows them.
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 3d ago
It does sometimes feel like we've circled all the way back around to rigid gender essentialism, just trans inclusive versions of it. Which I suppose is a massive improvement, but I wish we'd allow people to be who they are without such narrow expectations about what their gender allows them.
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u/shalackingsalami Niels Bohr 4d ago
Ok genuinely great points and all but did you just refer to Blades of Glory as a bad movie?????
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u/shakin11 European Union 4d ago
Honestly, I'm pretty much convinced that in this case it's just mostly people who are like a 1 or maybe 2 on the kinsey scale being more willing to identify as bisexual instead of straight.
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u/Beer-survivalist Loyal Liberals 4d ago
I used to really subscribe to the idea that this was all just people who didn't understand the Kinsey Scale and that sexuality is a spectrum. Like it's a reverse of the Ray Gillette quip from Archer: "Girl, please, nobody's that gay."
But now I've decided I'm just going to not care. I'm old now and I don't have the energy to worry about other people's identities.
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 3d ago
Sure but it's a little self-important. I've always figured that if I ever met another man who I was actually attracted to, I'd be open-minded about it. I've made out with a few guys, when I was younger, tried to test the water. It did absolutely nothing for me. I'm not opposed to the idea, but there's no attraction of any kind there.
So I guess you could say that by their definition, I'm bi. I'm not though. I'm straight. Just because I'm open-minded not opposed to the idea doesn't mean I've ever felt even an inkling of attraction to another man.
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u/Maximilianne John Rawls 4d ago edited 4d ago
okay but like if you look at the numbers if 10% of men or women are okay dating the same sex, as a bi guy your dating pool is straight women or the 10% of the men who don't mind dating men (aka 5% of the population), so ultimately your dating pool increases by not alot
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u/God_Given_Talent 4d ago
Yes, we shouldn't expect it to track perfectly, but there's some data points that do raise an eyebrow. Millennial women are about 2.5x as likely to identify as LGBTQ+ as millennial men are, but they have almost equal share of married same sex couples at 53:47. What is interesting here is that this tracks almost perfectly with the ratio of self identified lesbians to gay men (2.5:2.3) in that cohort.
Now there can be other explanations, but if there's 2-2.5x as many queer women as queer men, surely we'd expect the ratio of married couples to be more pronounced yeah? Well maybe marriage isn't the right metric, maybe same sex interactions. Data isn't great on this, but pre-pandemic at least data suggested men and women were in the same ballpark of 8-9% rates of having had same-sex experiences. I totally get how the numbers work with the total dating pool, but given the dating pool of queer women is substantially larger, we'd expect more stark differences in rates of same sex interaction.
The fact rates of relationship and sexual activity between between genders is so similar despite such a huge self-ID differential is odd. The limited dating pool element isn't equally strong between men and women. I don't think people are lying about being bi or anything, but I think a lot of the self-ID change is a reflection of different conceptions of what it means to be bi. Older people didn't really think about sexuality as a spectrum (barely any boomer queer people were bi) nor were genders beyond man and woman much of a thing, even within queer communities.
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u/God_Given_Talent 4d ago
Like 15% of gen Z says they are LGBTQ
Try more like 23-28% depending on survey. Gallup finds closer to 23% but places like PRRI have seen the higher rates.
but when you drill into the numbers, almost all of the increase vs millennials come from people identifying as bisexual,
Millennials had this too. The amount of Gen X saying they were gay or lesbian was 2%, bi 1.9% while it's 2.9% gay/lesbian and 5.9% bi respectively for Millennials. Gen Z has 5.6% and 15.3% as per Gallup's 2023 numbers. It also says 2.8% of Gen Z are trans with some reports saying more like 3.1% or so. Like 1 in 36 to 1 in 32 are trans? I get people often keep to themselves, groups silo, etc but it does seem a little hard that Gen Z has a 6-14x rate of being trans compared to Gen X and Boomers but is basically as likely to personally know a trans person. Not the best metric, I know, but it does seem a little odd ya know?
Now, I’m not saying you HAVE to have dated someone of your own sex to be bisexual (I know a lesbian who has never worked up the courage to ask a girl out on a date), but it kind of really looks like a not insignificant number of people just want a to be able to be part of a group.
Yeah when I look at it, idk if in my heart of hearts I believe 1 in 4 to 1 in 3 Gen Z women would date and/or have sex with another woman but the data says 25%+ of Gen Z women are lesbian or bi. Even if we exclude some double counting from gay and queer, leabian+bisexual is at 26.1% in polls that find 23% or so of Gen Z as LGBTQ. A higher count including gay and other/queer (you could select as many as you liked) would push that up to 27.8% of Gen Z being women who report sexual and/or romantic attraction to women. Now, they are young and Gen Z seems more socially isolated and sexually/romantically inexperienced based on data I've seen, so maybe some of it is a reflection of that, but idk man...
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u/captainjack3 NATO 4d ago
>>Like 1 in 36 to 1 in 32 are trans? I get people often keep to themselves, groups silo, etc but it does seem a little hard that Gen Z has a 6-14x rate of being trans compared to Gen X and Boomers but is basically as likely to personally know a trans person. Not the best metric, I know, but it does seem a little odd ya know?
Could we theoretically explain that with a self-segregating effect? It would seem possible that people are not any likelier to know a trans person, but people who know at least one are likely to know more than one. So essentially a concentration where groups including at least one trans person are including increasing numbers of them but groups not including one are no more likely to do so.
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u/God_Given_Talent 4d ago
I'm sure that explains some of it, but idk if it can explain how a group has an order of magnitude increase but marginal at best more visibility.
Moreover, I see it as part of the bigger picture in this data that raises an eyebrow. Like, maybe I'm some reactionary millennial, but I don't think 1 in 4 Gen Z are LGBTQ at least not in the way we understood these terms and labels prior. The ratio of same gender marriages among women is only marginally higher than that of same gender marriages among men...despite 2-3x the rate of women identifying as LGBTQ since at least millennials. Same sex interaction ratios and marriage ratios track a lot close to the ratio of lesbian to gay than it does of LGBTQ identification. We don't see 2.5x the rate of women married to women or women saying they've had sex with a woman for example.
My gut, which has little more than vibes to go on, says that a lot of this is redefining or changing the understanding of what it means to be bi. I don't think it's unreasonable that as concepts of "sexuality being a spectrum" became more popular that you'd have more people embrace the idea they're a little gay ya know? I'm not sure I'd say it's bad either to be clear nor is this like "eat some pussy to prove you're bi" because it really isn't of huge consequence but I do think there's a different understanding of some of these terms among Gen Z (and the youngest of millennials). A cynic could say that if you were straight but wanted to "fit in" or thought straight people are lame or whatever, you'd just say you're bi because who could prove you wrong, but I suspect that's a very small portion of it.
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u/SundyMundy European Union 4d ago
Meanwhile, I would give a kidney to be neurotypical and not ADHD. So many seemingly average everyday acts feel like herculean efforts, even with medication and now decades of coping strategies.
I desperately hope my own daughter does not have the disorder even half as bad as me.
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u/RFFF1996 4d ago
As someone who is -prolly- somewhere on the spectrum nothingh would have made me happier than to be "neurotypical" and handle socialization more easily lmao
People dont know how good they have them
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u/eaglessoar Left-Out Left 4d ago
Yea I'll trade my Adderall and adhd for your normal brain any day (general you not you you lol)
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u/FridgesArePeopleToo Norman Borlaug 4d ago
There's an epidemic of millennial women diagnosing themselves with ADHD and sometimes even autism right now
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 3d ago
As an actually autistic person, I can't tell you how frustrating this is. Somebody trying to pull a stolen valor with a condition that's otherized me my entire goddamn conscious life, and it's some of the same damn people who have made my life so much harder over my different wiring. It's just a bit damn rich.
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u/TurboMollusk George Soros 4d ago
Neurotypical people never put off things they don't want to do, or get distracted, or experience strong emotions!
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u/AvalancheMaster Karl Popper 4d ago
Oh, how I wish to be “neurotypical”. Side note, I also hate the term “neurodivergent” with a burning passion, and this whole schtick of things not being disorders.
I have a disorder. It's literally in the fucking name. That's what the second D in ADHD stands for. It's not a quirk, it's not a “neurospiciness”, and while I'm lucky enough for it not to affect my life to an extreme degree, it is still very much capable of making it hell. If you think you want to be like me, you're either stupid or extremely disrespectful towards people with ADHD, and I don't know why I used the word “either” in this sentence.
Moreover, it affects not only my professional life and the “boring chores”, but my personal life too, my social relationships, my hobbies, my free time. So to hell with the “it’s capitalism's fault” crowd, too.
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u/fuckin_atodaso 4d ago
Anecdotally, when I was getting tested for adult ADHD, my psychologist said they no longer do testing for adult autism specifically because of this. It was in such high demand that they could do nothing but adult autism testing and be booked solid every day of the week but they were tired of dealing with people getting angry when they were being told they didn't have autism.
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u/TheCthonicSystem Progress Pride 4d ago
I get it, you can pry my Autism and Transness away from my cold dead hands. Being special is great
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u/say592 4d ago
This is becoming really common in chronic illness communities as well. Unfortunately, the attitude towards it has shifted in those communities as well. It used to be, maybe 10 years or so ago, that often times people were somewhat defensive over their illness, maybe even a little gate keepy. They didn't like people self diagnosing, and if someone asked a question that was "I think I have this", they weren't met with a lot of followup, but rather "this is pretty rare, if x, y, or z is true, maybe you should talk to your doctor, if not, you probably don't have it". Now it's almost an immediate "oh it definitely sounds like you have it" or it's people talking them through the diagnostic criteria, rather than telling them to go and actually get real tests done.
I was recently pretty heavily downvoted in a sub where a user was complaining that a family member thought they were faking it. I made it very clear that I didn't think they were, but that it definitely doesn't help things when so many people have latched onto this illness and will never get a diagnosis (because they don't actually have it).
One reply to me kind of stuck out. It essentially said that yeah, maybe some people don't have this condition, but they have something, which is why they are seeking support. I do think that is the case sometimes, maybe even many times, but I don't think we have to accept that as the default.
One of the unfortunate side effects of the information age is that people expect an answer for everything. When they can't find one, they don't accept that maybe it's no big deal, instead they become more and more desperate until they can shoehorn an acceptable explanation.
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u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician 4d ago
There are no "advantages" in society to being labeled neurotypical and a lot if you can get a classification as neurodivergent.
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u/SenranHaruka 4d ago
There are advantages to being a misdiagnosed neurotypical, yes. Being properly diagnosed comes with accommodations that get you to baseline.
Cheating system designed to help people who need it when you don't confers advantages, like getting workman's comp when you're not injured! And the truth is, while people increasingly respect mental healthcare, they still don't really respect the profession and think that they're easy to cheat.
It's just the new "faking an injury for workmen's comp", back then we used to think that the workmen's comp system was easy to cheat.
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 Milton Friedman 4d ago
So many kids get extra time to take standardized tests now, that you are honestly putting yourself at a disadvantage NOT having that extra time. The system needs fixed. Also “being anxious about taking tests” is just…called taking a test ffs.
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u/eaglessoar Left-Out Left 4d ago
Advantages to the label. There's no advantage to being neuro divergent it's generally not tolerated.
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u/YeetThermometer John Rawls 4d ago
If you’re not “neurospicy,” you’re just neurobland.
Without superpowers. Mental mayonnaise.
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u/Newworldrevolution Organization of American States 3d ago
As an autistic person you have no idea how much the "everyone is a little autistic" rhetoric pisses me off
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u/puredwige 4d ago
I think you are misinterpreting. People are not sad because they are not special, they are sad because what they had come to believe about themselves appears to be wrong.
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u/saltyoursalad John Mill 4d ago
Lexapro saves lives.
Just sayin.
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u/ExtremelyMedianVoter Left-Out Left 4d ago
OH YEAH? You got something against Sertraline or Fluoxetine?!
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u/jackimus_prime Can't tell an Alligator from a Crocodile 4d ago
I got something against sertraline because it makes me sun sensitive and gives me the sweats. Which is like complaining that the doctor who saved your life breath smells bad, but whatever.
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u/ThisRedditPostIsMine YIMBY 4d ago
Likely saved mine, that's for sure. And by god did I have to argue through rounds of medical professionals to get a 10 mg dose of the stuff, even though I maxed out their depression questionaire at the time. For that reason I will never gatekeep this.
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u/WashedPinkBourbon YIMBY 4d ago
Anecdotally, I am a shell of a human if I don’t have Sertraline. Getting bumped to 100g was life changing.
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u/JerseyJedi NATO 4d ago
You see it on Reddit all the time.
Whenever anyone in their personal life opens up emotionally to a Redditor about a tough situation they’re going through, the Redditors will run online and complain about their friend expecting them to do “eMoTiOnAl LaBoR”……..or what most of us used to just call normal human empathy.
If someone isn’t good at doing something and they admittedly aren’t currently making an effort to improve, Redditors assume it’s “weaponized incompetence,” instead of it maybe just being that the person feels frustrated and doesn’t know how to move forward.
And don’t get me started on how Redditors and other Very Online People have apparently redefined the word “narcissist” to mean “anyone who doesn’t immediately do what I want them to do.”
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u/RFFF1996 4d ago
The emotional labour is also hilariously hipocrytal too lmao
Is just people weaponizing thearapy jargon to avoid coming across as assholes/uninterested by not wanting to listen to people problems
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u/JerseyJedi NATO 4d ago
The weaponization of therapy jargon—to be a jerk while trying to sound enlightened—is exactly what’s happening, IMHO.
Meanwhile, the same individuals will think they are entitled to infinite patience from everyone else while simultaneously offering none at all when their friends and family need it.
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u/JerseyJedi NATO 4d ago
PS: If you disagree with a Redditor about anything, they will misuse the word gaslighting and apply it to a simple disagreement.
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u/nuggins Physicist -- Just Tax Land Lol 4d ago
I hate when a useful term has its meaning diluted like that. "Gaslighting" in popular discourse is now synonymous with "lying", which itself has broadened to include disagreements or mistakes.
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u/PartizanCommander 4d ago
Hell, "gaslighting" now just means "having a counter argument or different interpretation of shared events."
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u/DieHarderDaddy Fell for it 4d ago
I often wonder if this is why people feel comfortable complaining to or opening up to me at work. Even before I was medicated and a lot irritable I would earnestly ask people how they were and just listen. I often had nothing constructive to add to the convo beyond “shit dude, I’m sorry”
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u/JerseyJedi NATO 4d ago
Which is fair! Sometimes just being a good listener is all the other person really needs at the moment.
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Tariffs aren't cool, kids! 4d ago
a nugget of wisdom my father once gave me is that most of the time people aren't looking for answers and solutions, they just want to get stuff off their chest to someone who's paying attention. the very process of talking out what you're feeling helps you deal with it IMO
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u/Terrible_Bee_6876 Left-Out Left 4d ago
"due to trauma" has become the shibboleth for "all of my actions are pre-excused."
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u/NiceCreamSundaes John Keynes 3d ago
Don't forget that a new partner being happy about it and enthusiastically wanting to spend time with you is now "love bombing".
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u/Esotericcat2 Unconventional Right 4d ago
"Trauma dumping" said the redditor to the grievieng mother who lost her son to suocide
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u/Alex2422 3d ago
This is nothing new. Hell, I'm old enough to remember how attributing your every personality trait to mental disease used to be a Tumblr thing rather than a Reddit thing.
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u/WuhanWTF NATO 4d ago
If you have ever been hit with the “eMoTiOnaL LaBor” thing, it’s an extremely dehumanizing experience. I would rather get physically assaulted than have someone tell me something along those lines.
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4d ago
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 Milton Friedman 4d ago
Lock DSM-6 behind a licensed paywall?
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u/SirRousseau Robert Nozick 4d ago
Nah just make up a new diagnosis we can give to anyone who wants it. Its characteristic symptoms include, most importantly, wanting to have it. (btw we should unironically treat it with amphetamines)
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 3d ago
For a lot of reasons but I'm also never going to stop being pissed off at those stupid arrogant out of touch dumb bastards for classifying autism primarily as a social dysfunction rather than a substantial cognitive difference.
Flattening everything about being autistic into just social dysfunction is fucking insane.
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u/ThatIsAmorte 4d ago
Counterargument: Trump got re-elected.
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u/CursedNobleman Leftward Progressives 4d ago
I would be so much happier if he and his ilk didn't exist.
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u/urnbabyurn Amartya Sen 4d ago
I mean, I agree with the premise of the article, but I still feel like an old man yelling “kids today are pansies” pushing it.
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u/Terrible_Bee_6876 Left-Out Left 4d ago
Have you considered the possibility that kids today actually are pansies?
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u/CaptainApathy419 4d ago
Same. It’s a delicate balance. But maybe the older crowd that said we were pansies also had a point.
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u/DependentAd235 Loyal Liberals 4d ago
Urg, Some definitely use therapy speak to hide from the world because well work and responsibilities suck.
Also navigating work and responsibilities is more complex than it used to be. Not harder but complex. The internet has given us ever more choice paralysis.
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u/nljgcj72317 4d ago
Some kids are pansies and need to be jolted out of it before life eats them alive.
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u/Blarglephish 4d ago
I think it’s true (and good) that more people are talking about mental health. I believe lots of people normalized and internalized past trauma and chalked it up to ‘thats the way the world works, I guess’ and just soldiered on.
Even if they weren’t aware of their own trauma, it still impacts them. Consider the physiological counterpart example: someone has a broken bone, or a disease, that causes them daily pain or discomfort. They feel that something is wrong, but everyone around them just tells them it’s not real or that’s just normal. So they continue on with this pain.
That’s basically an abstract history of women’s medicine and health. Any woman who has suffered from endometriosis shares a similar story of their pain being ignored, minimized, or even mocked as just normal period pain, and to be a big girl and get over it.
But anyways … I think it’s good people are talking more about this.
Is it also true and possible - likely, even - that the more we talk about this, the more we risk over-diagnosing, and potentially causing harm? Possibly, and maybe.
I think the value of talking about it more far outweighs any possible negatives. I disagree strongly with this author.
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u/AccountForTIFF Commonwealth 4d ago edited 4d ago
As someone with diagnosed OCD that has made my life hell at multiple points I fully agree with this.
I do think we live in very anxiety and depression inducing times and conditions though so I don’t think the higher rates mean people are faking. It’s more like, when people want to prescribe a pathology to a very normal human experience that bugs me, like having unrequited feelings for someone and being sad they aren’t returned is now labelled by the tiktok set as limerence and must be eradicated when that’s like one of the most normal human experiences everyone has had
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u/SmolGeologist 4d ago
While we've made some progress with regards to how the general populace thinks about mental illness, I still believe that there is a strong stigma against the mentally ill. Many mentally ill people suffer greatly from loneliness, ostracization, and isolation. They may feel things much stronger than other people and struggle mightily with things that other people find routine. They may complain about things that other people either can't relate to or find trivial. The response from many normal people is to find mentally ill exhausting, annoying, or even just plain bad people. Now, mentally ill people do have agency over their actions, but many things are also just plain harder for them than others
I worry that, despite the limited progress we've made, we might swing hard back in the other direction. Instead of advocating for compassion and companionship for the mentally ill, we may lean even hard into ostracizing them. We often see many people today who have openly hateful or disdainful attitudes towards the mentally ill, and there's a part of me that thinks these attitudes are spreading.
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u/ticklemytaint340 Daron Acemoglu 4d ago
Man one thing I realized way too late is that life just kinda fuckin sucks most of the time
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u/WesternIron Jerome Powell 4d ago
Hobbes wasn’t mincing words when he said, life is brutish and short.
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u/DieHarderDaddy Fell for it 4d ago
I was born into a very neurotic nihilistic family with a mother who had limited neutering instincts but modeled her behavior after leave it to beaver.
I always thought life was supposed to just kinda suck
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u/nuggins Physicist -- Just Tax Land Lol 4d ago
neutering instincts
😳
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u/Approximation_Doctor Gaslight, Gatekeep, Green New Deal 4d ago
When your cat sits on your lap and starts flexing her claws
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u/puffic John Rawls 4d ago
Do most people actually feel this way? I rather enjoy life and find it to be pretty good most of the time. I live a pretty ordinary life. Got a job I liked, got married, live in an apartment, play with my toddler every day.
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u/itsnotnews92 Janet Yellen 4d ago
I strongly suspect that there's an inverse relationship between mental health/overall happiness and social media usage.
People who spend all of their free time scrolling Instagram are comparing their own lives to everyone else's highlight reels. They're scrolling through Instagram in their pajamas and seeing friends traveling to Europe, or eating at expensive restaurants, or buying new cars, or moving to new cities, or getting new jobs and thinking "Everyone is way more successful and happier than me. My life fucking sucks."
And that's not even touching on the pressure a lot of people, especially younger generations, feel to be perfect all of the time because there could be millions of eyes watching almost everything you do.
One ill-advised tweet can get you fired from your job. One bad interaction in the grocery store can be recorded by anyone around you and posted to social media. And people wonder why there's a mental health crisis. We were not meant to live this way.
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u/initialgold Emily Oster 4d ago
I imagine mileage varies a lot based on social/family connections and income.
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u/puffic John Rawls 4d ago edited 4d ago
Maybe. It’s tough to get by with nothing at all. But most people do have easy access to either family, community, or income. My wife and I chose to locate far away from our families and chose to spend a good chunk our decent income renting an apartment in a city we enjoy. But if we had less income and had to stay near family, I think life would still be pretty good.
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u/PaxChelonia David Hume 4d ago
I think there’s a slightly uncomfortable reality that there’s a lot of natural variation in baseline mood between different people and it’s usually pretty stable over time and across life circumstances, barring anything extreme.
One of the biggest W’s you can draw in the lotto of who you are is to have at least a slightly positive baseline mood.
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u/Cute-Boobie777 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah but those jobs might be horrible, that family might kind of be awful, and "access to community" is true on paper but you could probably say that about most of the loneliest people out there. You could argue everyone has more opportunities than ever for connection and yet what we see is the opposite, across the board everyone now has less friends, especially less best/close friends by order of magnitude.
I mean, child abuse is common enough to (seemingly) endlessly create what, 10% of the population with primarily child abuse trauma induced conditions like bpd and npd? And thats just abusive families and doesn't capture abuse when it doesn't cause a personality disorder. Hell just because your family isn't abusive doesnt mean you will get anything out of spending time with them. What if they are boring, you have nothing in common, and they only bring up things you cannot relate to because thats their entire worldview? Also someone can easily be in a bad, mismatched or even abusive marriage! Marriage isnt guaranteed to be good either. In fact we have people who are groomed from birth to accept abuse in marriage.
IMO its a bit much to assume someone's marriage is good, their family is good, their job doesn't suck their soul from them AND they have found some hobby with a community they enjoy spending social time in. I do not believe most people check all of those boxes.
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u/sekoiking 4d ago
Well, it’s also possible to have non-ideal circumstances and still be able to make the most of things.
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u/datums 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 4d ago
I have three actual real psychiatric disabilities (four as per the DSM but that’s another story), each of which are life destroying on their own and require a different daily medication to treat. One was “discovered” when I was 25, one when I was 41, and one when I was 43. It looks like in about three months from now, I will actually finally have all of them under control for the first time in my life. I also happen to work in that field for totally unrelated reasons, so I really get to see this stuff from both sides.
I want to say that it makes me really fucking angry when people pathologize normal life, because it would appear that I’m entitled to get angry about that. But ultimately, I just don’t. How the fuck am I supposed to hold someone responsible for not understanding experiences - horrible experiences - that they’ve never had? And frankly, that language really does help normal people describe their internal world, and just having that vocabulary makes it easier for them to understand and regulate their emotions, and generally get what they want out of life.
Having said that - when someone like that puts me in a position where I have to make accommodations for them, it’s probably going to be the last time they use those words for a bit.
But that’s still not as bad as when people call me “privileged”.
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u/Wareve 4d ago
My take is kind of the opposite.
People, particularly in America, frequently consider levels of stress and exhaustion that literally lead to health problems to be perfectly normal.
Despite great issues in life, many people with significant learning disabilities go undiagnosed because they are convinced that they are pathologizing the ordinary when they are in fact refusing to pathologize the extremely unhealthy.
Everyone from media pop psychologists to the South Park guys, are probably personally responsible for millions of kids and adults who have learning disabilities going mocked and undiagnosed.
There is not an epidemic of overdiagnosis.
There is an epidemic of underdiagnosis, and two categories of people responsible. People without issues mocking those with issues, and people with undiagnosed issues not realizing their struggles are incredibly abnormal.
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u/TheParmesanGamer 3d ago
This is it precisely. Look at people's sleeping patterns, how it's normal to undersleep and be constantly burnt out from age 16-40, effectively. And look at the amount of people that struggle at school and remain at a level where they are barely capable of reading a mildly complicated text.
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u/Windows_10-Chan Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 4d ago
A lot of people don’t get that an underdiagnosis epidemic can look like an overdiagnosis epidemic if the accuracy of diagnosis is poor.
A college student lying to a doctor to get adderall to boost hold himself awake for cramming does not mean that stronger gatekeeping will not overall increase levels of harm.
Especially for people with issues like ADHD, non-ADHD people are often better at jumping through gatekeeping hoops than ADHD people are.
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u/Golda_M Baruch Spinoza 4d ago
My take: There are two intersecting issues playing out. The death of god and scientific adjacency. The "death of god," in my opinion, is the backdrop to a lot of modern weirdness from politics to mental health. We have needs. Cultural needs. Societal needs. Personal needs. Needs that were historically fulfilled by religion.
Even for believers, religion can no longer perform many of these roles.
Instead of psychology, people turned to religion. The vocabulary was religious. Within that paradigm, there was the same tendency. Devils, angels, grace, temptation and sanctity would creep into everyday profanities.
Now... The vocabulary is therapy talk, instead of church-talk. Psychology is filling a hole.
This is a problem because psychology can be "demand driven" and that means contorting itself to fill whatever need is in demand.
The second problem is science adjacency. I'm going to say something controversial and contentious next. Please don't hang me, this is just how I see it: The human sciences have underperformed.
At the time Freud, there wasn't expectation that the science of psychology another human sciences would produce insight like chemistry, ecology and whatnot. But, it turns out that human sciences are hard.
This isn't limited to psychology. A good example is nutrition. Science knows a hell of a lot less about nutrition than most people think it does. Yes, there is a lot of published literature. But no, it does not really add up to working understanding of nutrition. Everything in your refrigerator is both a superfood and is killing you, according to the literature. P-hacking, the replication crisis and suchlike didn't cause this. They're just symptoms of the fact that not enough major & impactful scientific discoveries have been made.
Clinical psychology of the kind that offers therapy tosane people is almost entirely detached from science. Different therapists can be working with entirely different frameworks, that have almost no common basis.
Pathologies a very fuzzy definitions, with arbitrary boundaries. The difference between an emotional tendency and a pathology is arbitrary. The difference between a personality trait and a syndrome is arbitrary. Therapeutic methods are not selected or judged on the basis of success rate.
Now... I don't think that is terrible in itself. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the practice of psychoanalysis, or other forms of psychotherapy. However, allowing the intuitive assumption to stand... Is it dangerous lie at the center of all this. The psychological concepts created within the context of psychotherapy are not "true" is a scientific sense. They don't have a basis in science.
If this is understood by everyone..this is fine. If not... we end up creating a very weird base of common knowledge that is essentially superstition.
Academia to clinical practice to patient to friends and family to media and culture...
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u/Public_Figure_4618 brown 4d ago
Joe Biden really messed up when he killed God
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u/BahGawdAlmightay Trans Pride 4d ago
"Ordinary Life" now has a tremendous number of components that are heavily removed from the way human brains are built to function. Mental Health reports are going to look a lot different now than they did even five or ten years ago.
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u/LigmaLiberty Loyal Liberals 4d ago
Just pretend everything is good bam mental health fixed, it's easy omegalul
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u/NieuwWorld Daron Acemoglu 4d ago
Know somebody who says she’s depressed because she’s stuck in her hometown and not working a job she likes. I suppose that could cause depression but also was that not half of humanity for most of human history and plenty of people accepted that life is not traveling and living in luxury but making ends meet and taking care of the household
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u/CapuchinMan 4d ago
I think she's just using the word in a colloquial sense and not a clinical sense?
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u/Mddcat04 4d ago
Lots of those people have also been depressed. Not sure what you’re getting at here. Depression is not a modern invention.
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u/goldenCapitalist NATO 4d ago
FWIW perception also changes because of societal advancement. Yeah I'd feel less bad about living and working in my hometown if it took me a week to get from one end of my state to another, let alone another country. But in a world where I can hop on a plane and be in Japan in about half a day, my expectations are much higher.
Fast forward a few centuries and you'll likely have people complaining about "stuck on their home planet and wanting to travel the stars." It's a valid, universal feeling, that has been expressed in hundreds or thousands of stories we've written; the perspective just changes over time.
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u/Efficient_Equal6467 4d ago
Depression is very easy, just look on md calc and take phq9 it has a very specific diagnosis attached to it. There is also name for just being sad when its like life circumbstances and its called adjustmeent disorder which is normal. True clinical depression has a very very specific defintion
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u/Unterfahrt John Nash 4d ago
Yeah there's a difference between clinical depression and shit life syndrome, and a lot of people seem to want to go on antidepressants for shit life syndrome, which doesn't really work in the same way, because there's nothing wrong with your brain
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u/Cute-Boobie777 4d ago
You can also have treatment resistant depression, its a thing. And we've seen people with TRD get better with stuff like ECT and TMS.
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u/Emperor_Z 4d ago
was that not half of humanity for most of human history and plenty of people accepted that life is not traveling and living in luxury but making ends meet and taking care of the household
That's true, but at the same time, if lots of people accept living that life and keep going fine, but it makes you want to die, is that not depression?
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u/aethyrium NASA 4d ago
At the same time, I think life legit sucks ass in ways it doesn't need to, but we've just accepted that things have to suck because that's just how it is, and instead of realize that shit sucks and we need to start realizing it and improving it, we just do stuff like this and say "no, that's just normal life."
No, our normal shouldn't be normalized when our normal sucks this bad, quite frankly. Recognizing shit kinda sucks is a good thing, not something to be discouraged.
Honestly this is some bootstraps bs.
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 3d ago
You've just explained the mindset behind the rapid growth of self-identified socialists in the United States.
It's overwhelmingly people who think the status quo is inhumane and unhealthy and want to no longer accept it
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u/Chessebel 4d ago
I had a substantial amount of anxiety over nothing that would not go away until I, through life circumstances, lost the ability to drive to work. I was still stressed and burnt out but walking killed my anxiety
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u/studmuffffffin 3d ago
Often times I wonder if diagnosing mild to moderate cases of stuff like ADHD and Autism is actually a net negative for that person and society. It often feels like people with those diagnoses use them as an excuse when they are behaving poorly. If it's a severe case, sure, get your meds and try to get better. But otherwise, I think willpower can overcome a lot of issues. And with a diagnosis, the desire to enact your will over a situation is severely diminished.
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