Take gender dysphoria for instance. It used to be called Gender Identity Disorder in DSM-4. Then it was renamed, and the approach of listing “Disorders” became replaced with “Traits” to lessen the stigma of a “disorder” while at the same time identifying traits that present in many otherwise normal individuals. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.1...
It is now becoming normalized to the point that 1 in 20 young adults identifies as nonbinary. Where it doesn’t add up is that this dysphoria was a serious disorder whose side effects included attempting suicide at a rate of 30-50%, depending on which study you looked at! Now, are you going to tell me that 2% of all young adults are attempting suicide in USA? Somehow I doubt that. It is too high. Hence it is overreported and overdiagnosed. The “social contagion” theory from 2018 is a part of an alternative answer but it goes deeper than that. It has to do with society making both parents work harder than ever to make ends meet and abandoning its children to be raised by school administrators. It has to do with capitalist industries like the music industry pushing gangst rap / drill music to young kids, instagram / tiktok pushing sexualization and much more very early on.
ADHD seems to be the new “hysteria” — for children instead of women. Hysteria was a catch-all “disorder” that was massively overdiagnosed, and by the way is how the medical industry invented the vibrator. Turns out the problem was upstream. Go figure! https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181107-the-history-of-t...
Today, one in five middle aged women is given SSRIs and ADHD kids are medicated with amphetamines! And many people are conditioned to carry water for the industry, and shut down any questioning of it. Until meta-studies come out to debunk the industry’s claims: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
What I would say is, we should try to fix our capitalist society where both parents work for corporations and stick their kids in public schools where they have to sit still for long periods, and which are modeled on the outdated corporation / factory model. Look at other countries, eg Finland has much better aligned schools and the prevalence of ADHD is far lower.
Same thing with society in general. Middle-aged women are depressed for a reason. With the rise in divorce rates they are often divorced, feeling unattractive and alone. Our society has a lot sad lonely people, our people live in cities, order amazon and food in, and hardly know even their neighbors:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Record levels of sadness in teens — look at TikTok and sexualization of women and body images, before prescribing antidepressants.
How does that work?
Between that and the water-carrying for anti-trans bigots, this has no place here.
Just because people are being systematically squelched for questioning gangsta rap or giving amphetamines to kids doesn’t mean they are “bigots”. They may care more about individuals than the people who view the kids as just a cog in a machine, and the administrators who cover their butt and barely know anything about the kid.
I believe that water-carrying is being done in the other direction far more — the capitalist industries that make a profit.
Check out the following issues and ask yourself whether all they have in common is “conspiracy nuts”, or whether on the other side they have a highly organized cooperation to push a change through, and to deplatform and delegitimize anyone — even previously respected experts or people whose job it is to deal with these issues - who dares to make too much noise or criticize whatever agenda is pushed:
Weapons industry / military industrial complex — the latest being the war in Ukraine, but previously in Iraq etc.
Plastic - recycling (later revealed to be a scam)
Depression - I saw lots of pushback right here on HN when questioning SSRIs and imbalance theory, but since the 2022 meta-study that died down
Vaccines - we are all aware of how pervasive the push for censorship was, just look at the latest revelations out of FB, Twitter
(CBDCs and National IDs - coming soon)
Gangsta Rap - anyone speaking against it or its misogyny is attacked
Trans activism - anyone voicing any concern for overdiagnosis, or the economic system that separates kids from both their parents, or even continues to use the psychiatric perspective of a disorder or dysphoria out of a concern for children, is shamed as “on the wrong side of history”.
BLM - Anyone discussing any other killings other than by cops of unarmed Black men was systematically attacked
MeToo - Men told to be quiet, listen and not be part of the conversation. Once again rape is very important topic, but the concept got “overdiagnosed” and stretched to the point where someone like Matt Damon making a nuanced distinction becomes persona non grata
To be clear, a man disagreeing with the following tweet is not the same as normalizing rape, but look how quick one side (the water-carrying one, in my opinion) is to paint the other as an “antisemitic/racist/white supremacist/misogynist/putin-supporting/bigot” for merely speaking up and voicing different opinion: https://twitter.com/driverminnie/status/941905518284566528?s...
There are groups who pounce on anyone attributing disparities in economic outcomes to any other factors than the one-dimensional explanation of systemic sexism, racism, etc. It is like when some Zionists explain criticism of Israel purely in terms of systemic antisemitism, or some anti-Zionists navel-gaze at Israel call it the world’s worst violator of human rights and hurl epithets at anyone who mildly disgrees. When you have an agenda you tend to do lots of adhominems. It shuts down the conversation and prevents real discussion exploring other factors. Because institutions have an agenda and they co-opt people into enforcing it. Whether it’s regular Han Chinese in China supporting the locking up of Uyghurs for the “greater good”. Or Sunni/Shiite proxy wars in Yemen. Their “solutions” are invariably worse than the problem, which in any case is upstream and probably due to the very institution and government working together to create it.
The well-meaning activists who carry water for these industries and agendas do not engage in good faith. They are so convinced they are morally superior that they simply insinuate you’re a bad person and then respond in passive-aggressive one-liners!
I said the systemic causes of problems are upstream. I named several of them: A, B, C that exacerbates X, Y, Z. That doesn’t mean A causes Z.
Gangsta Rap may be responsible for a totally different phenomenon than gender dysphoria: namely, the increase in violence, misogyny etc. in some Black communities. With the rise of Black music moguls it became essentially self-blaxploitation:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6gb1w72xA
And also influenced a lot of bad memes among many Black youth:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagging_(fashion)
This in turn hurt their economic chances as a class, to get high-paying jobs.
This shares elements with other similar examples, which are nevertheless distinct. For example, TikTok and Instagram harming the psyche of young teen girls, with one in three attempting suicide:
https://www.chconline.org/resourcelibrary/teen-girls-report-...
That’s insane! This was NOT the case in previous generations. But notice how few people in mainstream media talk about the upstream causes, and how they mostly discuss medicating this newfound problem away.
Similarly with diabetes, very few people talk about the prevalence of sugar in so many plants we eat (fructose in fruits for instance) or the government actually supporting high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified crops with sugar… or factory farms and so on…
https://weather.com/news/news/2018-10-03-fruit-so-sweet-zoo-...
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it:
Whereas something like, say, gender dysphoria has positively exploded in diagnoses. It’s a worrying disorder, which (eg unlike autism) studies show leads 30-50% to attempt suicide. So any increase in its prevalence to 5% of the emerging US population is worrying. If this was, say, a coronavirus with that kind of risk to life, we’d all be worried.
I want to be clear - I am not saying that the symptoms aren’t real and that “this is all in their head”, or that we need “conversion therapy” or something. I an saying the major systemic problems are upstream and by changing THE SYSTEM we will reduce the incidence instead of only focusing on medical interventions downstream as bandaids.
As an analogy — if we addressed antibiotic overuse on factory farms and sugar and high fructose corn syrup and pink slime, fast foods etc. we could address the epidemics of obesity and diabetes, including in children. But instead we focus on inventing new ways to medicate them!
And when the coronavirus comes around, instead of recognizing that these very same factors (obesity and diabtetes) are highly correlated with morbidity and mortality with that virus, we once again look for vaccines against the virus and once it subsides we continue to IGNORE all the systemic upstream factors in the underlying chronic epidemics in USA.
Autism could very well be yet another one, maybe it is like autoimmune diseases that are related to microplastics, maybe they affect hormones like aestrogen and testosterone. We need to LOOK UPSTREAM.
In no country is it true that 5% of young adults have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Perhaps people are trivializing the actual affliction and are “appropriating” the identity the way it has been done with blackface or wearing drag for the fun of it etc. I actually hope so since the opposite would imply a lot of psychological torment. But regardless, we must once again look at society and upstream issues.
For example, if a girl preferred traditionally male activities, today that is 1 of 2 criteria she needs to be considered as having gender dysphoria, while in the past she’d be called a Tomboy before. That was a normal acceptable category for explaining her tendencies. It didn’t come with an assumption that she is “REALLY” a boy inside and should make a decision on whether to take advantage of the latest technology to physically transition her gender before she hits puberty. And to be fair, the amount of people undergoing hormone blockers or surgeries is still low compared to the number of young kids who identify as trans. But if the capitalist psych and pharma industries have their way, they’ll push it to increase.
Most tomboys eventually changed as they got older, it was a phase, and it was contextualized differently by society. Also they had a mom at home, raising them, etc. Today both parents are away. School administrators cover their butt and say the parents can’t be notified and even if they do, they have no say. A lot of the industry increasingly is pushing ONE interpretation on all cases. An interpretstion that didn’t exist even 10 years ago. This is an experiment in novel interpretations and it’s not working well so far in terms of mental health outcomes.
Many times throughout history we had such interpretations (eg Hysteria for women, or chemical castration for gays) it turned out that the problem was societal.
Sorry, I don't have the energy to respond to the other stuff, but I really think you're mixing together the criteria for adults with the criteria for children.
Also, there are many antidepressants... I don't think there is a solid ground for why they describe a specific one for certain patients.
Check these too:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
https://www.nature.com/articles/193377a0
What makes it difficult for some experts, is that they perhaps dont know there can be 1000-2000 mitochondria per liver cell, and Mn Super Oxide Dismutase increases with manganese intake and beta alanine, which is required for MnSOD.
Point being are symptoms of depression caused by not enough manganese and beta alanine, when looking at how its missing from so much food and water.
When looking at aging, at end of life, feeling the cold is also a symptom of not enough manganese as the iron based reactive oxygen species generates the most heat in the body, ergo increase MnSod, more of the iron based ROS in the mitochondria can take place, like unblocking a drain.
Even the WHO have just rolled back on its manganese in drinking water guidelines.[1]
High fat diets also increase the faecal excretion of manganese, and alcohol contributes to manganese deficiency.
The risk with it, is with kids getting too much as it triggers puberty early as it increases luteinising hormone, and in adults, this would suggest an increase in sexual activity, which from a law enforcement point of view, is undesirable, but also probably explains why Weed makes people horny besides it phytoestrogens, namely because leaves, including tobacco will have the most amount of manganese in.
So it would seem there is a lot of meta data pointing to not enough manganese. Water regulations also require manganese to be removed from the potable water in the UK, so there will only be a few micrograms of the stuff in water.
Obviously pre-internet and personal mobile surveillance phones, trying to find and identify a chemical change to control the population would have been order of the day, but when seeing the rise in depression, have we reached a point where its becoming obvious there isnt enough manganese in our diet?
I could put lots of links up, but cant be bothered at this stage.
Did you or someone you know try to take a manganese supplement and see the effects?
DSM-5 has made it easier to diagnose someone with these things, boosting recurring revenues for the psychiatry and pharma industry.
And then look at the Tax Preparation industry, which always lobbies to keep things complex and perpetuate the individual income tax. If there was ever something that marched Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs essay, it’s that.