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I've long believed something that rhymes with this and becoming more familiar with modern psychiatry has done nothing but increase the feeling that we're both pathologizing normal human variance and create more extreme cases by creating identity molds for people to slot themselves into. I could have made a case for having many different issues, depression, anxiety, and attention defeciet, ect. It would be easy, maybe some of them at some points of my life would be even true.
I was diagnosed with dyslexia in childhood, to this day I am not sure if that is a diagnosis that just means nearly nothing or if it was a miss diagnosis. I do indeed read slower than many peers, but I'm not even sure how cleanly I can separate cause and effect there, perhaps the diagnosis gave me an excuse and in fact a neat little special marker that overcoming or discarding the diagnosis would actual rob me of. I'd just be a normal.
Anyways I mostly forgot about the whole thing for years but recent it's resurfaced in my consciousness as some excuse for some behavior and in resurfacing I now really do seem to be finding it relevant more and more. I find myself even more preferring audio to text, even more not putting in the effort to improve. On the other hand without the diagnosis I might have thought I was dimmer than I otherwise am, the identity package included strengths with the weaknesses and might have cause dme to lean more into math and engineering subjects than I otherwise would have.
I know you see the trans question as a red Haring but this is another reason I find the topic impossible to ignore. It's the meme equivalent of a bullet with my name on it. There but for the grace of God go I as it is exactly the kind of thing I might have been susceptible to.
Crystallizing this further, I think particularly in the case of depression / anxiety / ADHD, what happens is that a cultural meme develops that some common facet of the human experience is caused by some specific disease, and that the appropriate way to fix this is to obtain treatment.
Examples:
Alice notices that she does not enjoy things that she's "supposed" to enjoy. She's heard that this can be a symptom of depression. She looks up "how to tell if you have depression", and reads that common symptoms include apathy, lack of interest, excessive sleepiness, and insomnia. Now, every time she has trouble falling asleep, she thinks "wow, this depression sucks" and not "I am having trouble falling asleep". She looks up "what to do if you have depression", and sees the usual suggestions about sunlight / therapy / medication. She thinks "well, they were definitely right about my symptoms, so they're probably right about the treatment as well", and gets a therapist and a sunlamp.
Bob notices that he's having a lot of trouble focusing on his job as Senior Manipulator of Boring Numbers. He has heard that trouble focusing can be indicative of ADHD. He looks up "symptoms of ADHD", sees fidgeting, absent-mindedness, difficulty focusing, and forgetfulness. Now, the next time he is introduced to a room full of people and has trouble remembering their names, he thinks "wow, ADHD sucks" and not "wow, I'm bad at names". He obtains some amphetamines, which is what you do when you have ADHD.
Carol notices that her heart rate is elevated and her muscles are tense before her board meeting. This has happened before the last three board meetings too. She googles "elevated heart rate tense muscles" and sees that, according to WebMD, she either has anxiety or lupus. She knows that WebMD is strangely likely to say that people have lupus, but the description of anxiety is on-point. Additionally, there are some new ones on there, like "difficulty concentrating", which she didn't think were caused by the same thing as the thing where she gets way too nervous before important meetings, but maybe it is after all. She talks to a therapist, and learns that indeed, all of her problems are because she has a disease called "Anxiety", but with the proper therapy schedule and medications, she can probably live some semblance of a normal life.
Dan notices that he's been having trouble with his sexual performance. He goes to the friendly neighborhood elder, who informs him that this is a common symptom of being cursed by witches. When you are cursed by witches, lots of bad things can happen, including livestock death, sudden inexplicable vomiting, and impotence, and in extreme cases, your penis sometimes even disappears! The next day, one of Dan's chickens keels over and dies for no apparent reason, and what's worse, he starts violently vomiting after eating the dead chicken. And oddly his penis feels smaller than usual. What was it that elder said he should hang above his door again?
Hypothesis if this is a usefully predictive model of the world: People who read their horoscope on a daily basis are more likely to experience chronic pain than those who don't, even when controlling for all of the obvious confounding factors. I expect that this would be the case because I expect "reads the horoscope daily" to be a reasonably good proxy for both "is searching for an overarching narrative of why things are they way things are" and also "is prone to confirmation bias", and I expect that "you have chronic pain" is one of those things you're more likely to believe if you're searching for an overarching explanation and tend to look for evidence under streetlamps.
Crackpot theory time: It would be possible to significantly reduce the burden on chronic pain by doing something like the following:
Experienced debilitating, chronic pain for some period of time
Changed something plausible about their lives
Immediately after making the change, noticed something that was an obvious consequence of making the change
Now mostly find that, while they do sometimes experience pain, the pain is no longer continuous, is usually telling them something specific, and usually does not interfere with their ability to function
and then loudly broadcast the existence of this group of people at people who have chronic pain. I expect that this intervention would work even if people knew you were doing it, as long as you (correctly, I think) pointed out that your narrative is more plausible than the narrative of "sometime in the recent past, a phenomenon started happening where otherwise-healthy people started experiencing significant pain for no apparent reason, and found themselves unable to live their lives normally due to that pain, and found that, though the pain might sometimes temporarily improve, it always comes back". Because "I do sometimes experience pain, but it's not continuous" and "I sometimes experience a reduction in pain to the point where it's not noticeable, but the pain always comes back" in fact describe exactly the same set of experiences.
I don't really understand this - can you give a concrete example?
For some examples, see the comments of the link posted upthread. For example, pjeby's comment on that LW post:
1. Experienced debilitating, chronic pain for some period of time
2. Changed something plausible about their lives:
3. Immediately after making the change, noticed something that was an obvious consequence of making the change
4. Now mostly find that, while they do sometimes experience pain, the pain is no longer continuous, is usually telling them something specific, and usually does not interfere with their ability to function
So pjeby mostly reconceptualized what the pain meant. If you have a job that involves a lot of typing, and your wrist starts hurting, a natural hypothesis might be "the typing caused the wrist pain", which suggests the action of "reduce the amount of typing you do until the pain goes away". The idea of "trigger points" gives an alternative hypothesis of "I am feeling referred pain", and suggests the action of "look at the chart and massage the indicated areas until the pain recedes".
Now obviously, if the "trigger points exist, and pressing them causes the pain signals to diminish" model of the world is just factually correct, that would explain why pjeby saw such good results. But even if the world-model is not fully correct, it might still be less wrong than the original world-model where pain was caused by strain and should be solved by using rest. And in the case of chronic, debilitating pain where the sufferer has rested for an extended period and the pain is not improving, there is fairly strong (not insurmountable, but fairly strong) evidence that the "rest will make the pain go away" model is not helpful, and replacing it with a different plausible model is likely to be a good idea.
For the sake of clarity, there is a thing which sounds a lot like what I am saying, but is emphatically not what I am saying. That thing is "trigger points are bullshit placebos, and they only appear to work because chronic pain is fake". If that is what you are getting from my post, please let me know and I'll try to come at it from a different angle.
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Think of a certain sort of televangelist.
Find someone with debilitating but nonvisible illness
Loudly invoke the power of the LORD
Patient experiences one of the socially expected consequences, like speaking in tongues or collapsing
wow pain is gone
And then there’s step 5: televise this for awareness and/or profit.
It doesn’t have to be religious, but that’s probably the most visible narrative that deals with life transformation. I guess you could make a similar narrative for gender dysphoria…
I will note that it is an important part of my world model that people with chronic pain, or with gender dysphoria, are in fact experiencing sensations which they interpret as aversive. And, while there exist humans who can execute the mental motion of "recontextualize your experiences such that the pain is not suffering", I don't think telling people to do that directly is likely to be a winning strategy.
"There is no such thing as an unmediated experience" is a true fact about the world (one that people in our particular corner of the internet are particularly bad at acknowledging - see all of the "I didn't fall for that optical illusion" types). In isolation, is is not usually a helpful fact about the world. However, rephrasing it as "here are some different lenses you can view your experiences through, keep trying out different lenses until you find one you like" is an approach that I expect will work more often.
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See also: Duplex’s tithing experience in the Friday thread.
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Thanks for your perspective. Dyslexia is another good example of one of these potentially culturally bound illnesses.
I suppose I think that compared to depression, anxiety, chronic pain, anorexia, and other issues I see trans as something that doesn't cause nearly as much harm, but generates a disproportionate amount of outrage. It's definitely one of the best examples of a subculture driving mental illness though.
I do agree that Trans in of itself generates less harm, but the sheer massive correlations with other mental illnesses seems to be indicative of an issue.
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It’s pretty clear that it is much, much worse to be trans than cis, so it would be a pretty central example of a subculture driven mental illness really hurting people.
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I find this difficult to understand. Just on a trivial metric transgendered people seem to have a higher suicide rate than depressed people. You may be right on chronic pain but that does seem less memetically contagious and much less identity forming so it Amy make up in pure volume what chronic pain has in raw level of misery caused. I can't say which I would choose if I had to make such a choice, but it is far from obvious to me that transgendered is the least of the options on that list.
Fair! I suppose I thought depression/anxiety etc were much more broadly diagnosed and well known in society.
Then again, I'm also a bit tired of all the constant debates about trans on here. ;)
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