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Notes -
Another thought:
Psychological (software) and psychiatric (hardware) illnesses have historically been downplayed because of their invisibility. People fell through the cracks and died, or were caught in the social safety net and were institutionalized and forgotten. Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio, AC power, and the electric motor died penniless in a hotel where he kept pigeons in a coop. He was hailed as a great man, but had he known about his autism, he might have been even greater.
(The best explanation I’ve hear for Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is that Gregor Samsa woke up disabled one morning, and the bug thing is just a metaphor for dehumanization and dependency.)
It’s actually a good thing the rates are going up because, assuming there’s no actual rise in incidence, they’ll get care because the medical industry has got a profit motive to provide them care.
For some it’s definitely a benefit. But my biggest concern is that a lot of these diagnoses are not only not true, but believing them can take a normal person and turn them into almost a basket-case simply because the therapies designed for serious mental illnesses don’t work, but can make things worse.
Having a depressed person focus on the depression and focus on healing might help, but if you take a person with a case of tge blues and make them focus on their feelings and think about it as part of them, you create a worsening depression. The person had problems that could have been solved easily, but it got medicalized. Or someone with poor discipline and organization skills gets diagnosed ADHD and has an excuse for not doing what they actually could have done all along, but chose not to. Too much focus on feelings over getting things done just seems to take minor problems and turn them into something serious and long lasting.
The other problem in FdB’s “gentrification of mental illness.” Especially when an illness is deemed a part of ADA protections, Theres often a push for people with extremely mild versions of the symptoms (and I’m wording it this way because I’m not convinced that the vast majority of new cases are actually that disease) to get their diagnosis and use the ADA protection to get ahead in life. Or Autism. The people who really actually suffer from these disorders often end up falling further behind because the stuff intended to make it possible for them to live a normal life are handed to people with no such disorders who then use that help to get ahead of their peers, let alone the kids who have actual mental illness. Worse, those with the real thing often end up facing the stigma of being told that they’re not trying because some normal kid they know got diagnosed with ADHD and got a phd in something and so the reason you can’t keep an office job and remember to answer the emails isn’t the ADHD, it’s that you’re lazy or stupid or incompetent or whatever. No, the guy who got his phd wasn’t really ADHD, and the guy who can’t keep an office job is, and now he has to try to explain that to a boss. Or the actually autistic kid who can’t have normal conversations gets compared to a kid with “autism” who’s actually is just slightly shy. I know people with ADHD, real honest-to-God adhd, not the gentrified version, and they can’t keep a job easily even with medication because they have a serious disability.
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