I believe this trend has existed on different platforms for a long time. I remember in the 90s when it was trendy to have OCD or to be depressed. Part of being young seems to be finding a way to differentiate yourself and be special as is emphasized by our culture.
The difference between now and then, or even just now and the Livejournal days, is that "the algorithm" is actively pushing this content at people, instead of it merely being something they can come across.
Yeah, good old times of 3 TV channels and 2 newspapers which you could come across.
The algorithm of giving you what you prefer when there are too many choices is inevitable. Alternative is a bunch of people deciding what it should and should not give you. It really doesn't matter who those people work for.[1]
Positive feedback loop and information bubbles are not great but "the algorithm" is really not worse in this regard than leaving in a small village.
1. The algorithm is still a bunch of people but that's orthogonal to your point. People will prefer algorithms fitting their needs better and they are able to switch (yes monopolies, but that's a different thread already).
Older media is far less socially degenerative to consume. Even modern media standards are higher than much of what I have personally seen children consume on YouTube kids. The 3 TV channels and two newspapers never ran programming that features Spiderman and Elsa having diarrhea after sexually suggestive themes.
Really? Spiderman and Elsa having diarrhea is that much worse than presenting family model with woman being a washing machine and kids getting beaten by their dad? Nutella is a healthy breakfast and all cool kids smoke cigarettes. Shut up and do your job.
As far as I remember standards were not higher. They were different.
Plus really, the cartoons I remember were full of stuff like find a sleeping pills in parents cabinet, give somebody as a joke, put a pin on a chair so somebody sits on it etc. Racism everywhere. Stuff that is even hard to find nowadays because they had to scrub it. Sexually suggestive themes, like have you watched lion king? Or anything really... it seemed to be way more explicit.
We luckily tend to remember past as better than it was. There's also nostalgia element and there's cultural difference. Just like there are different cultures around the globe and most think that other ones are gross, the same happens in the time dimension.
edit: to be clear, things could be better, we should point out what's wrong and try to fix it, but with some more decent optimization function than "proximity to good the old days"
I agree with that difference but I'm not sure it's fundamental.
To me more fundamental is access to information that anybody has above certain age. Yes you still need to know how to interpret it, that's one of the most valuable skills nowadays, but in the past you had just no way of fact checking and doing more research on what has been given to you apart from spending hours in library which would not be very productive unless you were interested in some relatively popular chunk of history.
You get served stuff targeted at you but it's just information, and you have a way to put it in a bigger context. It was not possible before. The fact that you learn about unknown unknowns through a magic giving content box is also amazing. It is not perfect and have its issues, and I would love for everybody to just garden their homepages which I could visit like it's .. oh shit well 30 years ago, but I'm not sure I want to spend time on gardening mine when I can learn so much instead.
It's funny (odd) to see the shift in thinking in youth from, the media is the enemy and they want to feed us how to think from before the internet (think punk bands) and now where people can't live without media they fully know is automanipulated and is actively manipulating them. Sid Vicious must be rolling in his grave.
Everybody goes through this kind of thing when they first encounter the definitions and symptoms of psychological disorders. It's just that at the moment TikTok is the medium and as usual people blame the medium for the message.
I think everyone here is aware that this phenomenon isn’t new.
What the concern is has to do with scale, and whether this old problem is about to get a lot worse with new technologies. I tend to agree with this, I think the way information scales these days makes this much more dangerous a phenomenon.
"Neurodivergent" is becoming a subcultural identifier. Ive seen some tiktoks where the creator makes a statement like "the neurodivergent urge to <common human behavior>" or "neurodivergent people love <sensation that most people like>"
It's very odd IMO. Feels a bit like religious evangelism.
They have single-handedly managed to ridicule serious mental conditions like autism and adhd by turning them into quirky character traits, which has swept over to other platforms as well.
ADHD is now the lack of motivation. OCD has been hit just as badly. It is being used synonymously with liking order and cleanliness (which almost every human does).
And the most bizarre out of the bunch is the pseudo-personality disorder community on tiktok. They come up with names like 'shade' and 'lucius' for their supposed 'alters', all of which have assigned functions like 'the gatekeeper' and 'the emotional supporter', and can of course be activated on demand in front of a camera.
And get this, none of them are diagnosed (only 'self-dxed') because supposedly the medical system is biased and treats them unfairly.
I think you are correct to link this stuff to changes in how people think about autism, OCD, etc. I would also link it to the return of astrology and the proliferation of terms like asexual/demisexual/etc. Ultimately all of these trends have to do with how people conceptualize identity.
It's not clear how harmful any of this is but boy is it weird.
I mean, sort of, yes, but that's an extremely broad bucket you've built. Lots of things are to do with identity: nationality, political party, etc. 'HN reader' is a fairly strong identity!
The difference comes in the utility of that identity. If somebody is latching onto something which drives them to believe that getting one particular type of medication is the one and only way to fix their life, despite not really fitting the diagnostic criteria for the associated condition, I'd say that's a problem. Getting a new label (like asexual) which lets you make sense of your life and probably doesn't change your existing behaviour at all, let alone make you want treatment, I'd say is beneficial.
> They come up with names like 'shade' and 'lucius' for their supposed 'alters' all of which have assigned functions like 'the gatekeeper' and 'the emotional supporter' and can of course be activated on demand in front of a camera.
If people really did have multiple personalities,
it would be more surprising
if they didn't come up with terms to describe them.
I also don't see why it should be impossible for them to switch intentionally
at least some of the time.
Perhaps a lot of these people are pretending,
essentially acting the parts of imaginary friends.
I honestly don't see a problem with that.
A lot of people seem to benefit from talking to God,
who I also suspect is imaginary,
and that's fine so long as they don't harm others as a result.
If someone feels better being "Alice" at one time and "Bob" at another,
then I'm happy to accept them as such.
And on the off chance that their mind really is split into multiple consciousnesses,
then it would be really shitty to mock or marginalize them for it.
> According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, borderline personality disorder is extremely rare -- only 1.4% of the U.S. adult population is estimated to have this condition and it is rarely diagnosed in adolescents.
Wait, since when is 1.4% of the adult population "extremely rare"?
Thought the same thing when I read the article. We aren't alone - if you Google "borderline personality disorder" it says "Very common" [0]. Same for Bipolar, though DID (which the article also mentions) is "Rare" at < 0.1%.
1. My understanding is that these videos often talk about very general symptoms, that could be caused by these mental disorders -- but also by a lot of other things.
2. The videos take on an authoritative tone, which does a good job of convincing people (especially kids). I've written about this phenomenon (albeit playing out in written form) on HN before:
> Welcome to the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment.
> The scary thing is that many readers will also often take anything said confidently enough to be fact. This is also basically how a lot of disinformation works. Say it authoritatively, and you'll become an authority on the matter to many people.
3. The 'nocebo' effect is very real! It's the opposite of a placebo effect, where if you believe you have an illness, your body actually starts showing symptoms.
4. I'd believe that in a lot of cases it's less about a kid consciously thinking "Ooh it's trendy to have this, let me say I do", and more like kids thinking "Oh this seems to be a widespread thing, and I experience these symptoms sometime (I space out! And I have trouble sleeping! And I have a jittery leg! and so on), sure seems like I might have this!"
5. Very important quote from article:
> "If you spend 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes viewing people talk about these disorders over and over again, that can make it seem like these conditions are a lot more prevalent than they actually are in the world,"
Repetition makes it seem like a bigger deal, and makes it stick around in the kids' head. So the next time they space out in the classroom naturally the thought might occur ("Do I have dissociative disorder?").
6. If lots of kids start showing up to doctors' saying they have (for eg) BPD when they don't, it'll be a lot harder for those with actual symptoms to convince doctors of their situation and receive proper medical care, which is very worrying.
______
All this said:
1. I'm just a user of the internet - not a psychologist, nor someone with relevant formal training, so please take my hypotheses as just that -- hypotheses, not fact.
2. I haven't actually watched many of these videos, so if someone has links, please share them! I think a lot of people on HN might like to watch them and analyse what's going on.
Reminds me of the apocryphal reporter who pretended to have psych problems to get firsthand access to a facility. Then, when he told everyone he was faking, still couldn’t escape because apparently faking a mental illness is itself a sign of mental illness.
It is also very problematic in then seeking treatment: The conviction that you have X mental illness will influence how you report symptoms and color your experiences to fit that narrative.
Incorrect diagnosis is already a problem in mental health-- attempts at self diagnosis typically only compound the problem. It's one of those areas where you really want patients to go and report unbiased experiences (in so far as that is possible even without preconceived self diagnosis)
This has nothing to do with tiktok. This same phenomenon can and does occur on all social networks, and people mistakenly self-diagnose all the time outside of social network use too
I find this a bit disingenuous. TikTok videos have by far the highest reach of all social media due to their format and the way the for you page works. Moreover it rewards influencers from interacting with each other’s posts which often leads to top comments on TikTok (and Reels too although it’s much smaller as a platform) largely being an echo chamber.
1 post on Facebook might reach 100s, 1000s of people. Rarely a page with large enough following may hit 100,000s of people.
1 post on TikTok from a moderate influencer can hit millions.
That’s not to say other social media forms haven’t had bad trends in the past, but TikTok has had far more and in a far shorter amount of time. People just don’t interact with other social content the way they buy into TikTok, which is dangerous and leads to far more misinformation — it was maybe not even 3 weeks ago I had a bunch of my friends sending me a bunch of popular TikTok videos and asking about how AI Transformers were here and taking over the world (they are, but transformers in AI have nothing in common with the movies).
It also generalizes beyond social networks. Another way of viewing this is simply medical student syndrome[1] transplanted onto the substrate of social media. Learning about a new thing biases people in a way that they over identify that thing.
As a parent, I've experienced this in the last year. It was pretty easy to identify and correct for. Teens try out novel behaviors regularly. It's a good strategy for figuring out identity and maturing, but it does have these weird edge-cases that being on the lookout for and gently applying reality maintenance mechanisms corrects for.
It might not be unique to TikTok, it might happen on other social networks, but TikTok shouldn't continue to get a pass even as they become the worst purveyor of dangerous viral nonsense. There was the "steal stuff from school" thing and the wave of schools closing because of TikTok-inspired threats and the "corpse bride" eating-disorder thing and probably more I've missed. Now this. People don't hesitate to dump all over Facebook and Twitter. Nobody stands up and says "this has nothing to do with Facebook, it happens on all social media" around here unless they want to get their head ripped off. Bringing out that defense only for TikTok seems like something only a dedicated fan/addict (or worse) would do.
I don't agree. I don't use TikTok but every annoying BS video people have shared with me the last 2 years came from there. Literally every single one. Obviously I know this because they stamp their logo on every video. But they must be doing something to stimulate this kind of content.
I've almost never seen anything actually interesting, insightful or even just fun with that stamp. Just a handful of times. So it looks to me like it's become the sewer of the internet. You might find a gold ring there but you have to wade through knee deep shit to get to it :)
Of course this is also the reason I've never even considered joining. Though I left Facebook too and have never been on Twitter.
I actually enjoy TikTok. I watch a lot of dog videos and other fun and lighthearted content.
It’s great. I think it’s more what you make it than any other social media platform. I watch videos and I get other videos that I’ll like. If I was interested in other things they would show up on my page, through the algorithm working really well. Nobody crowbars stuff in e.g. I don’t see any maga shit, I just see really entertaining content.
Obviously this self diagnosis is a very real issue, but it’s not caused by Tik tok. Tik tok is just good at surfacing the problem though
The latest "OMG Teens are doing stupid stuff with the latest internetty thingy" story. Yay. Just like the last time where no, teens weren't killing themselves as part of a challenge, kids aren't freaking out. If anything, this trend will help make mental illness less stigmatizing.
I would encourage you to take a look at this subreddit. It's a bit mean spirited and not a nice place, but watch some of the videos and tell me you don't think we should be concerned about these people.
Or will result in doctors not taking people seriously because only a small percentage of their patients claiming to have a mental illness actually have one.
This isn't just for teens - It extends to the college students I see come through a mentoring program I volunteer with.
In some cases it's positive: I've seen a few people be convinced to seek treatment for anxiety and depression disorders after seeing people they trust on social media open up about their own therapy experiences.
But the worst offender (in older students, anyway) has to be ADHD right now. The sheer amount of bad ADHD self-diagnosis material on TikTok and other platforms is unbelievable. Influencers inherently want to reach the broadest audience possible, so they have an inherent conflict of interest to convince as many people as possible that they have ADHD. "Follow me for more ADHD tips!"
The result is a lot of TikToks and other short-form content that misrepresents ADHD as everyday struggles such as not being able to remember everyone's names at parties or forgetting to get all of the groceries you need at the store. Watch enough of these videos and anyone can become convinced they have ADHD. At one point, it felt like everyone in one cohort was convinced they had undiagnosed ADHD and wanted to discuss it in the Slack as the explanation for everything in their lives. It got bad enough that people were coaching each other about how to convince skeptical doctors to prescribe ADHD meds by exaggerating specific symptoms, at which point we had to shut down such conversation. Watching the ADHD self-diagnosis misinformation spread like wildfire was honestly one of my more terrifying social media experiences in recent history.
But it gets even worse: During COVID, the US government suspended a rule that required patients to have established a past in-person relationship with a prescriber before receiving controlled substance prescriptions. Several startups are capitalizing on this rule change with subscription services to send you Adderall prescriptions after a short 5-minute Zoom with a doctor. And of course, these ads are being served up to the people consuming the ADHD self-diagnosis TikToks. It's only a few clicks to talk to a pill mill that will prescribe you Adderall (for a monthly fee, of course).
At this point, I'm beginning to fear that so many young people are self-diagnosing ADHD from internet misinformation that we're heading for a reckoning with ADHD medication prescribing. It's starting to feel a bit reminiscent of the prescription opioid pandemic, where opioids were being prescribed to basically everyone who requested them. It wouldn't be good for actual ADHD patients if countries started severely cracking down on prescription practices.
I didn't want to for decades, despite obvious symptoms, for fear of dependency or being labeled a drug seeker and because of the stigma implied by comments like this. Could be I was the only person those drug education programs worked on.
I'm glad I finally did. That one little pill makes me a better and happier person.
Same. I was diagnosed with ADHD at eight and was put on stimulants then. Took them for 8 years and stopped. Now at 30, I'm on them again and all the anxiety and depression that I was caused by or masking my issues with functioning just dissolved. I'm glad I finally let myself take them, but I still feel stigma around it.
Even still, the stigma is reinforced by arbitrary rules that presume I am an addict: "You can only have a 30 day supply," "we can't fill the pending 'script until 31 days after you last picked it up," "no, you can't get it early even if you're traveling for over a month. You'll need to find a pharmacy there to fill it."
Agree. I've never used any drug recreationally, other than alcohol. No interest in it, and definitely don't want to wind up on any long term prescription meds.
Curiously alcohol is one of the worst drugs in any scale. The world worked with drugs before the "war on drugs", and things like opium, cocaine, marihuana... were consumed by tons causing less troubles than alcohol.
Opium was seen as the main reason behind chinese inmigrants to the USA being better workers than whites (XIX), so it was outlawed. Of course, the narrative was that opium was evil (you can even read things like chinese men lured white women to opium dens to made them slaves).
I prefer to avoid drugs, legal or not. But the war on drugs, any drugs, makes zero sense to me. It's a shame that drugs that were known to treat e.g. depression were outlawed because "say no to drugs", and further research effectively halted for decades.
Even today, when a new substance is discovered and used for "fun" is immediately outlawed. If you want fun, your only legal option is alcohol, even when we know it's way worse than, say, ecstasy or acid.
I'm pretty sure I've got ADHD but I've watched too many people ride rollercoasters for years finding the right amount of the right drug. I self medicate with a heavy caffeine habit, thank you very much. There are more important things in life than productivity.
I take an unprescribed focus drug every day, and it works wonders for me: Caffeine. I genuinely function so much better with it, I have no idea how I was productive at all before it.
I'm going to disagree with you and say that I think __ADHD__ has actually always been wide spread. We've just...not addressed it and seen rising depression, anxiety, suicide rates.
For far too long we've been __blaming individuals__ for their ADHD symptoms, and that's just created a broken system. And for far too long we've not taken ADHD symptoms seriously, and seen it as a phase.
The other point is, if people want to get these stimulants, why not? We actually understand them pretty well, and if they're not abused (e.g. you're not taking huge doses of them), they're fine.
And yeah, ADHD has always existed. But our lives weren't designed around making the symptoms of ADHD be something we have to deal with day to day. ADHD's impact is the worst on office based jobs.
--
Unrelated to the points I made above, but the recent more "understanding" of ADHD actually got me to go talk to a psychiatrist and got prescribed a stimulant based medicine for ADHD. I cried the first week I took it because it removed a fog from my brain that I had for my entire life.
I'm thankful that these discussions actually lead me to getting a diagnosis and medication.
Which is why a license physician is required to dispense this medication. There aren't candy stores with bins, giving these out by the pound. They are controlled substances and the fact that there are online pill mills to facilitate this? Well, it sounds like you have a problem with healthcare under capitalism, which to be clear, so do I, but absent a different system, that's the end result.
ADHD is an awful mental illness that attaching this warped definition to helps absolutely no one with. And I say that as someone who struggled for years to understand what my diagnosis actually meant because of this kind of vapid bullshit I seen pedaled on social media.
It's not just about misdiagnosing themselves, it's about people who have ADHD ending up with deep seated fundamental misunderstandings of their disorder is due to the constant bombardment of misinformation.
-
Also a pill mill has nothing to do with capitalism. If you're going to use words learn what they mean first.
The idea of a pill mill is physicians will jump to giving you the pills with minimal establishment of history.
It's trying to undermine the controls around the medication in such a way that it practically becomes a (pay-us-to-access-it) candy jar
You're using a service that is literally selling itself as a way to get pills for a specific disorder with the absolute least amount of friction, that's barely a step removed from pill mill.
They're even putting mini-quizes up for people to know if there's a good chance they'll get their diagnosis. Since you don't see a psychiatrist before "passing", you're literally being implicitly "coached" on how to get diagnosed.
Most (good) psychiatrists will take multiple visits with someone who has never been diagnosed before diagnosing let alone giving you pills for it, meanwhile these people are advertising how in 20 minutes you can be getting access to pills...
There's even stories of them turning away people who might have more issues than just ADHD, that's how laser focused their "treatment" is. If you were being given the same level of psychiatric treatment as a normal psychiatrist it'd be absurd to be told "I won't treat you because you have depression", for example.
Your link does not claim that. In fact, their study specifically states: "We only had repeated screen-time and behavior data available for a sub-sample of our cohort (n = 367) which limited our ability to determine directionality. As such, it is possible parents may respond to children who exhibit externalizing behavior difficulties by offering more screen-time or using increased opportunity for screen-time as a self-soothing strategy. "
It's a fair point. Not a perfect study and they do not claim a causal relationship. However, also from the results:
Researchers found by age 5, children who spent two hours or more per day, looking at screens, were 7.7 times more likely to meet criteria for a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, than children who watched screens for 30 minutes or less each day.
It's a substantial result. They talk about practical and ethical reasons they can't establish the causal relationship, too.
I'm guilty of being a little tongue in cheek, but I'd try to limit a kid's exposure to early screen time and ease them into things like TikTok.
On the other side of the coin, pathologizing everything can harm people as well. There are many children labeled “hyperactive” and put on drugs for a disorder they likely didn’t have at an extremely early stage in their development.
> We've just...not addressed it and seen rising depression, anxiety, suicide rates.
People are not developing major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders from not being on ADHD medications, at least not on the scale you’re referring to. “Increasing” rates of those disorders has largely been due to increased awareness and discussion of them, as well as some of the very patterns happening to ADHD right now: pathologizing normal feelings, romanticization of mental disorders, and self-diagnosis fueled by online communities.
> if people want to get these stimulants, why not?
Because they are not medical professionals. What they want needs to be vetted and discussed with a doctor.
Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is if you _didnt_ have ADHD as a child it's unlikely you have it as an adult.
So your assertion that it's a "disorder they likely didn’t have at an extremely early stage in their development" seems to be totally off the mark. Speaking as someone who really wishes their parents had medicated them for their childhood ADHD diagnosis. It likely would have saved me a lot of pain, heartache and C's in middle and high school. Not to mention college.
There's a big difference between "didn't have ADHD as a child" and "was never diagnosed with ADHD as a child", and it's one that a lot of people actually conflate. "They over-diagnose ADHD nowadays, I never had it" when they mean that there were no diagnoses in a period of time when ADHD was not widely known (if at all, depending on how far they go back).
It's easier for medical professionals to accept you have ADHD as an adult if you were diagnosed as a child, but that doesn't mean that all people with no childhood diagnosis cannot have ADHD.
The point I was contesting in the parent was "disorder they likely didn't have at an extremely early stage in their development".
He's claiming that childhood diagnosis is bunk. He's insisting that kids are unlikely to have ADHD.
I'm asserting that the behaviors for ADHD show up in children first and foremost.
I'm not saying that receiving clinical diagnosis as a child is the only way to have an adult diagnosis: In fact I'm not talking about diagnostics at all. It's that you _had_ ADHD as a kid, undiagnosed or otherwise, means you likely _have_ ADHD as an adult. I never once posited that someone with no diagnosis as a child is precluded from being diagnosed as an adult; however they should have had childhood symptoms based on the DSM as I understand it.
I'm arguing with someone who denies the existence of childhood ADHD in a naive "kids are just hyper don't drug them" argument.
> People are not developing major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders from not being on ADHD medications, at least not on the scale you’re referring to.
Evidence for this? ADHD meds have completely made my depression/anxiety go away because I'm no longer fighting with my brain. This has been the experience for dozens of other people that I know.
> Because they are not medical professionals. What they want needs to be vetted and discussed with a doctor.
Yeah. It's a schedule 2 drug. Which means you *need* to discuss it with a doctor anyway.
I still disagree with it being a scheduled drug. I wonder how many people are in prison because of self medication?
“Increasing” rates of those disorders has largely been due to increased awareness and discussion of them
I think we need to start verbalizing the root cause of that statement and go all the way to ‘increasing rates has largely been due to increased pressure to succeed academically and professionally in knowledge based professions’.
You ain’t gonna just grind Leetcode all day without a little something.
I think as society becomes more technical it becomes more debilitating for sure.
For whatever reason our society has a huge and totally inconsistent bias against medication/drugs to change brain chemistry.
To me, there is little doubt that people "self medicating" with coffee in the morning would never fly if coffee was just introduced to society yesterday.
We don't even bother to think about the unimaginable amount of good that has been done to society with people self medicating with coffee.
In the same sense , I can't imagine the amount of harm all this untreated ADHD that we don't take seriously will do to society in 2022.
You have to have had childhood onset to have ADHD. If problems with attention emerge during adulthood, that might be the beginning of a psychotic disorder, in which case the priority should be to treat the underlying psychotic disorder.
Given their source, I think either what they wrote is not what they meant, or they misread the DSM.
Specifically, it’s important to differentiate between symptoms “emerging” in adulthood vs. being identified in adulthood. What they wrote implies that most adult diagnoses are likely not ADHD if they did not get a diagnosis earlier in life.
Assuming what you said is true, why is that relevant here? Many people (myself included) discover they have ADHD as an adult but that doesn’t mean their ADHD symptoms _started_ when they were an adult.
Should also point out that a psychotic disorder is probably not the most likely reason for issues with attention in adulthood. There are numerous organic (medical term for non-psychiatric) and psychiatric causes of inattentiveness.
> Several startups are capitalizing on this rule change with subscription services to send you Adderall prescriptions after a short 5-minute Zoom with a doctor.
This really explains a lot - I have been seeing a sudden surge of of ADHD "diagnosis" or ADHD related content on all the popular social platforms (including HN) in the past 6 months or so, and was pondering if it was a concerted social media campaign by some pharma company or fund managers.
For those of you wondering if you have ADHD, please be aware that the more common depression and anxiety disorder often share similar symptoms. Some personality disorders too may appear like ADHD to the untrained. It is very easy to misdiagnose yourself when it comes to such mental ailment.
It’s also helpful that everyone wishes that they were more focused in their life. To paraphrase Dostoyevsky in The Idiot: “after his mock execution did he spend his days as if every day was his last? ‘No, quite the opposite, he was still a dour man who procrastinated and wasted much time’”
I learned of ADHD symptoms through a friend who got diagnosed and I've had other friends since recognise similarities and have asked me how I got evaluated
Sucks that there's people milking it for clout or whatever but it makes sense it's a word of mouth thing, I was never made aware of its existence or it's symptoms in school or anything. If you go by my education the only mental disorder that exists is depression
As for depression that has seemingly turned out to have been a side effect of untreatment. I've been sad or unhappy and all the normal down emotions but the depression basically dropped to nothing. Anxiety is falling away slowly too
I'm in the UK too so it's like a tenner a month for the prescription, probably not a money thing here at least
Similarly to how self diagnosis isn't the way don't self-undiagnose yourself either if you're suspecting something, ask a doctor rather than a web forum
I clicked on your HN profile and saw on your blog that you got diagnosed with ADHD this year. Congratulations on your diagnosis. I have ADHD and it absolutely sucks. I'm glad that you can finally get treated for it :)
We’re creating a society that’s going to force more people to resort to these drugs. Just take software development interviews, leetcode, med school, law school, these are intense things. You have a choice, dope up and grind these things or never have a chance at a good career. We aren’t building a society for healthy habits.
> It wouldn't be good for actual ADHD patients if countries started severely cracking down on prescription practices.
It’s already affecting ADHD patients. Most ADHD medications are controlled substances, and the rules around getting prescriptions for controlled substances can be draconian.
Yeah. Some states are more lenient but I would rather not have more restrictions placed on the only medication to ever get my life cleaned up because of some trend going on right now. North Carolina already won’t let me refill Adderall any more than 2 days out from my refill date. Life is so busy I need to actually a plan a day to start work late to get it.
Right there with you. I got tired of the constant fight (long holiday weekend? Tough, you still can't fill, enjoy being without your necessary meds! Doctor didn't get around to re-issuing the same script you've had for years? Tough, same deal, etc, etc...) and just plan on taking partial doses on the days I can afford to be less functional so that I've built up a reserve. It sucks, and it's a bigger deal than I think most people know.
What's even more fun is when the pharmacy is out of stock, so your refill is delayed, meaning you'll run out in the middle of holiday or travel when otherwise you would have been fine.
As someone who has experienced this phenomenon in the US, outside the US is so much better. My doctor just prescribes me nice round numbers of pills, usually ending with two zeroes. I almost couldn't believe it at first.
That’s a pretty standard corporate policy for controls across most states. And yeah it’s burdensome to plan your life around it.
The best suggestion I got was find a independent community pharmacy. Transfer scripts there. The staff will get to know you and when you say “my vacation is next week can I get my refill a week early?”, there is a good chance they’ll say “oh yeah, you mentioned that trip. I’ll get it filled today.”
You’re less of a number and more of a community member.
I’ll give that a shot. By corporate do you mean set by the pharmacy (in my case, CVS?). They’ve tried to override the fill restriction before only to be given back an exception regarding state law, I know California my doctor was actually able to refill outside the normal cycle once a year, possibly more, but needed a really damn good reason.
Yes, there can be multiple layers of regulations and policies. State law might restrict it. The state pharmacy board may have guidelines and then corporate may have further limits.
With the big chain pharmacies you’re fighting against them actually knowing you well enough to trust your request is legit AND the fact their hands may be tied by corporate.
At smaller pharmacies the pharmacist can often make the call themselves.
It’s really due to the opioid epidemic. Pharmacies were flagged as “you should have known it was inappropriate use”. It’s the pharmacist who will be questioned as to their judgement. If they can say “I’ve know Mr Smith for 10 years, he fills all his prescriptions here, has only asked for early refills 4 times in 5 years and each time was due to travel. In my judgement he was no misusing the controlled substance.”, then they’ll be happy to do it.
If they don’t recognize you and when they look you’re a new customer and your reason is the same one they hear all day long from obvious abusers, then they won’t put their ass on the line for you. Double so if they know corporate will say no.
Not just draconian; the rules seem almost calculated to cause pain and suffering to actual ADHD patients.
And not just in the general sense of "this shit is dehumanizing", but in the sense that the added bureaucratic hurdles are specifically the sort of thing that an ADHD patient would have problems satisfying without access to the drug. It's like some kind of Catch-22.
ADHD is a real disease, but it's also common for college students to fake it in order to get the medications as nootropics or for selling to their classmates. That's been going on since long before the current pandemic.
Besides the medications, an ADHD diagnosis can also get you special academic privileges such as extra time on exams.
> Besides the medications, an ADHD diagnosis can also get you special academic privileges such as extra time on exams.
Not only ADHD: dyslexia too, and probably other diseases / disorders related to the mental and neurological sphere.
This is problematic, because on one hand it's not hard to fake a disease if you know the symptoms and on the other hand it's quite easy to be convinced that you have a disease if you read the symptoms online. And I honestly don't know if doctors are able to discern "fake" illnesses from "real" ones when the diagnosis is essentially 100% derived from patients reporting their symptoms.
I think a large amount of the ADHD symptoms can be mitigated with lifestyle habits. Proper sleep, moving the body, getting sun, meditating, proper nutrition, managing dopamine disrupting activities (e.g. mindlessly scrolling TikTok or watching porn), etc. all improve ADHD symptoms.
Medication should be the last resort, only for severe cases, or perhaps not used every day so that the brain can recover. 4 day on and 3 days off seem to be a popular dosing schedule by some mindful advocates.
Of course, it’s incredibly difficult to do all the things mentioned above to aid optimal dopamine levels.
The way our society operates, it’s much easier to take the shortcut and pop some amphetamine after you wake up to get your day going.
Exceptions apply to legit, severe cases.
Andrew Huberman has a good podcast about the topic. [0]
This is pseudo-science garbage. People with ADHD have an imbalance in the levels of dopamine and norepinephrine in their brain (along with hyper efficient mop-up of dopamine and other abnormalities with norepinephrine.) You can't just wish this away with a little exercise and life-style change. People with ADHD will need to take medication for the rest of their life.
They didn't say that it's treatment for ADHD. If you invert their statement you end up with "having bad sleeping habits, [...] causes ADHD symptoms."
Fixing these issues would thus reduce them. It's not quiet as easy to diagnose ADHD as you seem to think, so a lot of people just live unhealthy, which gives them similar symptoms
I challenge any non-ADHD person to do the following for a week:
* Sleep only 5 hours a day
* Spend 5 hours on TikTok every day
* Eat a diet of mostly processed carbohydrates
* Stay sedentary all day
Let’s see if this person starts showing ADHD symptoms after a week. Should we start medicating them?
I am not saying that there are no _legit_ cases of ADHD when it is indeed genetic or trauma based that cannot be easily fixed by lifestyle changes. There are people who really need the meds. But I am betting that that these people are only a very low percentage of the currently medicated ones.
Med student here. I'm not dismissing the idea that some people are wrongly diagnosed with ADHD, but what you're saying here is the kind of harmful nonsense that's been interfering with appropriate treatment for ADHD for ages.
Psychostimulants for ADHD are universally associated with better outcomes, even in people who appear to manage without them. They reduce depression, anxiety, drug abuse and mortality. Heck, a lot of people with ADHD even sleep better while on them!
Stop meddling in other people's evidence-based medical treatment.
>Psychostimulants for ADHD are universally associated with better outcomes
When someone in the medical field starts talking about universal outcomes in relation to biological entities, my spidey sense goes crazy. As Eric Hoffer so eloquently put it, "We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand."[0] The pharmaceutical industry has strong incentives to emphasize benefits and downplay harm from drugs, especially in the long term effects[1]. That is assuming that the drugs are actually manufactured correctly[2]. And even drugs manufactured correctly can decay on the shelf into carcinogens at a million times the safe limit, and (almost) no one bothers to check[3]. I once sat through a doctor going through how to use the ADHD meds, and my head started to hurt. How to take one type before sleep so it kicks in just as the kid wakes up for school, but another works faster or slower, and on and on. And all of this from doctors (and medical students) who can tell you everything about how great drugs are but spend close to zero time learning about the uses of exercise in improving health outcomes[4].
None of the resources you link specifically address psychostimulants for ADHD. Handwaving and vaguely suggesting one drug is pretty much like all others isn't going to cut it: drugs don't work that way, drugs are _specific_.
The sordid situation around generics manufacturing has no bearing whatsoever on the effectiveness of plain old dexamphetamine or methylphenidate in helping people with ADHD. The FDA approval process doesn't impact how drugs work, just how they're licensed. And just because one single drug contained a carcinogenic ingredient doesn't suddenly mean they all do.
I'll give you one thing though: exercise helps people with ADHD. In addition to psychostimulants.
I have no clue whether the proposed lifestyles changes would help a person with ADHD. But the idea that a "chemical imbalance" cannot be influenced by lifestyle changes is a bit crazy. For many people that have an imbalance of sugar in their blood, a diet change will do miracles. Vitamin D imbalance (which is actually a hormone imbalance)? Sun exposure or diet change will be enough for many people.
We all take for granted that lifestyle changes can do actual change to our body, but for some reason the brain often seems exempt from this.
Obviously there are conditions, both psychological and not, where drugs are the best course of action, but lifestyle changes are not "wishing away" any more than trying to drug away an emotional distress due to life conditions.
Depression can also be caused by imbalances in the brain's chemistry, and can in many cases be mitigated by lifestyle changes. Why should ADHD be different?
What's the prior for assuming they don't all have ADHD?
Depression and anxiety feel like things that you might have a genetic tendency towards, but that a specific shared experience might bring out in multiple people and people wouldn't be surprised by that.
It feels like ADHD is being treated more as thing you have or don't, but is that correct?
One of the recommended things for ADHD is excercise, which kind of implies you could make someone ADHD by stopping them excercising.
If that's not real ADHD then how can excercising more help? If it helps, you've not 'got' ADHD, you just needed more excercise?
We were already at fake ADHD prescriptions. It's trivial to do, there is no diagnosis criteria beyond "I can't focus". ADHD medications are singularly the only reason I can work, which is the same for a lot of people. We are a culture that puts extreme amounts of work first. Especially in college. The workloads and competition are so great now that you cannot compete without drugs.
The students faking diagnosis for scripts are screwing themselves over by playing with fire. They literally can be down regulating their endogenous dopamine release and become dependent on stimulants to feel normal, therefore effectively giving themselves ADHD.
I witnessed this in med school students trying to get an edge on their exams and competing against classmates.
Be careful abusing neurotransmitter altering stims if you’re neurotypical, you may just get exactly what you asked for…
I think adults should be able to get prescriptions of Adderall without diagnosis. Amphetamines makes most people more productive (at least in the short term), and the medical and addiction risks are low when used at prescribed doses.
I think there are significant classism issues around requiring expensive doctors visits for adults to be able to access these medications.
How many silicon valley tech people have questionable ADHD diagnoses, but get a prescription because it lets them code for 8 hours straight without taking a break? Because of doctor shopping, de facto state of this country is that it's legal for rich people to take amphetamines if they wish, but undiagnosed poor people risk prison and dangerous adulterants for the same.
Nothing wrong with making a mockery of an already flawed medical system. These “mental illnesses” fit wide ranging bands, and damage people by treating them with medication when waiting a year would see a cessation of the issue without the long term impact of drugs
Then they update some kind of lexicon with new disorders people previously didn't know they could have (because they didn't exist) and invent groups of barely related things.
Something like: you might not have asperger syndrome but you certainly have hacker news. You might also be suffering from tik tok, google and facebook.
I had a great suggestion for the mental disorder list:
You are suffering from something like SCROOGE or GREED when your wealth is greater than X but are unable to do anything with your life other than attempt to expand your wealth. This is an extremely serious issue with billions suffering for generations to come.
Any kind of non lethal forced medication would work really. Something to slow them down, something to make them suffer greatly, prayer, etc
I found this trend on tiktok randomly and I have to say it's deeply deeply concerning, the darkest side of social media I've ever seen.
While social trends and fads have existed/influenced before but I think people might be underestimating how addictive and pervasive tiktok is, especially to young impressionable minds.
There is already an epidemic of anxiety among younger millennials and gen z, I shudder to think what kind of end effects these depersonalization/loss of identity memes can have over the long term.
I hate to break it to everyone, but the American Psychological Association does the exact same thing. Our ruling elite figured out a long time ago that, instead of taking responsibility for societal problems, it’s not only cheaper but in fact more profitable to convince struggling individuals that their problems are all in their own head. Unsurprisingly, playing loose with reality like that tends to get out of control.
Are you suggesting the American psychological association and some combination of billionaires and or politicians are conspiring to push mental health problems as an alternative for worsening quality of life in order to distract from problems that would impact profits if addressed?
It’s systemic. Nobody is scheming in a backroom. They are selecting solutions to problems as they come. Liberalism and capitalism is all it’s ever taken to royally ruin a society.
I volunteer on Crisis Text Line and have spoken to a number of people who are self-diagnosed — some older, some young. I don’t know where people have gotten their info when they explain that their emotions are complicated by DID or because they think have BPD. I can imagine a number of people spend a lot of time on social media since CTL has outreach initiatives through the different platforms or we’ve gone viral on different TikTok platforms. We celebrate the publicity, but what do we know of the effect on someone wondering if they too share in a mental health condition?
Where do we draw the line between exposure to mental health issues and over-diagnosing? I can say that a lot of people who come to our service have legitimate concerns while others might just be teens with typical angst, except now they are told theirs is diagnosable as X.
DID = dissociative identity disorder
BPD = borderline personality disorder
(Cool it with the acronym policing. Both acronyms are referenced in the link. Reading comments isn’t the same as reading the source.)
there is a big element of this in the same circles of people who are convincing people they have BPD, DID, ADHD, Ticks and Seizures.
I only know because my kid is struggling with severe mental issues and is currently in the hospital. I got on their tiktok and discord and saw the "communities" they were in and many of the ones espousing disorders are convincing kids who aren't sexually active that their inactiveness is a specific sexuality and defacto trans or non binary as a means of relating to other kids who have the same experiences when none seem to be actively trans/gay/non binary in their offline lives.
I believe this is across many age groups, it overlaps to conditions such as ADHD, OCD, gluten intolerance and also to sexual and gender identities.
People don't want to talk about the later parts i.e. gender/sexual identity because they're ostensibly 'inherent' but I believe this is a huge mistake.
If 'Goth' were put in a book as some kind of known identity that people assume, then kids would think they 'have' or 'are' ... 'Goth'.
That doesn't delegitimize the nature of real afflictions and identities etc. so much as it highlights how much power our minds have over reality.
I think this even overlaps into identities or 'self beliefs' such as being 'healthy and tough' or 'broken and in need'.
Some people I know never, ever get sick. I suggest they do, but they just 'tough it out' and don't talk about it. Other people I believe make sure everyone knows they are sick and like the sympathy they endear. The placebo effect demonstrates just a hint of the power of our minds, so I wonder how much this has to do with healthy wellbeing. I suggest the 'toughing it out' is probably a good mental state, until it becomes a problem with getting actual needed medical attention.
I'm on mental illness TikTok and I've watched this trend develop. Happy to answer any questions as someone that spends hours a day scrolling.
My main takeaways are this:
* People with mental illness are finding each other, sharing their experiences, and it's enormously validating for them. The algorithm is bringing them together and it creates a lot of engagement because there's a highly charged emotional human connection thing happening.
* The short form recording/publishing experience on a phone is so accessible to people that we're getting totally new viewpoints. I follow a schizophrenic that draws the faces he sees. It's fascinating. I'm sure this content will be researched for years. It's a self-reporting gold mine.
* People are struggling, finding community, then seeking the help of mental health professionals. That's a good news story.
* There's a lot of actual mental health professionals on TikTok spreading good information. It's fairly obvious who's legitimate.
The technology is helping similar people find each other in the same way that related YouTube videos help you find similar content.
In a way, it's because the person and the content are merging.
So yeah, it's accelerating, but it's probably a good trend.
GMA spins it weirdly because they're a boomer outlet, but fundamentally it's a generation waking up to mental health issues because an algorithm is putting that content in front of the people that are likely to have those issues.
Personally, I never gave much serious consideration to the idea that I have autism. But after watching a lot of recommended content, it's pretty likely that I do and the algorithm was right in identifying similarities. I'm not going to get a formal diagnosis because it doesn't serve any purpose for me, but I have no doubt I could.
The algorithm also thinks I'm a communist lesbian, which is very far off the mark, but I can sort of see why it would have binned me that way based on the content that I find interesting.
For people that haven't directly interacted with TT, I'd encourage just because it's so impressive. It will find interests you didn't even know you had. In some cases, that might be how you figure out you have ADHD or that you're gay or whatever your special group is that you didn't know you were a part of yet.
Thanks for sharing your experience, yours seems to be the positive side of the phenomenon in question.
I think we’re the same age, so keep that in mind, but I can’t help but disagree with the thrust of why you think this is a good thing. I think that increasing the efficiency of connecting individuals to communities based on real or perceived mental health problems creates new challenges that may nullify the positive aspects.
> creates new challenges that may nullify the positive aspects
It's a good thing because it means that finally something is changing.
We're developing a shared language and having a discussion about these really prevalent untreated mental issues.
I'm watching people discover that they're actually not "lazy" or "stupid" or "not good enough" or "an introvert", but that they actually have "sensory issues" or "meltdowns" or "executive dysfunction" or "social anxiety".
Simply having the language to discuss these things is very powerful. It reminds me a lot of when gay people started labeling things and creating cultural norms. Or when "new atheism" spread through the internet and made not believing a mainstream acceptable position (well, mostly, we're getting there).
I remember the first time I met other atheists and realized that I wasn't crazy after all. Tons of people are having that moment now for mental health disorders.
Also, you might not realize the scale of the problem. The estimated number of just children suffering with mental health disorders is about 10% and increasing (primarily ADHD, anxiety, depression). The real number is probably double that.
I think DID tiktok is different and more concerning than the other support-group style subcommunities.
DID is an extremely rare disorder, and all of the videos I've seen seem very performative. I think the majority of DID tiktok probably doesn't have DID, but they found that it gives them attention.
I definitely worry that performing a mental disorder for attention for a prolonged period could lead to actual disorders.
A friend of mine recently had her teenage daughter "come out" as autistic. Her daughter is... SO NOT autistic. She's a social butterfly who's extraordinarily empathetic, never struggled for a moment to make friends, never struggled with focusing, coordination, language comprehension, eye contact, reading facial expressions, or any of the myriad symptoms of autism.
But her daughter is quirky and artistic and sometimes gets a little anxious in large social gatherings. Due to TikTok, she became CONVINCED this means she is autistic. She was also furious at her mother for refusing to accept this diagnosis.
At first her mom kind of shrugged off the self-diagnosis as a goofy teenage episode. ...But then her daughter's school psychologist started recommending occupational therapy and medication for her "autism."
My friend demanded to know what symptoms the psychologist was seeing, and was met with the following: "She doesn't have any obvious autism symptoms, but girls can be very, very good at masking their autism. And she's saying she thinks anxiety medication and autism therapy sessions would be helpful, and people don't ask for those sorts of things if they don't need it."
Friend immediately took her daughter to see another psychologist (this one who specializes in autism.) This specialist said she didn't see even a hint of autism, and felt the anxiety was mild, normal for a teenager, and would be harmful to medicate.
Now here's the weirdest part: according to this specialist, she keeps seeing this exact same scenario play out. Mildly awkward teenager gets addicted to TikTok, becomes convinced they're autistic, and gets furious at their parents for "denying them treatment." Baffled parents ends up taking them to this specialist, who confirms their gut instinct that their kid is 100% neurotypical.
The scariest part of this, according to the specialist, isn't teens going down stupid rabbit holes on social media. It's the new generation of psychologists (like the young school psychologist) that emphasize "positive reinforcement" of identity. Teen says they're autistic? Then they're autistic! Simple as that. Now hand them some drugs, because they "wouldn't be asking for it if they didn't need it."
The good news: my friend's daughter saw a therapist for a few months, talked through her anxiety, is doing way better, and now admits she doesn't think she has autism after all.
The bad news: It's the job of mental health professionals to provide proper guidance when it comes to diagnosis, medication, and therapy. And at the moment, many of our practitioners seem to be failing at this, choosing instead to reinforce teenage fantasies.
My daughter is going through this right now. I'm thankful I have good insurance because the hospital and therapy visits last year alone where over $100k...
Just want to say, I'm so sorry you're going through this, and best of luck to you and your daughter. You're a great parent for actually taking the time and effort (and money) to help her to the best of your ability.
There's also GD but it's so trendy that you're ostracized for even daring to say it's a mental illness now. Crazy world, but as others have said designer illnesses are hardly a new thing.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadThe algorithm of giving you what you prefer when there are too many choices is inevitable. Alternative is a bunch of people deciding what it should and should not give you. It really doesn't matter who those people work for.[1]
Positive feedback loop and information bubbles are not great but "the algorithm" is really not worse in this regard than leaving in a small village.
1. The algorithm is still a bunch of people but that's orthogonal to your point. People will prefer algorithms fitting their needs better and they are able to switch (yes monopolies, but that's a different thread already).
As far as I remember standards were not higher. They were different.
Plus really, the cartoons I remember were full of stuff like find a sleeping pills in parents cabinet, give somebody as a joke, put a pin on a chair so somebody sits on it etc. Racism everywhere. Stuff that is even hard to find nowadays because they had to scrub it. Sexually suggestive themes, like have you watched lion king? Or anything really... it seemed to be way more explicit.
We luckily tend to remember past as better than it was. There's also nostalgia element and there's cultural difference. Just like there are different cultures around the globe and most think that other ones are gross, the same happens in the time dimension.
edit: to be clear, things could be better, we should point out what's wrong and try to fix it, but with some more decent optimization function than "proximity to good the old days"
This was not possible to do at scale 10+ years ago.
To me more fundamental is access to information that anybody has above certain age. Yes you still need to know how to interpret it, that's one of the most valuable skills nowadays, but in the past you had just no way of fact checking and doing more research on what has been given to you apart from spending hours in library which would not be very productive unless you were interested in some relatively popular chunk of history.
You get served stuff targeted at you but it's just information, and you have a way to put it in a bigger context. It was not possible before. The fact that you learn about unknown unknowns through a magic giving content box is also amazing. It is not perfect and have its issues, and I would love for everybody to just garden their homepages which I could visit like it's .. oh shit well 30 years ago, but I'm not sure I want to spend time on gardening mine when I can learn so much instead.
It's fascinating!
What the concern is has to do with scale, and whether this old problem is about to get a lot worse with new technologies. I tend to agree with this, I think the way information scales these days makes this much more dangerous a phenomenon.
It's very odd IMO. Feels a bit like religious evangelism.
ADHD is now the lack of motivation. OCD has been hit just as badly. It is being used synonymously with liking order and cleanliness (which almost every human does).
And the most bizarre out of the bunch is the pseudo-personality disorder community on tiktok. They come up with names like 'shade' and 'lucius' for their supposed 'alters', all of which have assigned functions like 'the gatekeeper' and 'the emotional supporter', and can of course be activated on demand in front of a camera.
And get this, none of them are diagnosed (only 'self-dxed') because supposedly the medical system is biased and treats them unfairly.
It's not clear how harmful any of this is but boy is it weird.
The difference comes in the utility of that identity. If somebody is latching onto something which drives them to believe that getting one particular type of medication is the one and only way to fix their life, despite not really fitting the diagnostic criteria for the associated condition, I'd say that's a problem. Getting a new label (like asexual) which lets you make sense of your life and probably doesn't change your existing behaviour at all, let alone make you want treatment, I'd say is beneficial.
If people really did have multiple personalities, it would be more surprising if they didn't come up with terms to describe them. I also don't see why it should be impossible for them to switch intentionally at least some of the time.
Perhaps a lot of these people are pretending, essentially acting the parts of imaginary friends. I honestly don't see a problem with that. A lot of people seem to benefit from talking to God, who I also suspect is imaginary, and that's fine so long as they don't harm others as a result. If someone feels better being "Alice" at one time and "Bob" at another, then I'm happy to accept them as such. And on the off chance that their mind really is split into multiple consciousnesses, then it would be really shitty to mock or marginalize them for it.
Wait, since when is 1.4% of the adult population "extremely rare"?
All according to quick Google searches, not deep vetting of the numbers.
0: https://www.google.com/search?q=borderline+personality+disor...
1. My understanding is that these videos often talk about very general symptoms, that could be caused by these mental disorders -- but also by a lot of other things.
2. The videos take on an authoritative tone, which does a good job of convincing people (especially kids). I've written about this phenomenon (albeit playing out in written form) on HN before:
> Welcome to the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment.
> The scary thing is that many readers will also often take anything said confidently enough to be fact. This is also basically how a lot of disinformation works. Say it authoritatively, and you'll become an authority on the matter to many people.
3. The 'nocebo' effect is very real! It's the opposite of a placebo effect, where if you believe you have an illness, your body actually starts showing symptoms.
4. I'd believe that in a lot of cases it's less about a kid consciously thinking "Ooh it's trendy to have this, let me say I do", and more like kids thinking "Oh this seems to be a widespread thing, and I experience these symptoms sometime (I space out! And I have trouble sleeping! And I have a jittery leg! and so on), sure seems like I might have this!"
5. Very important quote from article:
> "If you spend 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes viewing people talk about these disorders over and over again, that can make it seem like these conditions are a lot more prevalent than they actually are in the world,"
Repetition makes it seem like a bigger deal, and makes it stick around in the kids' head. So the next time they space out in the classroom naturally the thought might occur ("Do I have dissociative disorder?").
6. If lots of kids start showing up to doctors' saying they have (for eg) BPD when they don't, it'll be a lot harder for those with actual symptoms to convince doctors of their situation and receive proper medical care, which is very worrying.
______
All this said:
1. I'm just a user of the internet - not a psychologist, nor someone with relevant formal training, so please take my hypotheses as just that -- hypotheses, not fact.
2. I haven't actually watched many of these videos, so if someone has links, please share them! I think a lot of people on HN might like to watch them and analyse what's going on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Days_in_a_Mad-House
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly#Asylum_expos%C3%A9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
Incorrect diagnosis is already a problem in mental health-- attempts at self diagnosis typically only compound the problem. It's one of those areas where you really want patients to go and report unbiased experiences (in so far as that is possible even without preconceived self diagnosis)
1 post on Facebook might reach 100s, 1000s of people. Rarely a page with large enough following may hit 100,000s of people.
1 post on TikTok from a moderate influencer can hit millions.
That’s not to say other social media forms haven’t had bad trends in the past, but TikTok has had far more and in a far shorter amount of time. People just don’t interact with other social content the way they buy into TikTok, which is dangerous and leads to far more misinformation — it was maybe not even 3 weeks ago I had a bunch of my friends sending me a bunch of popular TikTok videos and asking about how AI Transformers were here and taking over the world (they are, but transformers in AI have nothing in common with the movies).
As a parent, I've experienced this in the last year. It was pretty easy to identify and correct for. Teens try out novel behaviors regularly. It's a good strategy for figuring out identity and maturing, but it does have these weird edge-cases that being on the lookout for and gently applying reality maintenance mechanisms corrects for.
1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201609/bri...
I've almost never seen anything actually interesting, insightful or even just fun with that stamp. Just a handful of times. So it looks to me like it's become the sewer of the internet. You might find a gold ring there but you have to wade through knee deep shit to get to it :)
Of course this is also the reason I've never even considered joining. Though I left Facebook too and have never been on Twitter.
It’s great. I think it’s more what you make it than any other social media platform. I watch videos and I get other videos that I’ll like. If I was interested in other things they would show up on my page, through the algorithm working really well. Nobody crowbars stuff in e.g. I don’t see any maga shit, I just see really entertaining content.
Obviously this self diagnosis is a very real issue, but it’s not caused by Tik tok. Tik tok is just good at surfacing the problem though
https://www.reddit.com/r/fakedisordercringe/
Or will result in doctors not taking people seriously because only a small percentage of their patients claiming to have a mental illness actually have one.
I can see it going both ways.
In some cases it's positive: I've seen a few people be convinced to seek treatment for anxiety and depression disorders after seeing people they trust on social media open up about their own therapy experiences.
But the worst offender (in older students, anyway) has to be ADHD right now. The sheer amount of bad ADHD self-diagnosis material on TikTok and other platforms is unbelievable. Influencers inherently want to reach the broadest audience possible, so they have an inherent conflict of interest to convince as many people as possible that they have ADHD. "Follow me for more ADHD tips!"
The result is a lot of TikToks and other short-form content that misrepresents ADHD as everyday struggles such as not being able to remember everyone's names at parties or forgetting to get all of the groceries you need at the store. Watch enough of these videos and anyone can become convinced they have ADHD. At one point, it felt like everyone in one cohort was convinced they had undiagnosed ADHD and wanted to discuss it in the Slack as the explanation for everything in their lives. It got bad enough that people were coaching each other about how to convince skeptical doctors to prescribe ADHD meds by exaggerating specific symptoms, at which point we had to shut down such conversation. Watching the ADHD self-diagnosis misinformation spread like wildfire was honestly one of my more terrifying social media experiences in recent history.
But it gets even worse: During COVID, the US government suspended a rule that required patients to have established a past in-person relationship with a prescriber before receiving controlled substance prescriptions. Several startups are capitalizing on this rule change with subscription services to send you Adderall prescriptions after a short 5-minute Zoom with a doctor. And of course, these ads are being served up to the people consuming the ADHD self-diagnosis TikToks. It's only a few clicks to talk to a pill mill that will prescribe you Adderall (for a monthly fee, of course).
At this point, I'm beginning to fear that so many young people are self-diagnosing ADHD from internet misinformation that we're heading for a reckoning with ADHD medication prescribing. It's starting to feel a bit reminiscent of the prescription opioid pandemic, where opioids were being prescribed to basically everyone who requested them. It wouldn't be good for actual ADHD patients if countries started severely cracking down on prescription practices.
Simple stuff.
No thanks.
I'm glad I finally did. That one little pill makes me a better and happier person.
Even still, the stigma is reinforced by arbitrary rules that presume I am an addict: "You can only have a 30 day supply," "we can't fill the pending 'script until 31 days after you last picked it up," "no, you can't get it early even if you're traveling for over a month. You'll need to find a pharmacy there to fill it."
Then the burning pain started. So no more for me. I at least know what it’s like to stay on task. Helps some. Still a major struggle.
Even among those with an ADHD self-diagnosis, I don't think it's hugely related.
I take those 'online tests' for ADHD and pretty much always score as though I have it.
I can 100% see a lot of people reading about it, taking those tests and believing they have it.
Opium was seen as the main reason behind chinese inmigrants to the USA being better workers than whites (XIX), so it was outlawed. Of course, the narrative was that opium was evil (you can even read things like chinese men lured white women to opium dens to made them slaves).
I prefer to avoid drugs, legal or not. But the war on drugs, any drugs, makes zero sense to me. It's a shame that drugs that were known to treat e.g. depression were outlawed because "say no to drugs", and further research effectively halted for decades.
Even today, when a new substance is discovered and used for "fun" is immediately outlawed. If you want fun, your only legal option is alcohol, even when we know it's way worse than, say, ecstasy or acid.
For far too long we've been __blaming individuals__ for their ADHD symptoms, and that's just created a broken system. And for far too long we've not taken ADHD symptoms seriously, and seen it as a phase.
The other point is, if people want to get these stimulants, why not? We actually understand them pretty well, and if they're not abused (e.g. you're not taking huge doses of them), they're fine.
And yeah, ADHD has always existed. But our lives weren't designed around making the symptoms of ADHD be something we have to deal with day to day. ADHD's impact is the worst on office based jobs.
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Unrelated to the points I made above, but the recent more "understanding" of ADHD actually got me to go talk to a psychiatrist and got prescribed a stimulant based medicine for ADHD. I cried the first week I took it because it removed a fog from my brain that I had for my entire life.
I'm thankful that these discussions actually lead me to getting a diagnosis and medication.
If we followed the logic of the current social media version of ADHD diagnosis, everyone would have it.
People post things like:
> Short sentence. > Very very very long sentence dragging on for 20 lines in small font. > Haha you have ADHD if you didn't read the second part.
It's ridiculous, and it doesn't even touch the tip of the iceberg of what living like ADHD is actually like.
ADHD is an awful mental illness that attaching this warped definition to helps absolutely no one with. And I say that as someone who struggled for years to understand what my diagnosis actually meant because of this kind of vapid bullshit I seen pedaled on social media.
It's not just about misdiagnosing themselves, it's about people who have ADHD ending up with deep seated fundamental misunderstandings of their disorder is due to the constant bombardment of misinformation.
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Also a pill mill has nothing to do with capitalism. If you're going to use words learn what they mean first.
The idea of a pill mill is physicians will jump to giving you the pills with minimal establishment of history.
It's trying to undermine the controls around the medication in such a way that it practically becomes a (pay-us-to-access-it) candy jar
You're using a service that is literally selling itself as a way to get pills for a specific disorder with the absolute least amount of friction, that's barely a step removed from pill mill.
They're even putting mini-quizes up for people to know if there's a good chance they'll get their diagnosis. Since you don't see a psychiatrist before "passing", you're literally being implicitly "coached" on how to get diagnosed.
Most (good) psychiatrists will take multiple visits with someone who has never been diagnosed before diagnosing let alone giving you pills for it, meanwhile these people are advertising how in 20 minutes you can be getting access to pills...
There's even stories of them turning away people who might have more issues than just ADHD, that's how laser focused their "treatment" is. If you were being given the same level of psychiatric treatment as a normal psychiatrist it'd be absurd to be told "I won't treat you because you have depression", for example.
Researchers found by age 5, children who spent two hours or more per day, looking at screens, were 7.7 times more likely to meet criteria for a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, than children who watched screens for 30 minutes or less each day.
It's a substantial result. They talk about practical and ethical reasons they can't establish the causal relationship, too.
I'm guilty of being a little tongue in cheek, but I'd try to limit a kid's exposure to early screen time and ease them into things like TikTok.
You can have conditions exacerbate the symptoms associated with ADHD.
> We've just...not addressed it and seen rising depression, anxiety, suicide rates.
People are not developing major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders from not being on ADHD medications, at least not on the scale you’re referring to. “Increasing” rates of those disorders has largely been due to increased awareness and discussion of them, as well as some of the very patterns happening to ADHD right now: pathologizing normal feelings, romanticization of mental disorders, and self-diagnosis fueled by online communities.
> if people want to get these stimulants, why not?
Because they are not medical professionals. What they want needs to be vetted and discussed with a doctor.
So your assertion that it's a "disorder they likely didn’t have at an extremely early stage in their development" seems to be totally off the mark. Speaking as someone who really wishes their parents had medicated them for their childhood ADHD diagnosis. It likely would have saved me a lot of pain, heartache and C's in middle and high school. Not to mention college.
It's easier for medical professionals to accept you have ADHD as an adult if you were diagnosed as a child, but that doesn't mean that all people with no childhood diagnosis cannot have ADHD.
He's claiming that childhood diagnosis is bunk. He's insisting that kids are unlikely to have ADHD.
I'm asserting that the behaviors for ADHD show up in children first and foremost.
I'm not saying that receiving clinical diagnosis as a child is the only way to have an adult diagnosis: In fact I'm not talking about diagnostics at all. It's that you _had_ ADHD as a kid, undiagnosed or otherwise, means you likely _have_ ADHD as an adult. I never once posited that someone with no diagnosis as a child is precluded from being diagnosed as an adult; however they should have had childhood symptoms based on the DSM as I understand it.
I'm arguing with someone who denies the existence of childhood ADHD in a naive "kids are just hyper don't drug them" argument.
Evidence for this? ADHD meds have completely made my depression/anxiety go away because I'm no longer fighting with my brain. This has been the experience for dozens of other people that I know.
> Because they are not medical professionals. What they want needs to be vetted and discussed with a doctor.
Yeah. It's a schedule 2 drug. Which means you *need* to discuss it with a doctor anyway.
I still disagree with it being a scheduled drug. I wonder how many people are in prison because of self medication?
Compared to 3 to 5% of the adult population in same estimation.
I think we need to start verbalizing the root cause of that statement and go all the way to ‘increasing rates has largely been due to increased pressure to succeed academically and professionally in knowledge based professions’.
You ain’t gonna just grind Leetcode all day without a little something.
For whatever reason our society has a huge and totally inconsistent bias against medication/drugs to change brain chemistry.
To me, there is little doubt that people "self medicating" with coffee in the morning would never fly if coffee was just introduced to society yesterday.
We don't even bother to think about the unimaginable amount of good that has been done to society with people self medicating with coffee.
In the same sense , I can't imagine the amount of harm all this untreated ADHD that we don't take seriously will do to society in 2022.
Source: I'm a doctor, also https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html
Specifically, it’s important to differentiate between symptoms “emerging” in adulthood vs. being identified in adulthood. What they wrote implies that most adult diagnoses are likely not ADHD if they did not get a diagnosis earlier in life.
Sure, but that doesn't mean childhood diagnosis, so I’m not sure how that's relevant to the discussion.
This really explains a lot - I have been seeing a sudden surge of of ADHD "diagnosis" or ADHD related content on all the popular social platforms (including HN) in the past 6 months or so, and was pondering if it was a concerted social media campaign by some pharma company or fund managers.
For those of you wondering if you have ADHD, please be aware that the more common depression and anxiety disorder often share similar symptoms. Some personality disorders too may appear like ADHD to the untrained. It is very easy to misdiagnose yourself when it comes to such mental ailment.
Sucks that there's people milking it for clout or whatever but it makes sense it's a word of mouth thing, I was never made aware of its existence or it's symptoms in school or anything. If you go by my education the only mental disorder that exists is depression
As for depression that has seemingly turned out to have been a side effect of untreatment. I've been sad or unhappy and all the normal down emotions but the depression basically dropped to nothing. Anxiety is falling away slowly too
I'm in the UK too so it's like a tenner a month for the prescription, probably not a money thing here at least
Similarly to how self diagnosis isn't the way don't self-undiagnose yourself either if you're suspecting something, ask a doctor rather than a web forum
It’s already affecting ADHD patients. Most ADHD medications are controlled substances, and the rules around getting prescriptions for controlled substances can be draconian.
As someone who has experienced this phenomenon in the US, outside the US is so much better. My doctor just prescribes me nice round numbers of pills, usually ending with two zeroes. I almost couldn't believe it at first.
The best suggestion I got was find a independent community pharmacy. Transfer scripts there. The staff will get to know you and when you say “my vacation is next week can I get my refill a week early?”, there is a good chance they’ll say “oh yeah, you mentioned that trip. I’ll get it filled today.”
You’re less of a number and more of a community member.
With the big chain pharmacies you’re fighting against them actually knowing you well enough to trust your request is legit AND the fact their hands may be tied by corporate.
At smaller pharmacies the pharmacist can often make the call themselves.
It’s really due to the opioid epidemic. Pharmacies were flagged as “you should have known it was inappropriate use”. It’s the pharmacist who will be questioned as to their judgement. If they can say “I’ve know Mr Smith for 10 years, he fills all his prescriptions here, has only asked for early refills 4 times in 5 years and each time was due to travel. In my judgement he was no misusing the controlled substance.”, then they’ll be happy to do it.
If they don’t recognize you and when they look you’re a new customer and your reason is the same one they hear all day long from obvious abusers, then they won’t put their ass on the line for you. Double so if they know corporate will say no.
And not just in the general sense of "this shit is dehumanizing", but in the sense that the added bureaucratic hurdles are specifically the sort of thing that an ADHD patient would have problems satisfying without access to the drug. It's like some kind of Catch-22.
Besides the medications, an ADHD diagnosis can also get you special academic privileges such as extra time on exams.
Not only ADHD: dyslexia too, and probably other diseases / disorders related to the mental and neurological sphere.
This is problematic, because on one hand it's not hard to fake a disease if you know the symptoms and on the other hand it's quite easy to be convinced that you have a disease if you read the symptoms online. And I honestly don't know if doctors are able to discern "fake" illnesses from "real" ones when the diagnosis is essentially 100% derived from patients reporting their symptoms.
Medication should be the last resort, only for severe cases, or perhaps not used every day so that the brain can recover. 4 day on and 3 days off seem to be a popular dosing schedule by some mindful advocates.
Of course, it’s incredibly difficult to do all the things mentioned above to aid optimal dopamine levels.
The way our society operates, it’s much easier to take the shortcut and pop some amphetamine after you wake up to get your day going.
Exceptions apply to legit, severe cases.
Andrew Huberman has a good podcast about the topic. [0]
[0] https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-37-adhd-how-an...
Fixing these issues would thus reduce them. It's not quiet as easy to diagnose ADHD as you seem to think, so a lot of people just live unhealthy, which gives them similar symptoms
* Sleep only 5 hours a day
* Spend 5 hours on TikTok every day
* Eat a diet of mostly processed carbohydrates
* Stay sedentary all day
Let’s see if this person starts showing ADHD symptoms after a week. Should we start medicating them?
I am not saying that there are no _legit_ cases of ADHD when it is indeed genetic or trauma based that cannot be easily fixed by lifestyle changes. There are people who really need the meds. But I am betting that that these people are only a very low percentage of the currently medicated ones.
Psychostimulants for ADHD are universally associated with better outcomes, even in people who appear to manage without them. They reduce depression, anxiety, drug abuse and mortality. Heck, a lot of people with ADHD even sleep better while on them!
Stop meddling in other people's evidence-based medical treatment.
When someone in the medical field starts talking about universal outcomes in relation to biological entities, my spidey sense goes crazy. As Eric Hoffer so eloquently put it, "We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand."[0] The pharmaceutical industry has strong incentives to emphasize benefits and downplay harm from drugs, especially in the long term effects[1]. That is assuming that the drugs are actually manufactured correctly[2]. And even drugs manufactured correctly can decay on the shelf into carcinogens at a million times the safe limit, and (almost) no one bothers to check[3]. I once sat through a doctor going through how to use the ADHD meds, and my head started to hurt. How to take one type before sleep so it kicks in just as the kid wakes up for school, but another works faster or slower, and on and on. And all of this from doctors (and medical students) who can tell you everything about how great drugs are but spend close to zero time learning about the uses of exercise in improving health outcomes[4].
[0] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/eric_hoffer_142924
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/jacob-stegenga-on-medical-nihilism/
[2] https://peterattiamd.com/katherineeban/
[3] https://peterattiamd.com/davidlight/
[4] https://www.exerciseismedicine.org/
The sordid situation around generics manufacturing has no bearing whatsoever on the effectiveness of plain old dexamphetamine or methylphenidate in helping people with ADHD. The FDA approval process doesn't impact how drugs work, just how they're licensed. And just because one single drug contained a carcinogenic ingredient doesn't suddenly mean they all do.
I'll give you one thing though: exercise helps people with ADHD. In addition to psychostimulants.
We all take for granted that lifestyle changes can do actual change to our body, but for some reason the brain often seems exempt from this.
Obviously there are conditions, both psychological and not, where drugs are the best course of action, but lifestyle changes are not "wishing away" any more than trying to drug away an emotional distress due to life conditions.
Here are one of those ads :
https://www.reddit.com/r/fakedisordercringe/comments/rsbkah/...
Depression and anxiety feel like things that you might have a genetic tendency towards, but that a specific shared experience might bring out in multiple people and people wouldn't be surprised by that.
It feels like ADHD is being treated more as thing you have or don't, but is that correct?
One of the recommended things for ADHD is excercise, which kind of implies you could make someone ADHD by stopping them excercising.
If that's not real ADHD then how can excercising more help? If it helps, you've not 'got' ADHD, you just needed more excercise?
I witnessed this in med school students trying to get an edge on their exams and competing against classmates.
Be careful abusing neurotransmitter altering stims if you’re neurotypical, you may just get exactly what you asked for…
I think there are significant classism issues around requiring expensive doctors visits for adults to be able to access these medications.
How many silicon valley tech people have questionable ADHD diagnoses, but get a prescription because it lets them code for 8 hours straight without taking a break? Because of doctor shopping, de facto state of this country is that it's legal for rich people to take amphetamines if they wish, but undiagnosed poor people risk prison and dangerous adulterants for the same.
Something like: you might not have asperger syndrome but you certainly have hacker news. You might also be suffering from tik tok, google and facebook.
I had a great suggestion for the mental disorder list:
You are suffering from something like SCROOGE or GREED when your wealth is greater than X but are unable to do anything with your life other than attempt to expand your wealth. This is an extremely serious issue with billions suffering for generations to come.
Any kind of non lethal forced medication would work really. Something to slow them down, something to make them suffer greatly, prayer, etc
While social trends and fads have existed/influenced before but I think people might be underestimating how addictive and pervasive tiktok is, especially to young impressionable minds.
There is already an epidemic of anxiety among younger millennials and gen z, I shudder to think what kind of end effects these depersonalization/loss of identity memes can have over the long term.
Where do we draw the line between exposure to mental health issues and over-diagnosing? I can say that a lot of people who come to our service have legitimate concerns while others might just be teens with typical angst, except now they are told theirs is diagnosable as X.
DID = dissociative identity disorder
BPD = borderline personality disorder
(Cool it with the acronym policing. Both acronyms are referenced in the link. Reading comments isn’t the same as reading the source.)
ALTAOYT: acronyms lower the accessibility of your text.
I only know because my kid is struggling with severe mental issues and is currently in the hospital. I got on their tiktok and discord and saw the "communities" they were in and many of the ones espousing disorders are convincing kids who aren't sexually active that their inactiveness is a specific sexuality and defacto trans or non binary as a means of relating to other kids who have the same experiences when none seem to be actively trans/gay/non binary in their offline lives.
(Sorry, it just had to be said.)
If 'Goth' were put in a book as some kind of known identity that people assume, then kids would think they 'have' or 'are' ... 'Goth'.
That doesn't delegitimize the nature of real afflictions and identities etc. so much as it highlights how much power our minds have over reality.
I think this even overlaps into identities or 'self beliefs' such as being 'healthy and tough' or 'broken and in need'.
Some people I know never, ever get sick. I suggest they do, but they just 'tough it out' and don't talk about it. Other people I believe make sure everyone knows they are sick and like the sympathy they endear. The placebo effect demonstrates just a hint of the power of our minds, so I wonder how much this has to do with healthy wellbeing. I suggest the 'toughing it out' is probably a good mental state, until it becomes a problem with getting actual needed medical attention.
We really need to understand this a bit better.
My main takeaways are this:
* People with mental illness are finding each other, sharing their experiences, and it's enormously validating for them. The algorithm is bringing them together and it creates a lot of engagement because there's a highly charged emotional human connection thing happening.
* The short form recording/publishing experience on a phone is so accessible to people that we're getting totally new viewpoints. I follow a schizophrenic that draws the faces he sees. It's fascinating. I'm sure this content will be researched for years. It's a self-reporting gold mine.
* People are struggling, finding community, then seeking the help of mental health professionals. That's a good news story.
* There's a lot of actual mental health professionals on TikTok spreading good information. It's fairly obvious who's legitimate.
Do you think that social media apps (not necessarily just Tiktok, but the lot of them) are contributing to an acceleration of this trend?
In a way, it's because the person and the content are merging.
So yeah, it's accelerating, but it's probably a good trend.
GMA spins it weirdly because they're a boomer outlet, but fundamentally it's a generation waking up to mental health issues because an algorithm is putting that content in front of the people that are likely to have those issues.
Personally, I never gave much serious consideration to the idea that I have autism. But after watching a lot of recommended content, it's pretty likely that I do and the algorithm was right in identifying similarities. I'm not going to get a formal diagnosis because it doesn't serve any purpose for me, but I have no doubt I could.
The algorithm also thinks I'm a communist lesbian, which is very far off the mark, but I can sort of see why it would have binned me that way based on the content that I find interesting.
For people that haven't directly interacted with TT, I'd encourage just because it's so impressive. It will find interests you didn't even know you had. In some cases, that might be how you figure out you have ADHD or that you're gay or whatever your special group is that you didn't know you were a part of yet.
I think we’re the same age, so keep that in mind, but I can’t help but disagree with the thrust of why you think this is a good thing. I think that increasing the efficiency of connecting individuals to communities based on real or perceived mental health problems creates new challenges that may nullify the positive aspects.
It's a good thing because it means that finally something is changing.
We're developing a shared language and having a discussion about these really prevalent untreated mental issues.
I'm watching people discover that they're actually not "lazy" or "stupid" or "not good enough" or "an introvert", but that they actually have "sensory issues" or "meltdowns" or "executive dysfunction" or "social anxiety".
Simply having the language to discuss these things is very powerful. It reminds me a lot of when gay people started labeling things and creating cultural norms. Or when "new atheism" spread through the internet and made not believing a mainstream acceptable position (well, mostly, we're getting there).
I remember the first time I met other atheists and realized that I wasn't crazy after all. Tons of people are having that moment now for mental health disorders.
Also, you might not realize the scale of the problem. The estimated number of just children suffering with mental health disorders is about 10% and increasing (primarily ADHD, anxiety, depression). The real number is probably double that.
Do you work for Tik Tok?
DID is an extremely rare disorder, and all of the videos I've seen seem very performative. I think the majority of DID tiktok probably doesn't have DID, but they found that it gives them attention.
I definitely worry that performing a mental disorder for attention for a prolonged period could lead to actual disorders.
And, for what it's worth, a personal anecdote:
A friend of mine recently had her teenage daughter "come out" as autistic. Her daughter is... SO NOT autistic. She's a social butterfly who's extraordinarily empathetic, never struggled for a moment to make friends, never struggled with focusing, coordination, language comprehension, eye contact, reading facial expressions, or any of the myriad symptoms of autism.
But her daughter is quirky and artistic and sometimes gets a little anxious in large social gatherings. Due to TikTok, she became CONVINCED this means she is autistic. She was also furious at her mother for refusing to accept this diagnosis.
At first her mom kind of shrugged off the self-diagnosis as a goofy teenage episode. ...But then her daughter's school psychologist started recommending occupational therapy and medication for her "autism."
My friend demanded to know what symptoms the psychologist was seeing, and was met with the following: "She doesn't have any obvious autism symptoms, but girls can be very, very good at masking their autism. And she's saying she thinks anxiety medication and autism therapy sessions would be helpful, and people don't ask for those sorts of things if they don't need it."
Friend immediately took her daughter to see another psychologist (this one who specializes in autism.) This specialist said she didn't see even a hint of autism, and felt the anxiety was mild, normal for a teenager, and would be harmful to medicate.
Now here's the weirdest part: according to this specialist, she keeps seeing this exact same scenario play out. Mildly awkward teenager gets addicted to TikTok, becomes convinced they're autistic, and gets furious at their parents for "denying them treatment." Baffled parents ends up taking them to this specialist, who confirms their gut instinct that their kid is 100% neurotypical.
The scariest part of this, according to the specialist, isn't teens going down stupid rabbit holes on social media. It's the new generation of psychologists (like the young school psychologist) that emphasize "positive reinforcement" of identity. Teen says they're autistic? Then they're autistic! Simple as that. Now hand them some drugs, because they "wouldn't be asking for it if they didn't need it."
The good news: my friend's daughter saw a therapist for a few months, talked through her anxiety, is doing way better, and now admits she doesn't think she has autism after all.
The bad news: It's the job of mental health professionals to provide proper guidance when it comes to diagnosis, medication, and therapy. And at the moment, many of our practitioners seem to be failing at this, choosing instead to reinforce teenage fantasies.