I think one thing that's kind of goes under the radar a lot of times about the rise of ADHD is that our environment has developed in ways that makes sustained attention and regulation really critical.
I think about this a lot because I have a ADHD and I've had it I was diagnosed as a woman in 2005 when it wasn't that popular. It's something that I've struggled with my whole life (ask my first grade teacher). The demands in an information heavy society has made everyday functioning more difficult for people with the set of regulation issues that is related to adhd.
The second part of it is that I am a big fan of focusing more on function than on symptoms when diagnosing people. I teach diagnosis at a university and this is why I focus on people's ability to function because we all have symptoms of a bunch of different disorders, but it doesn't usually rise to the point where interferes with people's daily functioning and that's the important difference. I think the social contagion in a lot of ways as accompanied by a lack of understanding about what a disorder is. If somebody says that ADHD is a superpower, then they don't have ADHD because obviously it's not interfering with her daily functioning and so they don't meet the criteria.
Is social contagion a big part of this problem? Absolutely. But so are pocket phones and social media. "[O]ur environment has developed in ways that make sustained attention and regulation really critical" --an excellent point, but may I change the last word to "difficult"?
With respect to your first observation on environment, I've really started to wonder if a significant portion of ADHD diagnoses for elementary-school boys isn't caused by contemporary parenting and education culture demanding that those boys sit still and work quietly for many more hours a day than was expected of prior generations.
Good piece, but in bringing up cases and examples I find it curious that you left out that one stinking dung heap left by the proverbial elephant in the living room: the bourgeois social contagion fueled trans phenomenon. Are there matters that you won’t even go near?
We don't discuss that issue here because the people who are interested in discussing it, generally, are not content with merely espousing their belief that there is a social contagion component to its increased incidence.
They also want to impute disreputable motivations and behaviors upon all sufferers, as well as offering prescriptions for how society should or should not accommodate them, often settling on no accommodations for `scientific' reasons.
Only this issue? Are there other issues that are verboten? If this is the only issue that is verboten, then that's a massive tell. Of what? I don't know, but it would be easy to figure out.
Thank you for writing about this issue Freddie. I am a therapist in California and I can say that this is a major issue and that it also creates barriers in treatment, as people who have told themselves (or been told by an online community) that they have an unchangeable neurological problem/disability are less likely to engage in techniques that could potentially help them. I have been considering writing a piece on my clinical experience with self-diagnosis and social contagion, perhaps I will follow your lead.
I first became aware of the phrase "social contagion" in the context of teen girls coalescing around the idea that they were really boys and then grouping themselves as gender dysphoric. The astounding rise in the number of them (compared to their extremely small numbers compared to boys who felt they were gender dysphoric) left health care professionals here and in Europe flabbergasted.
Pretty much all of your arguments here tracked the arguments of those of us who are concerned about separating out the social contagion -- and consequent media attention and deference to young people -- from the real cases of gender dysphoria.
Thanks for harping on an important issue that transcends individual manifestations. I keep reading you because you're annoying in all the right ways.
I'm with you on this Freddie. EVERYONE is on a spectrum - ALL kinds of spectrums. It's all shades of gray. I have attributes that may well qualify as ADHD or ADD, others that may well qualify as OCD, and yet others as Depression with a capital "D". Yet none of these are disabling or even more than occasionally annoying to myself or others at worst. I can pick literally any person I know who exhibit characteristics of those or other conditions. Are they disabling or even limiting in terms of living life in our culture? If the answer to that is yes, then that is one thing. Self-identification as being disabled is another thing entirely. Having a "disease" for social reasons - whether they be to gain advantage, sympathy or even just minor accommodation is understandable in our culture, but it doesn't make it right.
Now, my main point is that perhaps the culture is the cause. Rampant hyper-capitalism, competitive advantage by any means necessary is the unfortunate main characteristic of our modern US culture. THAT certainly causes all sorts of mental and emotional issues for people and is largely unrecognized as the source of so many of our ills. Yet it goes unquestioned like the force of gravity.
I ask you this - not in a flippant way - What comes after Capitalism? What comes next.... because surely this can't continue - a society that operates as a cancer on the planet and the people who live on it. I think so many of the real "ills" we attribute to mental/emotional issues are just people who can't cope under the stresses of the system we live within. Coping mechanisms, however poor or disabling, are still coping mechanisms.
Adult diagnoses of ADHD spiking has always just been transparently obvious to me in its roots: stimulants work regardless of whether or not you "really" have ADHD (a fact that makes many activists very angry, but is quickly proven by a talk with literally any undergraduate student in the country), and are professionally advantageous in most mentally intensive work. They're widely used and abused in my industry (tech) along with caffeine and nicotine and it's well known how to quickly get a diagnoses.
When the stakes are your performance in a several-hundred-thousands-of-dollars-a-year job and the hoops to jump through consist of a couple of lies to a doctor, why wouldn't we expect that to be a major factor?
If I understood you that in fact the existence of ADHD MAY be a result of what, where and who we are paying attention to as a society, wow do I get it.. I am OLD and grew up with cursive and memorizing spelling words and grammar and learning to write using same. In addition, I read and do read BOOKS which require time and space away from online sources whether computer, phone or TV. AND in another part of my life I am an IT computer solutions professional too BUT I had to concentrate and learn new ideas and about new spaces that were not there as I grew up iinto my years long career too. Without the ability to motivate myself and concentrate I would never have made it. Yes I do think it is more a societal disease for some, a means to ask for attention and time while being unable to manage one's own time in a productive way. I don't think of it as Attention Deficit so much as ATTENTION OVERLOAD all day every day...and an inability to withdraw to be more careful of one's own mental abillities to deal with this constant attentioon NOISE. Thank you.
The broad thrust of what you are trying to explore here is entirely legitimate, and many of your points made here are well argued. The problem is Freddie, you have a habit of coming across like a humongous bellend when you make them. A couple of suggestions coming from a primarily autistic perspective:
> Speak to more autistic people. Sounds like you have done an excellent job of speaking to families of Level 3 Autistic people, but you seem to have the strange notion that people with Level 1 Autism simply have a quirky personality trait with no effects on their life, and seem unaware that Level 2 Autism even exists. If you speak more to these communities you’ll understand why there is such a desire to organise around their disability and some of the motivations behind language choices.
> Distinguish more between those faking the disorders and those who actually have it. For all your talk of bravery, you are still remarkably coy when it comes to explicitly making a distinction and the net effect is that you end up painting the entire community of neurodivergent identifying people as being fake trend followers, which naturally pisses off the people who actually have it. Be explicit in distinguishing between the two and make it clearer your criticisms only apply to the latter.
> Acknowledge some of the difficulties faced by people without the most severe symptoms. Right now it comes across like you are saying either a disability has to be so severe that one is basically incapable of functioning without assistance, or that it’s basically nothing and people should stop claiming to be victims. There is a middle ground here, and telling legions of horrifically bullied but otherwise functional autistic people that actually they’re just faking it and are fine is a bit like lecturing a white working class boy born into poverty on how privileged he is.
Otherwise, some other thoughts:
> One’s answer to whether neurodivergence should have merch is the same one as to whether Pride should have it
> Obtaining an autism diagnosis in many places (the U.K. for example) is extremely difficult and so self diagnosis is frequently the only option
> At some point, most autistic people have someone tell them “you can’t really be autistic because you aren’t like Sheldon Cooper/Rain Man/insert other stereotype here”. As such, they tend to get very pissed off when someone who clearly has no idea what they are talking about doubts them
> If someone has spent their whole life being made to feel stupid, they are likely to simultaneously want to have their natural deficiencies to be fairly taken into account, and also have the things they are particularly good at be acknowledged. One way to do this is to simultaneously point out that something can be both a disability and a superpower at the same time.
> Most people really have no f***ing clue when it comes to autism. When you know what you are looking for, the sheer number of undiagnosed people operating in society becomes very obvious, and it’s clear most people don’t know it when they see it. It also becomes very obvious that many people have no idea how to handle autism, and this swiftly results in the harmful dynamics that make these communities so defensive in the first place.
Worth noting that under the auspices of social contagion, there is a perverse incentive to adopt identities as a form of commodification of the self. It’s not just about the money injected into the market surrounding identity exploitation, but the sublimation of subject into object. The mind-and-body becomes deracinated from itself.
I feel very conflicted honestly about the rising diagnoses.
ADHD and autism are real neurodevelopmental disorders, and deserve a lot of treatment and support. They’re not supposed to be trendy personality traits to lean back on. Even in the best case scenarios where people can harness their ADHD/autism for good, they struggle with the simple things that everyone else wouldn’t as much.
At least for ADHD, I wonder if its simultaneously over diagnosed for people who most likely don’t have it and under diagnosed for the people that DO have it because quite frankly, they won’t take the steps to be diagnosed. Whether it’s because their ability to retain attention, stick to tasks is far lower and other traits are much weaker than the general population.
I do want the field of psychology to be more strict in diagnosing who actually has it, but I don’t want to throw the baby out of the bathwater and let people think these diagnoses are just “excuses”.
My youngest daughter was diagnosed with Aspergers almost 20 years ago, when she was in 2d grade. The teacher thought there was something wrong with her. My wife said 'she is just like you, you should be tested." Yes, I also got the Apergers diagnosis - and I said "This is normal. I am an engineer/physcist/programmer and most of my peers are like me, many are worse.'
The idiots have medicalized a normal human variation. I have aspies up, down, and across my extended family - and not a single case of classic autism.
In my view, the psychologists who grouped autism and Aspergers together were clearly wrong - while they might have shared an aspect or two, they are probably fundamentally different phenomena. The aspies tend to find productive roles where they can function happily and productively, and that is what is important.
Psychology ranges on a lot of independent variables. Anybody who is at an extreme is going to have more difficulties dealing with the social world and finding friends and compatible people. It has always been so. If I remember correctly, the big 5 factors account for ~ 80 percent of variation in personality - and intelligence is an independent variable as well. That allows for a lot of variation from the median in widely different patterns.
Where do you draw the medicalization line? I would do it at the functional / non-functional line. I couldn't make it in the marketing / socialization sphere, I don't think that way. But engineering and the like is just natural for me. Others are the reverse.
Take a software developer who is good but not great and manages to stay employed more or less but is held back by hygiene and personality issues that could be remedied if addressed in a constructive manner. Now you could say he’s functional because he is houses and for the most part employed. But he is operating at a marginal level due to the issues noted.
If some modest early childhood interventions could have helped him live a happier and more productive life - wouldn’t that be a good use of resources?
My nephew is a very smart kid and he seems to have whatever the opposite of ADHD is. He comes home from school and completely unprompted says, “I’m just going to do all my homework now to get it out of the way so I can relax.” He’s probably at least in the 95th percentile for conscientiousness.
But the parents of 50th percentile kids are stressing because little Noah isn’t going to get into Duke if he doesn’t start acting like a kid in the 95th percentile for conscientiousness.
To the degree it’s a contagion it’s the patholgiziong of the 50th percentile kid and the assumption that 95th percentile is normal and everything else is abnormal.
“the NYT is simply not going to consider the notion that different individual people have fundamentally different levels of academic potential in its pages”
Isn’t this the ubiquitous hypocrisy of the left… to demand complete individualism while lumping people into a narrow band of superficial categories?
It seems a worldview problem connected to gendered evolutionary traits. Specifically females dominate the top-level control of public grade school education and much of higher learning, and females are wired more collectivist. A collectivist worldview is one that tends to reject individual merit as it results in different outcomes based on individual capability. So, people are lumped into categories/groups so care can be metered “fairly”. High differentiation, ideally at the individual level based on the individual’s unique learning needs, runs counter to the impulses of a person holding a collectivist worldview. However, since all people pursue their own self-interest as a primary motivation, there is a darker explanation for this collectivist low-granularity categorization of people into categories to meter out care… it stifles competition. If students are developed based on individual need, more would achieve academic success. This would then lead to more people representing a competitive risk.
Collectivists are also authoritarians. Their worldview is one where a few “elites” are put in positions of power and control over the rest, so that the elites can fairly meter out care to the rest. They do care for others, but only if they can do so in a position of authority and control. That is why they do not support high differentiation… because it leads to people becoming more self-sufficient and not needing the care that the collectivists leverage to retain authority and control.
"Why Can't We Be Honest About the Rise of Mental Disorders as Consumer Products? / this is an undeniable and widespread phenomenon with obvious negative consequences for society that mainstream media simply will not cover"
... And it goes back at least 35 years, in my experience.
Back about 45-50 years ago, as a young adult, I became convinced (justifiably, I believed then and now), that one of the causes of my depression was biological. Now, back in the late '70s, the Zeitgeist reflected the conviction (for lay people, at least) that it was not even possible for anything other than things like schizophrenia or full-blown psychoses to have any biological causes. Accordingly, I was ridiculed by psychotherapists whenever I tried to bring it up, compounding my mental difficulties. Even though we've known since *prehistory* that alcohol (and many other substances) affect conscious states -- Hello?! (I should add that I was not upper or upper-middle class, and could not easily find someone, professional or not, to have a decent conversation about it.)
About ten years (mid-late '80s) after I started pursuing this idea, I finally "arm-wrestled" a doctor at Man's Best Hospital (who demanded cash for the session) and walked out with and Rx for now-"obsolete" MAOI Nardil. After carefully following the risky protocol, about 3-5 months later, I discovered that it *worked*. Significantly. My first thought was not relief - it was anger. Nevertheless, I suppressed that reaction, as my suspicion now had been validated.
However, and the point of my story, is that three or so years later c.1990 -- after Prozac appeared -- is that the floodgates were opened. It was literally from night to day regarding respect for biological causes. At that point, I tried several different drugs -- but curiously, each was less effective than the past, yet every one had weird new side effects. I finally realized, after about fifteen years, that both medical professionals and drug developers really didn't yet understand all that much at this early point in history understanding how the brain works -- certainly not mine -- so that whatever they were doing was more like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. (Nardil, in fact, was an early accidental discovery.) The obvious real purpose for the incessant trotting out of new drugs: Money. (Oh, and Marcia Angell spoke up. I'll just leave that there on the table.)
For these reasons (and many more), I now have less than zero respect for psychopharmacology. I'll go to my grave before I'll willingly put another goddam new thing (psychoactive or not) into my bloodstream from the psychopaths steering the pharm industry. I'm confident they'll find a way around that little annoyance, however, for me and hundreds of million others, as we had an Exhibit A of their power just five years ago that survives to this day.
I think one thing that's kind of goes under the radar a lot of times about the rise of ADHD is that our environment has developed in ways that makes sustained attention and regulation really critical.
I think about this a lot because I have a ADHD and I've had it I was diagnosed as a woman in 2005 when it wasn't that popular. It's something that I've struggled with my whole life (ask my first grade teacher). The demands in an information heavy society has made everyday functioning more difficult for people with the set of regulation issues that is related to adhd.
The second part of it is that I am a big fan of focusing more on function than on symptoms when diagnosing people. I teach diagnosis at a university and this is why I focus on people's ability to function because we all have symptoms of a bunch of different disorders, but it doesn't usually rise to the point where interferes with people's daily functioning and that's the important difference. I think the social contagion in a lot of ways as accompanied by a lack of understanding about what a disorder is. If somebody says that ADHD is a superpower, then they don't have ADHD because obviously it's not interfering with her daily functioning and so they don't meet the criteria.
Is social contagion a big part of this problem? Absolutely. But so are pocket phones and social media. "[O]ur environment has developed in ways that make sustained attention and regulation really critical" --an excellent point, but may I change the last word to "difficult"?
agreed
With respect to your first observation on environment, I've really started to wonder if a significant portion of ADHD diagnoses for elementary-school boys isn't caused by contemporary parenting and education culture demanding that those boys sit still and work quietly for many more hours a day than was expected of prior generations.
Yes and there are a fewer pathways for people who can't sit for hours to be successful.
Good piece, but in bringing up cases and examples I find it curious that you left out that one stinking dung heap left by the proverbial elephant in the living room: the bourgeois social contagion fueled trans phenomenon. Are there matters that you won’t even go near?
You know that relative who, when you say you don't talk about politics, or religion, or abortion, or whatever, insists you do it anyway?
New guy.
We don't discuss that issue here because the people who are interested in discussing it, generally, are not content with merely espousing their belief that there is a social contagion component to its increased incidence.
They also want to impute disreputable motivations and behaviors upon all sufferers, as well as offering prescriptions for how society should or should not accommodate them, often settling on no accommodations for `scientific' reasons.
Only this issue? Are there other issues that are verboten? If this is the only issue that is verboten, then that's a massive tell. Of what? I don't know, but it would be easy to figure out.
Thank you for writing about this issue Freddie. I am a therapist in California and I can say that this is a major issue and that it also creates barriers in treatment, as people who have told themselves (or been told by an online community) that they have an unchangeable neurological problem/disability are less likely to engage in techniques that could potentially help them. I have been considering writing a piece on my clinical experience with self-diagnosis and social contagion, perhaps I will follow your lead.
I first became aware of the phrase "social contagion" in the context of teen girls coalescing around the idea that they were really boys and then grouping themselves as gender dysphoric. The astounding rise in the number of them (compared to their extremely small numbers compared to boys who felt they were gender dysphoric) left health care professionals here and in Europe flabbergasted.
Pretty much all of your arguments here tracked the arguments of those of us who are concerned about separating out the social contagion -- and consequent media attention and deference to young people -- from the real cases of gender dysphoria.
Thanks for harping on an important issue that transcends individual manifestations. I keep reading you because you're annoying in all the right ways.
Thanks for this line..."I keep reading you because you're annoying in all the right ways.".
I'm with you on this Freddie. EVERYONE is on a spectrum - ALL kinds of spectrums. It's all shades of gray. I have attributes that may well qualify as ADHD or ADD, others that may well qualify as OCD, and yet others as Depression with a capital "D". Yet none of these are disabling or even more than occasionally annoying to myself or others at worst. I can pick literally any person I know who exhibit characteristics of those or other conditions. Are they disabling or even limiting in terms of living life in our culture? If the answer to that is yes, then that is one thing. Self-identification as being disabled is another thing entirely. Having a "disease" for social reasons - whether they be to gain advantage, sympathy or even just minor accommodation is understandable in our culture, but it doesn't make it right.
Now, my main point is that perhaps the culture is the cause. Rampant hyper-capitalism, competitive advantage by any means necessary is the unfortunate main characteristic of our modern US culture. THAT certainly causes all sorts of mental and emotional issues for people and is largely unrecognized as the source of so many of our ills. Yet it goes unquestioned like the force of gravity.
I ask you this - not in a flippant way - What comes after Capitalism? What comes next.... because surely this can't continue - a society that operates as a cancer on the planet and the people who live on it. I think so many of the real "ills" we attribute to mental/emotional issues are just people who can't cope under the stresses of the system we live within. Coping mechanisms, however poor or disabling, are still coping mechanisms.
"offensive bit of minstrelsy"... worth the whole piece.
Adult diagnoses of ADHD spiking has always just been transparently obvious to me in its roots: stimulants work regardless of whether or not you "really" have ADHD (a fact that makes many activists very angry, but is quickly proven by a talk with literally any undergraduate student in the country), and are professionally advantageous in most mentally intensive work. They're widely used and abused in my industry (tech) along with caffeine and nicotine and it's well known how to quickly get a diagnoses.
When the stakes are your performance in a several-hundred-thousands-of-dollars-a-year job and the hoops to jump through consist of a couple of lies to a doctor, why wouldn't we expect that to be a major factor?
"and I’ve read the comments at LessWrong"! lol
If I understood you that in fact the existence of ADHD MAY be a result of what, where and who we are paying attention to as a society, wow do I get it.. I am OLD and grew up with cursive and memorizing spelling words and grammar and learning to write using same. In addition, I read and do read BOOKS which require time and space away from online sources whether computer, phone or TV. AND in another part of my life I am an IT computer solutions professional too BUT I had to concentrate and learn new ideas and about new spaces that were not there as I grew up iinto my years long career too. Without the ability to motivate myself and concentrate I would never have made it. Yes I do think it is more a societal disease for some, a means to ask for attention and time while being unable to manage one's own time in a productive way. I don't think of it as Attention Deficit so much as ATTENTION OVERLOAD all day every day...and an inability to withdraw to be more careful of one's own mental abillities to deal with this constant attentioon NOISE. Thank you.
The broad thrust of what you are trying to explore here is entirely legitimate, and many of your points made here are well argued. The problem is Freddie, you have a habit of coming across like a humongous bellend when you make them. A couple of suggestions coming from a primarily autistic perspective:
> Speak to more autistic people. Sounds like you have done an excellent job of speaking to families of Level 3 Autistic people, but you seem to have the strange notion that people with Level 1 Autism simply have a quirky personality trait with no effects on their life, and seem unaware that Level 2 Autism even exists. If you speak more to these communities you’ll understand why there is such a desire to organise around their disability and some of the motivations behind language choices.
> Distinguish more between those faking the disorders and those who actually have it. For all your talk of bravery, you are still remarkably coy when it comes to explicitly making a distinction and the net effect is that you end up painting the entire community of neurodivergent identifying people as being fake trend followers, which naturally pisses off the people who actually have it. Be explicit in distinguishing between the two and make it clearer your criticisms only apply to the latter.
> Acknowledge some of the difficulties faced by people without the most severe symptoms. Right now it comes across like you are saying either a disability has to be so severe that one is basically incapable of functioning without assistance, or that it’s basically nothing and people should stop claiming to be victims. There is a middle ground here, and telling legions of horrifically bullied but otherwise functional autistic people that actually they’re just faking it and are fine is a bit like lecturing a white working class boy born into poverty on how privileged he is.
Otherwise, some other thoughts:
> One’s answer to whether neurodivergence should have merch is the same one as to whether Pride should have it
> Obtaining an autism diagnosis in many places (the U.K. for example) is extremely difficult and so self diagnosis is frequently the only option
> At some point, most autistic people have someone tell them “you can’t really be autistic because you aren’t like Sheldon Cooper/Rain Man/insert other stereotype here”. As such, they tend to get very pissed off when someone who clearly has no idea what they are talking about doubts them
> If someone has spent their whole life being made to feel stupid, they are likely to simultaneously want to have their natural deficiencies to be fairly taken into account, and also have the things they are particularly good at be acknowledged. One way to do this is to simultaneously point out that something can be both a disability and a superpower at the same time.
> Most people really have no f***ing clue when it comes to autism. When you know what you are looking for, the sheer number of undiagnosed people operating in society becomes very obvious, and it’s clear most people don’t know it when they see it. It also becomes very obvious that many people have no idea how to handle autism, and this swiftly results in the harmful dynamics that make these communities so defensive in the first place.
Worth noting that under the auspices of social contagion, there is a perverse incentive to adopt identities as a form of commodification of the self. It’s not just about the money injected into the market surrounding identity exploitation, but the sublimation of subject into object. The mind-and-body becomes deracinated from itself.
Don’t make me tap the sign, you know how it goes.
I feel very conflicted honestly about the rising diagnoses.
ADHD and autism are real neurodevelopmental disorders, and deserve a lot of treatment and support. They’re not supposed to be trendy personality traits to lean back on. Even in the best case scenarios where people can harness their ADHD/autism for good, they struggle with the simple things that everyone else wouldn’t as much.
At least for ADHD, I wonder if its simultaneously over diagnosed for people who most likely don’t have it and under diagnosed for the people that DO have it because quite frankly, they won’t take the steps to be diagnosed. Whether it’s because their ability to retain attention, stick to tasks is far lower and other traits are much weaker than the general population.
I do want the field of psychology to be more strict in diagnosing who actually has it, but I don’t want to throw the baby out of the bathwater and let people think these diagnoses are just “excuses”.
My youngest daughter was diagnosed with Aspergers almost 20 years ago, when she was in 2d grade. The teacher thought there was something wrong with her. My wife said 'she is just like you, you should be tested." Yes, I also got the Apergers diagnosis - and I said "This is normal. I am an engineer/physcist/programmer and most of my peers are like me, many are worse.'
The idiots have medicalized a normal human variation. I have aspies up, down, and across my extended family - and not a single case of classic autism.
In my view, the psychologists who grouped autism and Aspergers together were clearly wrong - while they might have shared an aspect or two, they are probably fundamentally different phenomena. The aspies tend to find productive roles where they can function happily and productively, and that is what is important.
If you’re happy then that’s great.
But a lot of aspies aren’t - they are lonely and struggle to make friends and find romantic partners, they struggle in school and work, etc.
Psychology ranges on a lot of independent variables. Anybody who is at an extreme is going to have more difficulties dealing with the social world and finding friends and compatible people. It has always been so. If I remember correctly, the big 5 factors account for ~ 80 percent of variation in personality - and intelligence is an independent variable as well. That allows for a lot of variation from the median in widely different patterns.
Where do you draw the medicalization line? I would do it at the functional / non-functional line. I couldn't make it in the marketing / socialization sphere, I don't think that way. But engineering and the like is just natural for me. Others are the reverse.
Functional is doing a lot of the work there…
Take a software developer who is good but not great and manages to stay employed more or less but is held back by hygiene and personality issues that could be remedied if addressed in a constructive manner. Now you could say he’s functional because he is houses and for the most part employed. But he is operating at a marginal level due to the issues noted.
If some modest early childhood interventions could have helped him live a happier and more productive life - wouldn’t that be a good use of resources?
I’m not sure about social contagion.
My nephew is a very smart kid and he seems to have whatever the opposite of ADHD is. He comes home from school and completely unprompted says, “I’m just going to do all my homework now to get it out of the way so I can relax.” He’s probably at least in the 95th percentile for conscientiousness.
But the parents of 50th percentile kids are stressing because little Noah isn’t going to get into Duke if he doesn’t start acting like a kid in the 95th percentile for conscientiousness.
To the degree it’s a contagion it’s the patholgiziong of the 50th percentile kid and the assumption that 95th percentile is normal and everything else is abnormal.
“the NYT is simply not going to consider the notion that different individual people have fundamentally different levels of academic potential in its pages”
Isn’t this the ubiquitous hypocrisy of the left… to demand complete individualism while lumping people into a narrow band of superficial categories?
It seems a worldview problem connected to gendered evolutionary traits. Specifically females dominate the top-level control of public grade school education and much of higher learning, and females are wired more collectivist. A collectivist worldview is one that tends to reject individual merit as it results in different outcomes based on individual capability. So, people are lumped into categories/groups so care can be metered “fairly”. High differentiation, ideally at the individual level based on the individual’s unique learning needs, runs counter to the impulses of a person holding a collectivist worldview. However, since all people pursue their own self-interest as a primary motivation, there is a darker explanation for this collectivist low-granularity categorization of people into categories to meter out care… it stifles competition. If students are developed based on individual need, more would achieve academic success. This would then lead to more people representing a competitive risk.
Collectivists are also authoritarians. Their worldview is one where a few “elites” are put in positions of power and control over the rest, so that the elites can fairly meter out care to the rest. They do care for others, but only if they can do so in a position of authority and control. That is why they do not support high differentiation… because it leads to people becoming more self-sufficient and not needing the care that the collectivists leverage to retain authority and control.
"Why Can't We Be Honest About the Rise of Mental Disorders as Consumer Products? / this is an undeniable and widespread phenomenon with obvious negative consequences for society that mainstream media simply will not cover"
... And it goes back at least 35 years, in my experience.
Back about 45-50 years ago, as a young adult, I became convinced (justifiably, I believed then and now), that one of the causes of my depression was biological. Now, back in the late '70s, the Zeitgeist reflected the conviction (for lay people, at least) that it was not even possible for anything other than things like schizophrenia or full-blown psychoses to have any biological causes. Accordingly, I was ridiculed by psychotherapists whenever I tried to bring it up, compounding my mental difficulties. Even though we've known since *prehistory* that alcohol (and many other substances) affect conscious states -- Hello?! (I should add that I was not upper or upper-middle class, and could not easily find someone, professional or not, to have a decent conversation about it.)
About ten years (mid-late '80s) after I started pursuing this idea, I finally "arm-wrestled" a doctor at Man's Best Hospital (who demanded cash for the session) and walked out with and Rx for now-"obsolete" MAOI Nardil. After carefully following the risky protocol, about 3-5 months later, I discovered that it *worked*. Significantly. My first thought was not relief - it was anger. Nevertheless, I suppressed that reaction, as my suspicion now had been validated.
However, and the point of my story, is that three or so years later c.1990 -- after Prozac appeared -- is that the floodgates were opened. It was literally from night to day regarding respect for biological causes. At that point, I tried several different drugs -- but curiously, each was less effective than the past, yet every one had weird new side effects. I finally realized, after about fifteen years, that both medical professionals and drug developers really didn't yet understand all that much at this early point in history understanding how the brain works -- certainly not mine -- so that whatever they were doing was more like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. (Nardil, in fact, was an early accidental discovery.) The obvious real purpose for the incessant trotting out of new drugs: Money. (Oh, and Marcia Angell spoke up. I'll just leave that there on the table.)
For these reasons (and many more), I now have less than zero respect for psychopharmacology. I'll go to my grave before I'll willingly put another goddam new thing (psychoactive or not) into my bloodstream from the psychopaths steering the pharm industry. I'm confident they'll find a way around that little annoyance, however, for me and hundreds of million others, as we had an Exhibit A of their power just five years ago that survives to this day.
https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understanding-Health/dp/1637741588/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3OGWYQ7JOVR0G&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Mz9DPpv5doAYCaJSEjzv8KHf_seWqAHSGo91_vvJy1hr0KGkUqEdvyoyyv4gTgNe2ILNkGgsoYxAxAbIHzazu11G27QLH6uiinreOLkk9w4kecS-OmMObTJb3k546GvbEkZRNlFVI8XsSnktMO74In38Rlw9vERvjzLN-TpiX0-YZtGRt4rLCJ4a22rTelo8ufh_yD0DUPMq9gbJD-NVkLm6U4TOlCE0OQXZpcJtitA.Mp6AUbRscL3ia_R8F8CcYHlbFo7sAJ4DsiYN5g-pcSc&dib_tag=se&keywords=brain+energy&qid=1744740610&sprefix=brain+energy%2Caps%2C193&sr=8-1