The funny thing to me, someone with raging ADHD, is that when someone asks why I make it such a big part of who I am now, all I can think of is all the years of being told I was just lazy, I was...
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The funny thing to me, someone with raging ADHD, is that when someone asks why I make it such a big part of who I am now, all I can think of is all the years of being told I was just lazy, I was just unmotivated, I was just self centered, I just wasn't applying myself, I just didn't want it enough. All of that feels pretty label-y to me, at least it did when people were constantly trying to make that my identity. I was the lazy student who didn't work on their projects until the night before or study for a test until I was outside the classroom. It didn't matter that I had spent my evening on the bed trying, trying, tryyyying to understand my homework, until I finally accepted that I just didn't know and torturing myself by sitting there and blankly soaking in numbers that made no sense to me was pointless. It didn't matter that every geometry class I would walk in and think "This time, this time I'll sit here and I'll copy down every single word the teacher writes, I'll learn this." Then, 10min into class, when I don't understand a word he's saying and my hand is cramping, and I've already missed multiple things the teacher wrote, I give up. It doesn't matter that my brain, quite literally refused to remind me of test dates and I had no one to teach me any skills that a child with raging neurodivergence can utilizing, because I I was just a lazy kid, duh.
The truth is that there have always been labels and just like I can't understand why someone would make dirt bikes the center of their personality, there's probably a pretty good reason to them and it doesn't matter if I understand. People are a little kinder to me now that people can label themselves with autism or ADHD, sometimes managers or co-workers understand your struggle better and partner with you to circumvent your weak spots, helping you thrive and contribute.
So, I don't know, it seems fine to me. But I would agree that anyone who makes any one thing the end all be all of their personality is grating and people who use their diagnosis as a weapon are abusing the understanding the rest of us are trying to cultivate.
Right there with you. "Bright, doesn't live up to his potential, needs a fire lit under him" was my report card's core point my entire public school experience. I was trying my best. Turns out I...
Right there with you. "Bright, doesn't live up to his potential, needs a fire lit under him" was my report card's core point my entire public school experience.
I was trying my best. Turns out I have pretty severe ADHD, and I didn't get diagnosed until my 40s. Getting appropriate medication and naming the demon, so to speak, has given me such greater agency over my life that I weep for what could have been if I'd figured this out sooner. I'll take knowing now over not knowing ever, but damn. So many lost, painful years.
And yeah, it's part of who I am. I don't talk about it all the time, but my close circle of loved ones and friends all are aware. They need to be. And it sure beats feeling shitty about myself dealing with all the other awful labels that were applied before.
I've hated the word "potential" since high school. Yes yes, potential. Some vaguely undefined stretch goal that from their perception I'll never be able to reach. The last time my manager told me...
I've hated the word "potential" since high school.
Yes yes, potential. Some vaguely undefined stretch goal that from their perception I'll never be able to reach. The last time my manager told me that I have "potential" I flat out told him that I do not know what that means because it's an unreachable ideal and I would need tangible goals with deadlines to function at all.
Most of the times "potential" just means that you should remember things and plan your work like a normal person and little else.
Similarly we had to discuss a date for a deliverable and he asked me "what do you think".
I told him that my brain doesn't understand how to properly assess the duration or length of certain tasks so he should just come up with a date himself and I'll comply. Being clear worked.
I don't turn my ADHD into a label, but knowing I have it and knowing what comes with it and why no matter how hard I try I can't do certain things, means I can tell others and explain why things are the way they are. Labels are certainly useful provided they're correct and nowadays I'm happy to help share the correct information. At the same time I don't expect people to bend over backwards to accommodate me all the time, so I'll do my best too in understanding how it may be frustrating for others if I forgot detail XYZ again.
It's part of who I am and over time I've learnt (healthy or unhealthy) methods to deal with certain shortcomings. ADHD is not a separate thing or entity, wearing it as a label makes it an uncontrollable entity looming over me and that's not how I want to have it function. Knowing I have it makes me able to control or at least recognize when certain traits show up and I can give into them or prevent them.
Interesting article and something that became very interesting to me after listening to an episode of CBC Spark that dealt with similar topics. ADHD and spectrum disorders have shown up in a big...
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Interesting article and something that became very interesting to me after listening to an episode of CBC Spark that dealt with similar topics.
ADHD and spectrum disorders have shown up in a big way in my social circles over the previous few years. Some people get the diagnosis and connect the dots between their lives and the disorder from time to time, others make the disorder into a frontline part of their personality, but what I'm noticing to be almost unanimous is that people define themselves as beholden to the disorder moreso than the disorder being one part of their personality.
Call me crazy, but I don't think that it was purely the stigma of having a disease or disorder that encouraged people as little as five years ago to characterize themselves as a person who happens to have an autonomous diagnosis instead of a diagnosis that drives all that the person does.
It's part and parcel of our desire today to link ourselves (white North Americans in particular) to long list heritage, a disease and or anything else we can find just to stand out, and I find it so very odd.
Edit** Not sure if this requires the edit, but I've had tics my whole lives and had a grandpa with severe Tourette's that I likely inherited to some degree. When you start framing your life experience around 'the thing', it's what you become known for, and frankly, I'd rather people just pretend it's not there unless circumstances require us to talk about it. Everybody has quirks - some with labels, some without -- why not advertise your personality using the traits you're most proud of instead of the label you've been given?
I can speak to autism in particular. I've had the diagnosis for a long time, but have only recently started thinking seriously about its impact on my own life. (I think I lacked perspective, both...
I can speak to autism in particular. I've had the diagnosis for a long time, but have only recently started thinking seriously about its impact on my own life. (I think I lacked perspective, both on autism and on my life, until recently.)
And it's, uh, a lot. Autism mediates social interactions, which is basically to say that autism mediates everything in your entire life. I could go into more detail, but suffice to say that I'm pretty confident that basically everything important that has ever happened (or not happened) in my life has been strongly influenced by my autism.
Moreover, developing an awareness and acceptance of my diagnosis has made it possible for me to make better life decisions. Internalized shame prevented me from socializing with other autistic people throughout my life, even though they were the people with whom I was best poised to make friendships and connections. Accepting myself and trying to let go of the shame has made it possible for me to make friendships that I would not have been able to otherwise.
And it doesn't hurt that being autistic is generally a disadvantage. It's much easier for a facet of one's self to become an identity if that facet brings disadvantages with it.
That one hits close to home. There definitely were some guys in my K–12 years who I could've become close friends with if I hadn't had concerns about being seen as his friend. I was much more...
Internalized shame prevented me from socializing with other autistic people throughout my life, even though they were the people with whom I was best poised to make friendships and connections.
That one hits close to home. There definitely were some guys in my K–12 years who I could've become close friends with if I hadn't had concerns about being seen as his friend. I was much more relaxed when around them than around my ostensible other friends. Somehow, I had much less of that worry about stigma while in college and finally managed to form lasting friendships.
The flip side to this is that—from both personal experience, but especially from being an avid rubbernecker of online drama—is that the worst interpersonal interactions are often between two incompatibly neurodiverse people. NTs typically know when to get bored and walk away. A personal trigger of mine is when people discuss a special interest that's adjacent to one of mine and expect me to know the basics or care. No, I do not give a toss about anime. Talk about an interest that's totally off my radar and I'll be interested to your every word.
I spend time in a subreddit related to a disorder I have, and I see a lot of posts where people ask if others on the sub have some obscure behavioral traits that the poster has. Sometimes the...
I spend time in a subreddit related to a disorder I have, and I see a lot of posts where people ask if others on the sub have some obscure behavioral traits that the poster has. Sometimes the traits they ask about dont really have a strong connection to the listed symptoms in the DSM, and sure enough often the response is like 50:50 of people agreeing or disagreeing, so it doesnt seem like theres a steong correlation. Its like they want all of their various quirks to ultimately derive from this one thing, even when the connection between the two is tenuous.
I think its maybe comforting for them to think that the various things they feel dont make them fit in actually do make them fit in, just with a different crowd. Potentially a better crowd with more social clout and more political or ideological homogeneity.
These subs are not very useful. There's a group phenomenon where everyone is incentivized to report increasingly outrageous symptoms because that is the condition to belong. I believe that...
These subs are not very useful. There's a group phenomenon where everyone is incentivized to report increasingly outrageous symptoms because that is the condition to belong. I believe that over-reporting may lead to an exaggerated perception of their own difficulties.
Bingo - it's really become an in group/ out group sort of thing. There are certainly the benefits that come from members of the group understanding a person's unique life experience, but once...
Bingo - it's really become an in group/ out group sort of thing.
There are certainly the benefits that come from members of the group understanding a person's unique life experience, but once that's happened, subreddits (and the internet broadly) have this tendency to want to fold all experiences under the umbrella into the whole.
It's this crazy phenomenon that happens with internet groups. Somehow, all fringe ideas can and must become part of the master narrative - mostly in an effort to prove that the group is inclusive.
It's a common delusion of the recently diagnosed that disclosing their classification to everyone will provide some kind of solace or automatic resolution. Although sharing that kind of thing with...
It's a common delusion of the recently diagnosed that disclosing their classification to everyone will provide some kind of solace or automatic resolution. Although sharing that kind of thing with close ones is important, in the grand scheme of things, you are priming yourself for disappointment. Except maybe for certain cases of autism, which, in certain circumstances, do seem to bring positive results when broadly divulged. But I wouldn't know.
There is a great deal of shame piled onto people for not being normal in one category or another. For some personal examples, I'm ashamed of the way I deal with organization of items in my life. I...
There is a great deal of shame piled onto people for not being normal in one category or another. For some personal examples, I'm ashamed of the way I deal with organization of items in my life. I often create piles out of things I use frequently while drawers and cabinets sit empty. I lose my keys constantly. My vegetables spoil if I put them in the drawer because I don't remember they are there. I've put milk in the pantry and appliances in the fridge and forgotten why I walked into a room as soon as I get there. I lived a whole 3 decades of feeling really ashamed of the state of my house and ashamed of myself. Eventually I got better systems, I took the doors off things and now I have an easier time putting them away, fewer piles. I keep my veggies in the door where I see them. Solutions. But I still felt ashamed, like really embarrassed to have people over because I thought it's so bad to have to do weird shit just to reach a level of tidy that other people seem to get to without any special steps. I never talked about this and instead just refused to have guests. Finding out about ADHD didn't change my goals or my personality, but it made me feel a lot less ashamed of myself. Now I understand it's common for people with ADHD to need doors taken off cabinets, and to make piles, and to forget about the lettuce, where before I just thought I was disgusting. The people who you view as beholden to the disorder might feel that way, but maybe like me they used to feel beholden to the idea that they were shamefully bad at being a person, which is worse and is something I bet they would have been less likely to talk about. At least by sharing a diagnosis people can find established solutions instead of reinventing them in isolation.
Removing stigma allows people to be a more relaxed version of themselves. 5 years ago they might have felt the same ways but not felt like it was acceptable to discuss it. If it's shown up in your social circle recently, understand that it was there the whole time.
That's cool and I'm happy that the label is so useful for many. Maybe it's just my outlook, but I've always been the "different" one in my family and frankly, love it when I can keep people...
That's cool and I'm happy that the label is so useful for many.
Maybe it's just my outlook, but I've always been the "different" one in my family and frankly, love it when I can keep people guessing. It's probably the Tourette's/tics in some part, but already being 'weird' really gives me the freedom to do life on my terms. People can't handle it out themselves early on - the same goes for those who can, or even want somebody a little abnormal in their lives.
Honestly don't know how to feel about the article, it felt a lot like a more erudite version of the quiet grumbling older people do when forced to acknowledge that normal isn't real. That there...
Honestly don't know how to feel about the article, it felt a lot like a more erudite version of the quiet grumbling older people do when forced to acknowledge that normal isn't real. That there are more differences they have to be (or pretend to be) respectful of when interacting with others.
It's also suffocating because the way the article is narrated doesn't really speak to how even now mental illness carries a stigma, and all the labels in the world won't help you if the person or institution you're interacting with refuses to be accommodating. So many people act like the use of the label du jour itself is more threatening than the reason why more people than feels usual are claiming it. I think of all the conspiracy theorists convinced that 5G or vaccines are what's behind autism and adhd and then I think of just how many people have lived and died thinking there was something fundamentally wrong with them for not being able to be 'normal'. 🙂↕️
The more we learn about people, the more that normal seems wrong to me. Seeking it just ads stress we don't need and it seems like normal doesn't even exist except as a mask. People are like...
The more we learn about people, the more that normal seems wrong to me. Seeking it just ads stress we don't need and it seems like normal doesn't even exist except as a mask.
People are like paintings and Normal is a blank canvas. Normal is boring and very unnatural, would it not look far better with even a splash of paint to make it different, less plain?
It's terrible that so many people paint over their masterpieces to appear normal or hide their painting. I'm loving that people are starting to fight back against it, either not adding or removing the layer of paint covering their work of art. I hope this continues on and doesn't turn out to be a transient fad.
While ADHD is not my entire personality, it does severely affect my entire personality, as other posters have pointed out. After having been mislabeled for 40 years by other people, starting form...
While ADHD is not my entire personality, it does severely affect my entire personality, as other posters have pointed out. After having been mislabeled for 40 years by other people, starting form early childhood and including doctors mislabeling me in ways that put my life at risk, it's pretty damn important to engage in corrective measures now that I have the information that enables me to do so.
When it comes to adopting unnecessary or downright harmful group mentality, I would rather point fingers at nationalism, sports fanaticism, sexism, ableism etc. Most humans routinely use these to artificially prop up their self-importance, when the reality is that your favourite sports team winning had nothing to do with you, being a man does not make you more logical than someone else, being a woman does not make you a better parent than someone else, being born in a developed country with a high GDP does not make you better than those born elsewhere, etc.
And to add to that list, being neurotypical - or a journalist, or a clever person, a doctor, an individual with a diagnosis, or whatever this author believes to give weight to their opinion over others - does not give you a free pass to deem someone else's identity misconstrued.
OHHHHHH BOY. This is one of those articles where I read the headline, read the top comment, and realize that if I engage with the article and want to leave a comment with all my thoughts and...
OHHHHHH BOY. This is one of those articles where I read the headline, read the top comment, and realize that if I engage with the article and want to leave a comment with all my thoughts and feelings in it, my entire day will be consumed. I will spend hours parsing my thoughts and feelings and be completely unable to focus on my work. So unfortunately I will have to hope that I remember to come back and engage with this after my workday is over.
I don't think it is irony, but I don't know the proper term to describe this situation. I'm going to use irony as a fill-in, but if it is wrong please correct me and tell me what the correct term is. My whole life I have had issues with hyper fixating on conversations and writing overly-verbose responses to things to a detrimental extent. It will consume my entire my for hours and I won't be able to focus on anything else, no matter how much I try. Getting diagnosed with ADHD was what allowed me to recognize that I do that, understand why I do it, and to preemptively avoid those situations. The fact that one of my first times successfully avoiding the multi-hour rabbit hole is on an article about mental illness becoming a core part of someone's identity feels ironic*.
Kneejerk thought: I have a feeling the reason that this is being portrayed as an issue now is because it is impacting corporations and capital.
I got my ADHD diagnosis a few years ago, and everything started making sense. The more I think about it the more I find how it affected and affects pretty much every area of my life. I can even...
I got my ADHD diagnosis a few years ago, and everything started making sense. The more I think about it the more I find how it affected and affects pretty much every area of my life. I can even pinpoint certain characteristics I developed which were partially affected by ADHD. I mean, like, duh, developmental disorders and such affect pretty much everything. It's not "just a part" of me. It's an integral variation in the system that is me that has affected almost everything. No wonder people attach much meaning to them. It's a core part of people like us.
The critiques about overemphasizing psychiatric labels seem very overblown to me. I don't think it's a big issue, and I'm not seeing any convincing evidence that the mentioned reification in the article is as important as proposed. The given examples are basically anecdotes. Furthermore, any approach is bound to have outliers. As a scientist, I have to say, it's an integral part of science, and it's not at all rare to find scientists having decades or centuries old discussions about the definition of core concepts in their fields. Life scientists, for example, can't still agree on what the definition of a species is. This is especially true when you compare eukaryotes and prokaryotes.
The remedy to that is not refusing categories or "labels" altogether. Following the same example, it would be extremely counterproductive to refuse the category of what a species is. It's not a realistic reflection of how human mind comprehends things. Instead, the much more reasonable and easier thing to do is updating the frameworks and constructing newer ones in a way that is more reflective of the natural variation. To my knowledge, this is already happening in psychiatry.
I think people ought to recognize that any categorization has its limitations, but it's not a reason to throw the entire thing out.
Edit: I also found that the author is an anthropologist. It's my observation, but I found that anthropologists sometimes tend to make sweeping declarations about related fields without due diligence. Especially in front of public.
What particularly baffles me about this is that it's not like ADHD and autism are labels we ourselves came up with as communities to be a source of identity. These are labels that for the vast...
Exemplary
What particularly baffles me about this is that it's not like ADHD and autism are labels we ourselves came up with as communities to be a source of identity. These are labels that for the vast majority of their existence were assigned to us by psychologists based on their assessments of our behavior and thought processes differing from the norm. The idea that, well, these labels were fine when they were just thing a doctor came up with, even when they could limit our opportunities, but now that we're embracing them and discussing our experiences in the context of these categories, suddenly they're bad and limiting? I think it's pretty absurd.
I think the absurdity of criticizing people for focusing too much on these labels and "making it their personality" might be more clear to neurotypical people if they consider how this would work for physical chronic illnesses. I have hypothyroidism as well as ADHD -- and of the two, the hypothyroidism has by far been the bigger negative impact on my life. But both of these things impact my personality, my thought patterns, and what I am able to do day-to-day. Is talking about how I'm fatigued and have brain fog from my hypothyroidism "making it part of my personality"? Or how my decreased stamina and mobility make it harder to go out and do errands or visit friends? And how is that different from talking about how my struggles to control my attention span and my troubles with memory and executive function due to my ADHD can also impact my life?
And with developmental disorders, it's incredibly difficult to actually separate them out from your personality, because they've been part of your experience more or less since you can remember. They influence your life experiences as you build your personality and contribute to your current experience of what makes you the way you are. I can remember what body and mind were like before I developed hypothyroidism. I can't remember some mythical personality I never developed because I have ADHD. And while medication is a very effective treatment for both hypothyroidism and ADHD, the degree to which they "get rid of" the symptoms of the condition are worlds apart. Once I'm on the ideal dose of levothyroxine, the goal is that my symptoms will be gone, and my body will act like that of a person with a normal functioning thyroid. Whereas my daily dose of Vyvanse doesn't actually get rid of even close to all of my ADHD symptoms -- and no psychiatrist would expect it to! It just improves things in select areas in ways that make it easier to cope with my symptoms and overcome them to get things done.
I don't think making sweeping declarations about other fields without due diligence is unique to anthropologists (just look at Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Twitter for evidence of that), but I do agree that anthropologists are particularly bad about doing so with any field that's even kinda adjacent to anthropology. The amount of bad linguistics (the field I studied) I've seen from anthropologists... eugh.
Oh, it's definitely not limited to any single field. Some fields, especially public figures, are particularly bad at it. Like Tyson, there are a lot of Stemlord types. However, I also observed...
Oh, it's definitely not limited to any single field. Some fields, especially public figures, are particularly bad at it. Like Tyson, there are a lot of Stemlord types. However, I also observed that some anthropologists are among the particularly bad ones.
I also have a physical condition, and I absolutely agree with you about everything. For some reason some people are upset by the embracing of conditions. Talking about them comes off as "being in your face" about them. Funnily enough, these are also things said about queer experiences. There's a common Othering in all of these situations, instead of an effort to understand why people do these things.
As an extension of this, the article in question comes off as patronizing. It's very one-sided. Even though it presents itself as an answer to the "why" of the situation, it doesn't ask the people themselves why they do embrace these "labels".
Anthropologists are like the physicists of the social sciences. They constantly insist that all the other fields are actually just subsets of anthropology. I bristle whenever anthropologists say...
Anthropologists are like the physicists of the social sciences. They constantly insist that all the other fields are actually just subsets of anthropology. I bristle whenever anthropologists say linguistics is a subfield of anthropology. We're in separate departments for a reason!
That said, I did manage to cover my physical science lab GenEd requirement with an anthropology course in undergrad, so I at least have to give them credit for letting me avoid taking a harder lab than "count the teeth on this hominid."
I thoroughly enjoyed this article, and find my own thoughts very much in alignment with the perspective presented therein. This excerpt, in particular, stood out to me: Yea, I agree with that....
I thoroughly enjoyed this article, and find my own thoughts very much in alignment with the perspective presented therein. This excerpt, in particular, stood out to me:
In “DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible” (2021), the medical sociologist Allan V. Horwitz presents reasons for the DSM-5’s botched revolution, including infighting among members of the working groups and the sidelining of clinicians during the revision process. But there’s a larger difficulty: revamping the DSM requires destroying kinds of people. As the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, labelling people is very different from labelling quarks or microbes. Quarks and microbes are indifferent to their labels; by contrast, human classifications change how “individuals experience themselves—and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behavior in part because they are so classified.”
Yea, I agree with that. People like to fit in, so it’s no surprise that they would — after finding themselves belonging to or accepted into a certain group — have a vested interest in staying within and further binding themselves to the norms of that specific community. Especially formerly lonely people who know what it is to be left out; why would they jeopardize this newfound sense of connection? It is, after all, quite the relief to feel understood. So, if people subconsciously pull select, ‘well-documented’ in-group prevalent aspects of their disorder closer to the surface, whilst tucking away and minimizing some less commonly acknowledged ones, in the interest of fitting the accepted mold, then that’s that.
This actually brings to mind something an acquaintance once brought up during a discussion about mental illness. They were a practicing psychologist, and something they had noticed within their own experiences with schizophrenia spectrum disorder patients in particular was that people raised within DSM informed cultures reacted to their own delusions and hallucinations differently from those raised without. That is, the patients all definitely had the disorder, however, the manner in which they each experienced the disorder strongly conformed to the expectations of the culture to which they belonged. So, as the excerpt states: “… human classifications change how individuals experience themselves.”
The article misses some important points: We tried asking politely for reasonable adjustments, and got ignored. So now we have to use a diagnostic label to make the various laws work for us. To be...
The article misses some important points:
We tried asking politely for reasonable adjustments, and got ignored. So now we have to use a diagnostic label to make the various laws work for us. To be able to make use of disability discrimination laws in the workplace you often have to tell your employer that you have a disability.
Medicine is science, and the purpose of science is to use new knowledge to develop understanding. Pluto is no longer a planet, but this doesn't mean the IAU system doesn't work. Any classification system is a mess - biologists are very open about the fact that classifying plants and animals is complicated - but we don't hear anyone (apart from the most severe cranks) claiming this means the entire system is broken.
The article makes a point about DSM being invalid because fMRI can't tell the difference between schizophrenia and bipolar - but ignores the ethical considerations of getting consent to stick someone undergoing a psychotic episode into an MRI machine.
And I'm not even a fan of the DSM, I think there's a lot about it that really sucks. The reason a lot of the anti-DSM people miss the real flaws with DSM is because they're often also anti-psychiatry, rather than mentally ill people trying to deal with an imperfect psychiatric system.
I really enjoyed the article and was surprised to see I interpreted its message completely differently than a lot of comments here, including yours. To be clear I mostly agree with your comment,...
I really enjoyed the article and was surprised to see I interpreted its message completely differently than a lot of comments here, including yours. To be clear I mostly agree with your comment, except I thought the article wasnt in conflict with it.
Psychology is still a work in progress right? Imagine a theoretical future hundreds of years from now where humanity has survived long enough to come to a better understanding of human behavior. I doubt terms like ADHD and Autism would still be valid, or at least they wouldn't have the same meaning as they do now.
I interpreted the articles critism of the DSM as a way of showing how we are just barely scratching the surface of psychology. Showing that we are on this path, but still understand so little. And how much the DSM has changed over the years as we gain understanding and refine the labels we use.
The article establishes early on how important the DSM is.
It determines which conditions are taught in medical schools, which can be treated by F.D.A.-approved drugs, and which allow people to collect disability benefits and insurance reimbursements. Through its classification of mental illnesses, it establishes their prevalence in the population and indicates which ones public policy should target.
I never got the sense the writer was advocating that we go back to ignoring these conditions. Instead I felt they were putting into words something I've felt strongly now for awhile. That it's great that we are finally talking about all these different ways the brain works all the conflicts they cause in society, but this problem is so hard and we are so early in the process, that it is counter productive to buy in so whole heartedly to the vague amorphus blob of symptoms that we have decided to call 'autism' or 'ADHD'. These are just temporary terms and classifications until we figure out something better right?
I thought the mention of FMRI scans and the lack of any genes associated with specific DSM labels were there to illustrate how we don't have any real hard data on how these conditions actually work at chemical level. We are still feeling around in the dark here.
While the labels are vague and not well understood the behaviors/symptoms are real, and it helps to give them some kind of name. You can't learn about something and start dealing with it until you make up some words and classifications, just so you can talk about them.
But usually the first few systems you come up with are inaccurate or grossly oversimplified.
Think: Earth/Air/Fire/Water, or blood/yellow bile/black bile/phlegm. I think we are still closer to that stage in psychiatry now.
The article cited a few different cases where it seemed researchers wanted to update some labels and classifications based on new research, but met with resistance from people and institutions that had become attached to the old labels.
I think we should embrace science and change, take people seriously when they talk about how their own brain works, and not get too attached to labels.
I feel like this is a human thing. We make progress in an area and it's so great and such a relief that we now defend and worship this new thing at all costs. Sometimes a thing is great, but still just a stepping stone to something better.
I also did have to snort in derision about the complaints of getting away from the DSM's psychoanalytic roots. No one likes psychoanalysis except the few people who go to school just for it. Not a...
I also did have to snort in derision about the complaints of getting away from the DSM's psychoanalytic roots.
No one likes psychoanalysis except the few people who go to school just for it. Not a single person in my counseling program was like "aha I'd like to follow in the footsteps of Freud" or "my theoretical orientation will be psychoanalysis!"
Wait until someone tells the author that a lot of studies involving MRI are essentially p-hacking, because MRI machines are frequently misapplied or misinterpreted.
because fMRI can't tell the difference
Wait until someone tells the author that a lot of studies involving MRI are essentially p-hacking, because MRI machines are frequently misapplied or misinterpreted.
The funny thing to me, someone with raging ADHD, is that when someone asks why I make it such a big part of who I am now, all I can think of is all the years of being told I was just lazy, I was just unmotivated, I was just self centered, I just wasn't applying myself, I just didn't want it enough. All of that feels pretty label-y to me, at least it did when people were constantly trying to make that my identity. I was the lazy student who didn't work on their projects until the night before or study for a test until I was outside the classroom. It didn't matter that I had spent my evening on the bed trying, trying, tryyyying to understand my homework, until I finally accepted that I just didn't know and torturing myself by sitting there and blankly soaking in numbers that made no sense to me was pointless. It didn't matter that every geometry class I would walk in and think "This time, this time I'll sit here and I'll copy down every single word the teacher writes, I'll learn this." Then, 10min into class, when I don't understand a word he's saying and my hand is cramping, and I've already missed multiple things the teacher wrote, I give up. It doesn't matter that my brain, quite literally refused to remind me of test dates and I had no one to teach me any skills that a child with raging neurodivergence can utilizing, because I I was just a lazy kid, duh.
The truth is that there have always been labels and just like I can't understand why someone would make dirt bikes the center of their personality, there's probably a pretty good reason to them and it doesn't matter if I understand. People are a little kinder to me now that people can label themselves with autism or ADHD, sometimes managers or co-workers understand your struggle better and partner with you to circumvent your weak spots, helping you thrive and contribute.
So, I don't know, it seems fine to me. But I would agree that anyone who makes any one thing the end all be all of their personality is grating and people who use their diagnosis as a weapon are abusing the understanding the rest of us are trying to cultivate.
Right there with you. "Bright, doesn't live up to his potential, needs a fire lit under him" was my report card's core point my entire public school experience.
I was trying my best. Turns out I have pretty severe ADHD, and I didn't get diagnosed until my 40s. Getting appropriate medication and naming the demon, so to speak, has given me such greater agency over my life that I weep for what could have been if I'd figured this out sooner. I'll take knowing now over not knowing ever, but damn. So many lost, painful years.
And yeah, it's part of who I am. I don't talk about it all the time, but my close circle of loved ones and friends all are aware. They need to be. And it sure beats feeling shitty about myself dealing with all the other awful labels that were applied before.
I've hated the word "potential" since high school.
Yes yes, potential. Some vaguely undefined stretch goal that from their perception I'll never be able to reach. The last time my manager told me that I have "potential" I flat out told him that I do not know what that means because it's an unreachable ideal and I would need tangible goals with deadlines to function at all.
Most of the times "potential" just means that you should remember things and plan your work like a normal person and little else.
Similarly we had to discuss a date for a deliverable and he asked me "what do you think".
I told him that my brain doesn't understand how to properly assess the duration or length of certain tasks so he should just come up with a date himself and I'll comply. Being clear worked.
I don't turn my ADHD into a label, but knowing I have it and knowing what comes with it and why no matter how hard I try I can't do certain things, means I can tell others and explain why things are the way they are. Labels are certainly useful provided they're correct and nowadays I'm happy to help share the correct information. At the same time I don't expect people to bend over backwards to accommodate me all the time, so I'll do my best too in understanding how it may be frustrating for others if I forgot detail XYZ again.
It's part of who I am and over time I've learnt (healthy or unhealthy) methods to deal with certain shortcomings. ADHD is not a separate thing or entity, wearing it as a label makes it an uncontrollable entity looming over me and that's not how I want to have it function. Knowing I have it makes me able to control or at least recognize when certain traits show up and I can give into them or prevent them.
Interesting article and something that became very interesting to me after listening to an episode of CBC Spark that dealt with similar topics.
ADHD and spectrum disorders have shown up in a big way in my social circles over the previous few years. Some people get the diagnosis and connect the dots between their lives and the disorder from time to time, others make the disorder into a frontline part of their personality, but what I'm noticing to be almost unanimous is that people define themselves as beholden to the disorder moreso than the disorder being one part of their personality.
Call me crazy, but I don't think that it was purely the stigma of having a disease or disorder that encouraged people as little as five years ago to characterize themselves as a person who happens to have an autonomous diagnosis instead of a diagnosis that drives all that the person does.
It's part and parcel of our desire today to link ourselves (white North Americans in particular) to long list heritage, a disease and or anything else we can find just to stand out, and I find it so very odd.
Edit** Not sure if this requires the edit, but I've had tics my whole lives and had a grandpa with severe Tourette's that I likely inherited to some degree. When you start framing your life experience around 'the thing', it's what you become known for, and frankly, I'd rather people just pretend it's not there unless circumstances require us to talk about it. Everybody has quirks - some with labels, some without -- why not advertise your personality using the traits you're most proud of instead of the label you've been given?
I can speak to autism in particular. I've had the diagnosis for a long time, but have only recently started thinking seriously about its impact on my own life. (I think I lacked perspective, both on autism and on my life, until recently.)
And it's, uh, a lot. Autism mediates social interactions, which is basically to say that autism mediates everything in your entire life. I could go into more detail, but suffice to say that I'm pretty confident that basically everything important that has ever happened (or not happened) in my life has been strongly influenced by my autism.
Moreover, developing an awareness and acceptance of my diagnosis has made it possible for me to make better life decisions. Internalized shame prevented me from socializing with other autistic people throughout my life, even though they were the people with whom I was best poised to make friendships and connections. Accepting myself and trying to let go of the shame has made it possible for me to make friendships that I would not have been able to otherwise.
And it doesn't hurt that being autistic is generally a disadvantage. It's much easier for a facet of one's self to become an identity if that facet brings disadvantages with it.
That one hits close to home. There definitely were some guys in my K–12 years who I could've become close friends with if I hadn't had concerns about being seen as his friend. I was much more relaxed when around them than around my ostensible other friends. Somehow, I had much less of that worry about stigma while in college and finally managed to form lasting friendships.
The flip side to this is that—from both personal experience, but especially from being an avid rubbernecker of online drama—is that the worst interpersonal interactions are often between two incompatibly neurodiverse people. NTs typically know when to get bored and walk away. A personal trigger of mine is when people discuss a special interest that's adjacent to one of mine and expect me to know the basics or care. No, I do not give a toss about anime. Talk about an interest that's totally off my radar and I'll be interested to your every word.
Thanks for that - I feel like I was a little too eager to fold autism into my argument.
I spend time in a subreddit related to a disorder I have, and I see a lot of posts where people ask if others on the sub have some obscure behavioral traits that the poster has. Sometimes the traits they ask about dont really have a strong connection to the listed symptoms in the DSM, and sure enough often the response is like 50:50 of people agreeing or disagreeing, so it doesnt seem like theres a steong correlation. Its like they want all of their various quirks to ultimately derive from this one thing, even when the connection between the two is tenuous.
I think its maybe comforting for them to think that the various things they feel dont make them fit in actually do make them fit in, just with a different crowd. Potentially a better crowd with more social clout and more political or ideological homogeneity.
These subs are not very useful. There's a group phenomenon where everyone is incentivized to report increasingly outrageous symptoms because that is the condition to belong. I believe that over-reporting may lead to an exaggerated perception of their own difficulties.
Bingo - it's really become an in group/ out group sort of thing.
There are certainly the benefits that come from members of the group understanding a person's unique life experience, but once that's happened, subreddits (and the internet broadly) have this tendency to want to fold all experiences under the umbrella into the whole.
It's this crazy phenomenon that happens with internet groups. Somehow, all fringe ideas can and must become part of the master narrative - mostly in an effort to prove that the group is inclusive.
It's a common delusion of the recently diagnosed that disclosing their classification to everyone will provide some kind of solace or automatic resolution. Although sharing that kind of thing with close ones is important, in the grand scheme of things, you are priming yourself for disappointment. Except maybe for certain cases of autism, which, in certain circumstances, do seem to bring positive results when broadly divulged. But I wouldn't know.
There is a great deal of shame piled onto people for not being normal in one category or another. For some personal examples, I'm ashamed of the way I deal with organization of items in my life. I often create piles out of things I use frequently while drawers and cabinets sit empty. I lose my keys constantly. My vegetables spoil if I put them in the drawer because I don't remember they are there. I've put milk in the pantry and appliances in the fridge and forgotten why I walked into a room as soon as I get there. I lived a whole 3 decades of feeling really ashamed of the state of my house and ashamed of myself. Eventually I got better systems, I took the doors off things and now I have an easier time putting them away, fewer piles. I keep my veggies in the door where I see them. Solutions. But I still felt ashamed, like really embarrassed to have people over because I thought it's so bad to have to do weird shit just to reach a level of tidy that other people seem to get to without any special steps. I never talked about this and instead just refused to have guests. Finding out about ADHD didn't change my goals or my personality, but it made me feel a lot less ashamed of myself. Now I understand it's common for people with ADHD to need doors taken off cabinets, and to make piles, and to forget about the lettuce, where before I just thought I was disgusting. The people who you view as beholden to the disorder might feel that way, but maybe like me they used to feel beholden to the idea that they were shamefully bad at being a person, which is worse and is something I bet they would have been less likely to talk about. At least by sharing a diagnosis people can find established solutions instead of reinventing them in isolation.
Removing stigma allows people to be a more relaxed version of themselves. 5 years ago they might have felt the same ways but not felt like it was acceptable to discuss it. If it's shown up in your social circle recently, understand that it was there the whole time.
That's cool and I'm happy that the label is so useful for many.
Maybe it's just my outlook, but I've always been the "different" one in my family and frankly, love it when I can keep people guessing. It's probably the Tourette's/tics in some part, but already being 'weird' really gives me the freedom to do life on my terms. People can't handle it out themselves early on - the same goes for those who can, or even want somebody a little abnormal in their lives.
Honestly don't know how to feel about the article, it felt a lot like a more erudite version of the quiet grumbling older people do when forced to acknowledge that normal isn't real. That there are more differences they have to be (or pretend to be) respectful of when interacting with others.
It's also suffocating because the way the article is narrated doesn't really speak to how even now mental illness carries a stigma, and all the labels in the world won't help you if the person or institution you're interacting with refuses to be accommodating. So many people act like the use of the label du jour itself is more threatening than the reason why more people than feels usual are claiming it. I think of all the conspiracy theorists convinced that 5G or vaccines are what's behind autism and adhd and then I think of just how many people have lived and died thinking there was something fundamentally wrong with them for not being able to be 'normal'. 🙂↕️
The more we learn about people, the more that normal seems wrong to me. Seeking it just ads stress we don't need and it seems like normal doesn't even exist except as a mask.
People are like paintings and Normal is a blank canvas. Normal is boring and very unnatural, would it not look far better with even a splash of paint to make it different, less plain?
It's terrible that so many people paint over their masterpieces to appear normal or hide their painting. I'm loving that people are starting to fight back against it, either not adding or removing the layer of paint covering their work of art. I hope this continues on and doesn't turn out to be a transient fad.
While ADHD is not my entire personality, it does severely affect my entire personality, as other posters have pointed out. After having been mislabeled for 40 years by other people, starting form early childhood and including doctors mislabeling me in ways that put my life at risk, it's pretty damn important to engage in corrective measures now that I have the information that enables me to do so.
When it comes to adopting unnecessary or downright harmful group mentality, I would rather point fingers at nationalism, sports fanaticism, sexism, ableism etc. Most humans routinely use these to artificially prop up their self-importance, when the reality is that your favourite sports team winning had nothing to do with you, being a man does not make you more logical than someone else, being a woman does not make you a better parent than someone else, being born in a developed country with a high GDP does not make you better than those born elsewhere, etc.
And to add to that list, being neurotypical - or a journalist, or a clever person, a doctor, an individual with a diagnosis, or whatever this author believes to give weight to their opinion over others - does not give you a free pass to deem someone else's identity misconstrued.
OHHHHHH BOY. This is one of those articles where I read the headline, read the top comment, and realize that if I engage with the article and want to leave a comment with all my thoughts and feelings in it, my entire day will be consumed. I will spend hours parsing my thoughts and feelings and be completely unable to focus on my work. So unfortunately I will have to hope that I remember to come back and engage with this after my workday is over.
I don't think it is irony, but I don't know the proper term to describe this situation. I'm going to use irony as a fill-in, but if it is wrong please correct me and tell me what the correct term is. My whole life I have had issues with hyper fixating on conversations and writing overly-verbose responses to things to a detrimental extent. It will consume my entire my for hours and I won't be able to focus on anything else, no matter how much I try. Getting diagnosed with ADHD was what allowed me to recognize that I do that, understand why I do it, and to preemptively avoid those situations. The fact that one of my first times successfully avoiding the multi-hour rabbit hole is on an article about mental illness becoming a core part of someone's identity feels ironic*.
Kneejerk thought: I have a feeling the reason that this is being portrayed as an issue now is because it is impacting corporations and capital.
I got my ADHD diagnosis a few years ago, and everything started making sense. The more I think about it the more I find how it affected and affects pretty much every area of my life. I can even pinpoint certain characteristics I developed which were partially affected by ADHD. I mean, like, duh, developmental disorders and such affect pretty much everything. It's not "just a part" of me. It's an integral variation in the system that is me that has affected almost everything. No wonder people attach much meaning to them. It's a core part of people like us.
The critiques about overemphasizing psychiatric labels seem very overblown to me. I don't think it's a big issue, and I'm not seeing any convincing evidence that the mentioned reification in the article is as important as proposed. The given examples are basically anecdotes. Furthermore, any approach is bound to have outliers. As a scientist, I have to say, it's an integral part of science, and it's not at all rare to find scientists having decades or centuries old discussions about the definition of core concepts in their fields. Life scientists, for example, can't still agree on what the definition of a species is. This is especially true when you compare eukaryotes and prokaryotes.
The remedy to that is not refusing categories or "labels" altogether. Following the same example, it would be extremely counterproductive to refuse the category of what a species is. It's not a realistic reflection of how human mind comprehends things. Instead, the much more reasonable and easier thing to do is updating the frameworks and constructing newer ones in a way that is more reflective of the natural variation. To my knowledge, this is already happening in psychiatry.
I think people ought to recognize that any categorization has its limitations, but it's not a reason to throw the entire thing out.
Edit: I also found that the author is an anthropologist. It's my observation, but I found that anthropologists sometimes tend to make sweeping declarations about related fields without due diligence. Especially in front of public.
What particularly baffles me about this is that it's not like ADHD and autism are labels we ourselves came up with as communities to be a source of identity. These are labels that for the vast majority of their existence were assigned to us by psychologists based on their assessments of our behavior and thought processes differing from the norm. The idea that, well, these labels were fine when they were just thing a doctor came up with, even when they could limit our opportunities, but now that we're embracing them and discussing our experiences in the context of these categories, suddenly they're bad and limiting? I think it's pretty absurd.
I think the absurdity of criticizing people for focusing too much on these labels and "making it their personality" might be more clear to neurotypical people if they consider how this would work for physical chronic illnesses. I have hypothyroidism as well as ADHD -- and of the two, the hypothyroidism has by far been the bigger negative impact on my life. But both of these things impact my personality, my thought patterns, and what I am able to do day-to-day. Is talking about how I'm fatigued and have brain fog from my hypothyroidism "making it part of my personality"? Or how my decreased stamina and mobility make it harder to go out and do errands or visit friends? And how is that different from talking about how my struggles to control my attention span and my troubles with memory and executive function due to my ADHD can also impact my life?
And with developmental disorders, it's incredibly difficult to actually separate them out from your personality, because they've been part of your experience more or less since you can remember. They influence your life experiences as you build your personality and contribute to your current experience of what makes you the way you are. I can remember what body and mind were like before I developed hypothyroidism. I can't remember some mythical personality I never developed because I have ADHD. And while medication is a very effective treatment for both hypothyroidism and ADHD, the degree to which they "get rid of" the symptoms of the condition are worlds apart. Once I'm on the ideal dose of levothyroxine, the goal is that my symptoms will be gone, and my body will act like that of a person with a normal functioning thyroid. Whereas my daily dose of Vyvanse doesn't actually get rid of even close to all of my ADHD symptoms -- and no psychiatrist would expect it to! It just improves things in select areas in ways that make it easier to cope with my symptoms and overcome them to get things done.
I don't think making sweeping declarations about other fields without due diligence is unique to anthropologists (just look at Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Twitter for evidence of that), but I do agree that anthropologists are particularly bad about doing so with any field that's even kinda adjacent to anthropology. The amount of bad linguistics (the field I studied) I've seen from anthropologists... eugh.
Oh, it's definitely not limited to any single field. Some fields, especially public figures, are particularly bad at it. Like Tyson, there are a lot of Stemlord types. However, I also observed that some anthropologists are among the particularly bad ones.
I also have a physical condition, and I absolutely agree with you about everything. For some reason some people are upset by the embracing of conditions. Talking about them comes off as "being in your face" about them. Funnily enough, these are also things said about queer experiences. There's a common Othering in all of these situations, instead of an effort to understand why people do these things.
As an extension of this, the article in question comes off as patronizing. It's very one-sided. Even though it presents itself as an answer to the "why" of the situation, it doesn't ask the people themselves why they do embrace these "labels".
It's my experience that while there are good anthropologists out there, the bad ones sure do like to talk about people without ever talking to them.
…and all my life, I've believed that was a specialty reserved for physicists.
Anthropologists are like the physicists of the social sciences. They constantly insist that all the other fields are actually just subsets of anthropology. I bristle whenever anthropologists say linguistics is a subfield of anthropology. We're in separate departments for a reason!
That said, I did manage to cover my physical science lab GenEd requirement with an anthropology course in undergrad, so I at least have to give them credit for letting me avoid taking a harder lab than "count the teeth on this hominid."
I thoroughly enjoyed this article, and find my own thoughts very much in alignment with the perspective presented therein. This excerpt, in particular, stood out to me:
Yea, I agree with that. People like to fit in, so it’s no surprise that they would — after finding themselves belonging to or accepted into a certain group — have a vested interest in staying within and further binding themselves to the norms of that specific community. Especially formerly lonely people who know what it is to be left out; why would they jeopardize this newfound sense of connection? It is, after all, quite the relief to feel understood. So, if people subconsciously pull select, ‘well-documented’ in-group prevalent aspects of their disorder closer to the surface, whilst tucking away and minimizing some less commonly acknowledged ones, in the interest of fitting the accepted mold, then that’s that.
This actually brings to mind something an acquaintance once brought up during a discussion about mental illness. They were a practicing psychologist, and something they had noticed within their own experiences with schizophrenia spectrum disorder patients in particular was that people raised within DSM informed cultures reacted to their own delusions and hallucinations differently from those raised without. That is, the patients all definitely had the disorder, however, the manner in which they each experienced the disorder strongly conformed to the expectations of the culture to which they belonged. So, as the excerpt states: “… human classifications change how individuals experience themselves.”
The article misses some important points:
We tried asking politely for reasonable adjustments, and got ignored. So now we have to use a diagnostic label to make the various laws work for us. To be able to make use of disability discrimination laws in the workplace you often have to tell your employer that you have a disability.
Medicine is science, and the purpose of science is to use new knowledge to develop understanding. Pluto is no longer a planet, but this doesn't mean the IAU system doesn't work. Any classification system is a mess - biologists are very open about the fact that classifying plants and animals is complicated - but we don't hear anyone (apart from the most severe cranks) claiming this means the entire system is broken.
The article makes a point about DSM being invalid because fMRI can't tell the difference between schizophrenia and bipolar - but ignores the ethical considerations of getting consent to stick someone undergoing a psychotic episode into an MRI machine.
And I'm not even a fan of the DSM, I think there's a lot about it that really sucks. The reason a lot of the anti-DSM people miss the real flaws with DSM is because they're often also anti-psychiatry, rather than mentally ill people trying to deal with an imperfect psychiatric system.
I really enjoyed the article and was surprised to see I interpreted its message completely differently than a lot of comments here, including yours. To be clear I mostly agree with your comment, except I thought the article wasnt in conflict with it.
Psychology is still a work in progress right? Imagine a theoretical future hundreds of years from now where humanity has survived long enough to come to a better understanding of human behavior. I doubt terms like ADHD and Autism would still be valid, or at least they wouldn't have the same meaning as they do now.
I interpreted the articles critism of the DSM as a way of showing how we are just barely scratching the surface of psychology. Showing that we are on this path, but still understand so little. And how much the DSM has changed over the years as we gain understanding and refine the labels we use.
The article establishes early on how important the DSM is.
I never got the sense the writer was advocating that we go back to ignoring these conditions. Instead I felt they were putting into words something I've felt strongly now for awhile. That it's great that we are finally talking about all these different ways the brain works all the conflicts they cause in society, but this problem is so hard and we are so early in the process, that it is counter productive to buy in so whole heartedly to the vague amorphus blob of symptoms that we have decided to call 'autism' or 'ADHD'. These are just temporary terms and classifications until we figure out something better right?
I thought the mention of FMRI scans and the lack of any genes associated with specific DSM labels were there to illustrate how we don't have any real hard data on how these conditions actually work at chemical level. We are still feeling around in the dark here.
While the labels are vague and not well understood the behaviors/symptoms are real, and it helps to give them some kind of name. You can't learn about something and start dealing with it until you make up some words and classifications, just so you can talk about them.
But usually the first few systems you come up with are inaccurate or grossly oversimplified.
Think: Earth/Air/Fire/Water, or blood/yellow bile/black bile/phlegm. I think we are still closer to that stage in psychiatry now.
The article cited a few different cases where it seemed researchers wanted to update some labels and classifications based on new research, but met with resistance from people and institutions that had become attached to the old labels.
I think we should embrace science and change, take people seriously when they talk about how their own brain works, and not get too attached to labels.
I feel like this is a human thing. We make progress in an area and it's so great and such a relief that we now defend and worship this new thing at all costs. Sometimes a thing is great, but still just a stepping stone to something better.
I also did have to snort in derision about the complaints of getting away from the DSM's psychoanalytic roots.
No one likes psychoanalysis except the few people who go to school just for it. Not a single person in my counseling program was like "aha I'd like to follow in the footsteps of Freud" or "my theoretical orientation will be psychoanalysis!"
Wait until someone tells the author that a lot of studies involving MRI are essentially p-hacking, because MRI machines are frequently misapplied or misinterpreted.
Paywall-free link: https://archive.is/RfTgj