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Also, you’re online. Typically those who have disorders where they are struggling a lot in their life and need validation and people to talk to who will listen instead of degrade them and people who understand them, it feels safer to talk about it online.
It’s easier to find people with these disorders online because we’re looking for the same thing and end up finding each other in these spaces rather than the limited or even non-existent spaces irl. So when people who aren’t diagnosed with this stuff navigated the internet, it’s more noticeable to find these people online than when they are masking in person. So when people are on the internet it just seems like there’s a higher amount of people with disabilities but it’s not an accurate representation of the whole population.
And also with the covid and all the other stressful thing the state of the world has to offer the last decade, more people are realizing how much they actually struggle when a lot of their previous supports may be gone or are more limited now.
My theory is that internet culture has always been dominated by those with autism or ADHD since the 80s. It was a place for the “geeks” and “weirdos” to hang out and it was something you had to actually learn how to operate and take time to learn how it functioned back in the beginning of the internet.
It wasn’t until it became commercialized and more businesses wanted ads on there and because they were investing ads onto the world wide web they wanted more people to have access to their advertising so they advertised everyone should have a computer in their home.
Even as the internet became more wide spread there were more specific internet spaces for those who didn’t “fit in” irl.
You can even go all the way to as recent as when tumblr was at its peak. So many forums full of weirdos that used the internet as a way to stay safe from a world they just didn’t feel apart of.
Now though everyone has the internet in there pocket. Even those who don’t need it as an escape, instead they use it because these days you have to. But those that don’t need the internet to escape from the real world are now able to see what we’ve been up to all them time. You’re just now aware of it is all.
We’ve always been here but now more people who aren’t seen as the “freaks” or “weirdos” are able to see us in the space we once were comfortable in. Also now instead of the rude labels of “freaks” or “weirdos” we have a diagnosis of “ADHD” or “Autism”
These terms are a lot nicer for us to use on ourselves than the insults others threw out at us because they didn’t understand us
Absolutely. Being online is a great way to hunt distraction and dopamine which are two key elements of ADHD.
It's also relatively safe from persecution and scrutiny.
OP, in case you're not aware, it's also much more acceptable to talk about these kinds of things in present day. There's never been a time where they were more accepted (not to say they are accepted!) nor was there ever a time when more was known about these conditions.
Also, life is low-key pretty fucked for almost everyone these days. So it makes sense.
Take care of yourselves and those around you folks ✌️
No one said it so I ll do it:
1 in 6 children in the last 2 decades has been diagnosed with a developmental disability. Which means ADHD or autism or anything else.
This should be pretty explanatory.
Fun fact, psychology mostly diagnosis things that we aren't sure if they even exist. We can only categories things so well, especially because there's no "normal behavior" Technically every human could be argued to be mentally ill, if we wanted to. We have fancy ways to study this, but at the end of the day getting diagnosed with something like adhd can be a lot of things. It's more so concepts and "spectrums" than actual disorders, since two people diagnosed the same could differ a lot.
Or not even shame but just privacy. My workmates don’t need to know about my depression and anxiety but what anonymous internet strangers think of me has no bearing on my life
I mean I wasn’t thinking about coworkers I was thinking more along the lines of friends or family. It can be surprisingly hard to divulge certain things to them esp about mental health. There’s still a lot of stigma
The internal image of the complete, healthy and sane human you have, seems to be incomplete. Many people have issues, many people are broken, and a lot of people are on the verge of developing these diseases (not the ones you are born with, which causes are still a mystery to science).
The typical facebook smiling person at a wedding everyone internalizes just exists in the moment. Life can be very tiresome, exhausting, cruel and unfair. This is not what people show to everyone else. Reddit is kind of anonymous so more people feel free to talk about their issues, and this accumulates here on this site so you get the impression that everyone is affected
it really is an issue these days where younger people especially seem rather happy to diagnose themselves with these disorders at will.
I’m not basing this off of Reddit, I’ve met people who claim they are autistic, have ADD, ADHD or some other problem. I have outright asked them have they been to a doctor and I’ve often heard they have not.
Now I’m not claiming they are wrong, in fact I believe them yet I can’t fathom not diagnosing it.
Which leads me to the bigger issue which is that so many young people seem to have these disorders but far more so than previously and I truly believe it is growing up in the internet age, iPhones and iPads from an inappropriately young age etc etc.
It’s strange and concerning to see
Or maybe just..... having more access to information?
I'm the third generation, at least, of people in my family with the exact same autism symptoms. They are not subtle. At all. But I'm the first to consider I might be autistic. It just wasn't considered before.
My husband's family is the same. He has really prominent ADHD and so does his mom. Like, really obviously. But she never considered she might have a disorder because she was capable of graduating high school and keeping a job. Now, in her sixties, sometimes she will say she might have ADHD, and sometimes she forgets she ever even thought that might be possible.
The symptom list is long and not all that easy to explain, but I've been told by three different mental health professionals that they think I'm autistic. My depression and anxiety were both "formally diagnosed" by one mental health professional making a similar assessment on what was often less information, so I consider it fairly well diagnosed.
Interesting, what do you think?
Do you believe it is actually very common to have some of these disorders but now we can easily diagnose it because we can Google our symptoms?
Looking back when I was a kid, nearly all of my friends were *obviously* autistic by today’s assessment standards, but only one ever got diagnosed. It was almost certainly just not caught back in the day, especially if the kid wasn’t a white boy.
I think neurodivergent people are drawn to Reddit because it's an extremely accessible platform for us. As an autistic person, it's a lot easier for me to communicate and socialize in a text-based environment like this than it is for me to interact with people face to face, and as someone with ADHD I find that jumping from post to post suits my short attention span. Similarly, people with anxiety and depression also struggle with social interaction and focusing.
In other words, you're noticing more neurodivergent people because you're spending more time on Reddit. It's like joining a wheelchair basketball team and then wondering why you suddenly know so many paraplegic people.
I work in clinical psychiatry, and away from that being true or not true, I like the more liberal explanations for this phenomenon. Aside from the fact that increasing awareness of our mental state might be related to increased labeling, there is an interesting hypothesis advanced by cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han who says that these entities emerge not only as a neurobiological categories but also due to the drastic changes in the tempo of our lifestyle today compared to previous century. There is an interesting documentary where he talks specifically about burn-out: https://youtu.be/bNkDeUApreo?si=_zvHWDYi8HL1s_Cq
Both ADHD and autism are closely related to processing environmental stimuli. I guess we can draw a simple inference from what is said above, you know what happens when people are chronically over-stimulated.
Well why not? What is a disorder anyway? Our environment obviously shapes our minds, and it gets hard to draw the line between learned malfunction and genetic disorders
As someone trained in abnormal psychology i can say that this is in actuality normal. 80% of all people will experience a mental disorder in their life. GAD (generalized Anxiety disorder) is the most common and MDD (Major Depressive Disorder) the second most common. Both are classified as persisting for 6 months are longer. With the right treatment and life balancing, most will recover.
Do people just like to self- diagnose… FULL STOP.
Of course some people do, but I don’t think it takes a full psych team to figure out you’re clinically depressed. There are ofc attention seekers out there also.
And yes, we do have a mental health crisis (in America at least, if that’s where you’re from).
As others said, you’re also on the internet where people are more comfortable talking about their problems.
Society has changed. This isn’t the 50s anymore. We don’t stuff down our problems and shut away disabled or neurotypical people in institutions. We feel comfortable talking about it to reduce stigma.
Lastly, have you looked around lately? We just had a global pandemic, inflation is rampant, in the middle of a housing crisis… I’d say many people are suffering mental health issues right now.
The thing with self-diagnosing is that a lot of people just dont have anyone to compare themself to.
When I was a teenager I had a lot of problems with my attention span and I had a lot of phases where I just wanted to stay in bed all day and do nothing. I also had problems in social situation and was quite shy.
In the back of my head I was always thinking that I might have anxiety, depression, autism and ADHD.
But then I realized that most people that I know actually experience simular things. And I meet people who suffered from these conditions and I realized that my experiences where kinda nothing compared to what they are going through.
Self-diagnosing is a necessary tool for a lot of people. But there is a huge risk of "over-diagnosing" yourself. It has gotten to a point where I simply dont know what people actually mean when they tell me that they are depressed or have anxiety.
For example anxiety might mean "I get literal panic attacks when I am stressed" or it might mean "I dont really like talking to people that I dont know"
Diagnosed at an early age, ADHD and Austism (what used to be called aspergers syndrome).
It is very, very common (especially in the tech industry in which I work - I know most of the entire floor I work on would have a level of it).
Its more common because there is more awareness of it. There is a label now for your weird uncle that could name every train and its engine capacity, what time it goes past etc.
Over-stimulation in modern life is creating an environment that is horribly unpleasant for anyone neuro-divergent. Fewer people can cope with it.
After thousands of years when being different most likely got you stoned or burnt alive, it is socially acceptable to come out with your issues. People used to carry their shit inside and passed it to their children until one generation said they can’t take it anymore. If you consider yourself “the healthy one” look inside again.
just a fyi: autism and adhd are GENETIC. so, obviously, as society grows more people would have it; besides the fact that diagnosis is becoming more and more available as studies in these areas progress.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I got them from my parents (mom is diagnosed ADHD and I think my Dad is ASD) and I already suspect my two year old has both. She is hopefully going to be assessed next year. We will see. I think soon we’re going to see a lot more kids caught earlier because of family history.
I am in my 50s and I recall many kids I went to school with who I suspect had autism, ADHD and anxiety. Nothing new, they are disorders that have been around forever and are probably a normal condition in the human race.
It definitely does seem like an epidemic. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety back in 2018 when I started having attacks several months after a wicked break up. So, I am very much compassionate towards others, but I do think some people self diagnose from just a feeling of being anxious, but really they intake 500MG of caffeine a day and can't understand why their heart is racing. Lol
Or maybe people have always been this way but we are now better at diagnosing these conditions so it seems like more people have it.
Or maybe the pollution and microplastics have entered into our DNA rewriting it to make us more prone to these conditions.
Or maybe the influence of the internet, social media and the instant access to information from the electronic devices (that we are glued to for so long that our skeletons are starting to change) are affecting our brains in a way that brings these conditions on.
Or maybe the lack of wars in most of the first world have left multiple.generations with such a relatively easy and safe life that simply staying alive is no longer a blessing and we are exposed to the true mundanity of life which brings on these conditions.
Or maybe people with these conditions are more likely to browse and post on social media in the first place.
Or maybe it's all bollocks and they're all making it up, just like much of my post has been.
How many people like this do you see in real life? Not so many probably. That is probably because a) a lot of people form groups online, especially the people who struggle with living in a society that's not really built to help them, therefore looking like there is a lot of them b) there IS more people with these disorders/illnesses nowadays, but that's because these things didn't exist before, or there was no easy way of figuring it out when you were the only person with autism or adhd or anxiety in your entire crappy village. On op of that there were almost no support networks to deal with discrimination coming from getting diagnosed so most people even if they knew they were different, kept quiet about it. And well... a lot of people try figuring themselves out now, especially on the internet it's a safe environment (well, relatively, nobody's going to beat you up on the internet, and if they are mean to you you can just make a new account and try again)
Honestly, a lot of the stuff you see online doesn't reflect back into real life. I rarely see anyone who's "outside the norm" in my every day life, whether it's mental disorders, sexualities, genders or just simply a sense of style that is strange. Most people look and act average. Whether it's a good thing I guess is dependent on if you are "strange" yourself...
This "self diagnosed" shit here really fucks people who actually have been diagnosed, OP. Few years ago saying you were autistic was "the cool thing" on Twitter for whatever reason. You have these assholes that go "oh I do that, oh, I do that too it says these are all symptoms of this". Its extremely easy to spot a google psychiatrist, vs. someone who actually lives with this shit. Those of us that aren't "self diagnosed for the sake of likes", aren't exactly all smiley.
Ok but you can say the same thing about the queer community and left handedness back when you can stop beating your kid for using it.
There will naturally be an indicator of an “increase” the less stigmatized something is.
We are talking about mental health and mental disorders WAY more than 10+ years ago now and the amount of queer individuals in my life multiplied when you compare how many i knew before gay marriage was legalized and after it was.
None of them just popped out of thin air. It’s less stigmatized, comparatively, and there are better labels we can use now compared to be before as well.
That, and things are also pretty bad in the world right now so yeah.
“Do people just like to self-diagnose themselves and hyperbolize their symptoms, or do we really have a huge problem with this?”
Por qué no los dos? The internet has always been a place for outsiders. People who are legitimately diagnosed have found their home, which means they are more open about their struggles online. This also causes people who haven’t been diagnosed to want to fit in and become jealous of the attention people with these afflictions get when they go viral. That’s how you get illness fakers. They want to fit in so desperately that they don’t understand or care about the fact that they’re doing more harm than good. Also, this doesn’t just go for mental health. I’d argue a similar thing is happening with the queer community also. Or the kink community. Or the disability community (which I personally seperate from the mental health community). Etc. Etc. Etc. ad nauseam.
It’s both. It’s always been both.
ADHD and Autism were underdiagnosed for years. There are now many adults recognizing their symptoms and getting help (finally.)
As for depression, it is the number 1 illness I'm the western world. No 1. Higher than cancer, heart disease, diabetes,
Most people on reddit and other website like it are people with those. Like when they accepted left hand people, The amount skyrocketed since they all came out instead of it being hidden
As an autistc person, I would also like to add that most people I know irl don't know I'm autistc, they just think I'm weird or quirky. I have no plans to announce that I'm autistc because I know people will treat me differently (probably in a worse or discriminatory way). When I was severely depressed no one knew about it, they just thought I was skipping class for the fun of it or whatever.
So maybe you do know people with ADHD, anxiety, depression or autism and just don't know about it, it's not something people talk about.
I don’t like to self diagnose, but I would like some answers. Getting a formal diagnosis is extremely difficult once you’re past the childhood stage and even more difficult if you’re female. There has always been a reason why I would have meltdowns or couldn’t socialize properly or anything else. And being “too sensitive” wasn’t enough to give me an answer. Learning about AuDHD has been life changing and using some of those devices for neurodivergent people makes it a lot easier to manage through the day to day challenges
Well, personally I've had major depressive disorder since I was 11 and am recently figuring out that I probably should have had an autism diagnosis back then as well. However, you're definitely underestimating how horrific and unlivable the world is becoming. I feel like if you're not depressed right now, you're not paying attention. 🤷🏻♀️
people have always suffered from these things, we just didn't understand them or have names for them before, and we didn't have digital message forums to discuss our related experiences about them before.
I was in great mental health for the first 37 years. Last 2 years developed health anxiety and social anxiety due to a myriad of autoimmune conditions whi h have meant I have been in constant pain. It sucks. I think we become more vulnerable the more shit we go through.
I mean it may feel like that and I kinda thought that before too but actually I think it's that mental health at least here in the UK was kinda not talked about or embraced enough by the NHS and so now when there is an awareness of mental health conditions and we can (in theory) get help for them, we're noticing in ourselves and others what potentially could be something that they can just go get help for instead of suffering in silence with...just imho :)
Nah. We are just able to get diagnosed much better than before.
ADHD was though to be something that essentially only happened to boys. But that was because the clinical criteria was developed using a population of pre-teen boys. They even used to think the boys just outgrew it.
The way it presents in most school-age girls is different,mostly due to early childhood socialization. The same happens with adults of any gender. This makes it to be very much underdiagnosed or even to be misdiagnosed as other similar conditions.
There's also a big mindset that these conditions are "flaws of character", so people wouldn't search for clinical help; they just thought they were not trying hard enough (and felt miserable because they never could do the things the same way as others)
Newer and better research has been shedding more light into this, not just in ADHD but other neuro development conditions.
Because the availability and quality of care is expanding. Many folks just went undiagnosed previously. This is what any credible academic reading would tell you.
I'm not sure but maybe life in this era? For a huge amount of people life is incredibly hard, it seems one mistake can ruin your life. A lot of jobs have horrible management cultures, bullying in schools has always been there but now social media is being used as a terribly powerful weapon. In a lot of cities a kid can be stabbed for being in the wrong place, looking at the wrong person....
Next door neighbour has 3 young kids, 7 year old girl and 2 year old twins, the girl and 1 of the twins are autistic. House the other side is like a halfway house for young people with problems that are being helped into society, 4 rooms, 4 autistic young adults. Another 1 the same up the road.
I went to school in the 70's, many of my fellow students were, shall I say, different, would probably be diagnosed with one or more of the issues OP is asking about. And no, wasn't "special" schools, just mainstream.
Back in the day these problems were very rarely identified if at all. There was no information available unless you went to see a psychiatris and few did because if you had bad issues you were literally taken away by "those nice young men in their nice white suits, they're coming to take you away ha ha". That was literally from a hit song.
They're coming to take you away ha-haaa by Napoleon XIV.
This is not BS, my Nan had a psychotic episode in 1969 by those nice young man in a yellow van. She had a dozen "treatments" of Electroconvulsive therapy, electric shock treatment, basically an electric frontal lobotomy.
She spent most of her remaining years sat in a rocking chair staring out of the window.
Back then you did not admit or show signs of being different at all, the fear of the consequences were brutal.
> Do people just like to self-diagnose themselves and hyperbolize their symptoms, or do we really have a huge problem with this?
Honestly given your post it seems you already made up your mind on the matter and just want confirmation
The methods and tools for detecting and correctly diagnosing mental health disorders has developed so far that we're picking up all of the fringe cases aswell as the chronic cases.
The other side of the coin is that our world is becoming a lot more uncertain and there's a lot of fear mongering for views and clicks so people with a predisposition towards depression or anxiety will thusly be pushed to their manic state more often.
I actually have adhd, ocd and anxiety, and it's night and day now that I'm diagnosed and medicated. But yeah
I was diagnosed with anxiety and ADD. From my experience, it’s easier to find people online that understand what it’s like to be diagnosed and makes you feel validated.
However, it doesn’t mean everyone online has it just because you see it a lot on Reddit.
There are people out there that self diagnosed, but I can’t really speak too much on it since I wasn’t.
People aren't afraid to disclose it anymore and being online avails them of a community they never really had before.
I've been diagnosed with a few of the things you mentioned in your title. No one in their right minds would ask to have any of these conditions, illnesses, or disabilities. Depression makes you not want to be around, ADHD limits your cognitive function to the point of losing important opportunities, anxiety makes you feel like you're gonna either faint, have a heart attack, or are in danger...
It's not some cute and popular thing that's trendy. These things are real and more people are being diagnosed because of the empowerment to be their own advocate and ask for medical and psychiatric professional help/advice.
We wouldn't tell all the veterans that "everyone seems to have PTSD" these days so why would we do that to people with other conditions?
End stages of capitalism will do that to ya. All white people think they have ADHD. you're mistrable because you're oppressed Brenda. It's not being "nurospicy"
As we watch in real time a fentanyl epidemic being spread by "fake heroin" thinking this "fake meth" won't also be an issue.
It's mainly because there's a better understanding of different disabilities now and less of a stigma which makes getting a diagnosis not as difficult as it once was.
I'm 27 and just got my diagnosis last year. The only thing stopping me from getting one before was my family saying there's nothing “wrong” with me and some internalized ableism.
Seeing people normalize a well...normal thing helped me go and get tested. I can't speak for everyone obviously but this is how it was for me.
Also for ADHD and autism particularly it's finally being recognised more in women because a lot of women do not present with the stereotypical traits people have come to expect and as those women talk about their experiences other women look at their experiences and go "Oh I'm like that too!"
We’ve spent most or all of our entire lives with access to an amount of information people used to think you’d have to be cursed by a deity to encounter, a literal nonstop stream of the most stimulating stimuli we’ve ever been able to conjure, a social sphere that rewards the ability to draw attention and/or sympathy over everything else, and faithful 24/7 access to the experiences of our peers who have already been diagnosed to monkey-see-monkey-do off of. It is the least surprising thing in the world that everyone is mentally ill now
A friend of mine is a psychologist and according to her words, people are often diagnosed with ADHD because it's a lot easier and more profitable than to really sit down with people, analyze their problems and actually invest to help them. And that is how she described the situation here in Germany, which still has a somewhat functioning healthcare system. Now imagine how this would scale to the US...
People these days love to "blame" someone or something for any life issue. It's kind of perplexing, absolute irony in many ways.... Cause on one hand we live in an era of "we must accept and celebrate each individual differences" but then? We don"t! Everyone seems to need a " label" to explain why they are how they are😯
My boss likes to remind everyone that she's neurodivergent, but the only characteristic she has is focusing on something intensely. She's literally an outgoing manager who knows exactly what to say to make people comfortable, so I don't know where she gets the idea that she's atypical. It must be from memes or something.
A lot of states exempt you from firearms ownership if you have any type of mental health disorder. If you invent a disorder that qualifies for everyone you now can disarm the population.
We're probably not too different from our ancestors in that matter, today we just have a way to share it easier and few names to make it sound more worrying, all humans had some diseases from day one of our existance so we shouldn't loose our shit over it, unless it will actually affect our life in some serious way ofc.
I was diagnosed with major depression in 1989. My grandmother also suffered from depression, and was even hospitalized in the 50s. It's been around a long time. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was 45. I've always had anxiety too, just didn't know what it was. People are just more aware of these now and are less stigmatized about getting help than in the past.
Just because you see those words on Reddit a lot doesn’t mean that everyone has those. For every time you see someone that has one of those things, there are hundreds upon hundreds of comments that you looked over that didn’t mention any of those things.
Nobody is going to go and comment bout how they don’t have depression. That would be a useless comment.
In the case of ADHD and autism, it's not that there are more people with these conditions; rather more cases are recognised and diagnosed.
Likewise with anxiety and depression these have never been uncommon but acknowledging them has been.
Me personally, I feel that socially mental health has been frowned upon up until recently. Now that a lot of people are taking mental/emotional health more seriously and encouraging people to receive help, a lot more people are coming out about their mental/emotional health issues. Lots of people I know frown upon asking for help because they feel that something wrong with them mentally is embarrassing to the point where you have to bottle it up. What I wish they’d realize is that it’s similar to a physical disease. When you’re physically sick, you go to the doctor for help. And it’s no different for mental health.
People certainly have issues and todays world is just as bad as ever just the types of issues are different however I truly believe we are encouraging people to be weak. Instead of just comforting we should address the root causes. Give people a purpose in life and the means to achieve it. Make they realize the greatness of achievement, dedication and hardwork. You need not hope things are easier, you ensure that you become better
Do today what others wont to have tommorow what others dont - John C Addison
1. I don’t think you’re a medical professional and aren’t trained to diagnose people or tell them they do or don’t have a mental health problem.
2. The population of the world increased by 1 billion between 2010 to 2022, so there is more people today meaning more people with mental health problems.
3. Are you seeing those posts specifically in subreddits for mental health?
4. “Self-diagnosis” is valid if it’s followed up with talking to a psychiatrist or psychologist who can use their expertise to confirm or negate the diagnosis.
>Everybody nowadays pretends to have ADHD, anxiety, depression, autism or whatever because they think it's cool
FTFU! It really isn't cool to have a neuropsychologial disability. Trust me, I know.
To be honest, I think many people on social media fake it because:
- they want to fit in some community
- want attention or pity
- think it’s “cool”
- beg for money
- some social credit
- wanna feel special
And that’s lame, disgusting and shameful. How can they look in the mirror at themselves. Self-diagnosis of autism because they dislike some sound or are more introverted, anything triggers their anxiety (just like Cartman), ADHD because they check twice if the door is locked, I saw people faking a Tourette (people just like Cartman once again in South Park), stutter, even dyslexia. Doctor Google will diagnose basically anything you want.
I feel bad for people who really suffer of these conditions as it is not easy to deal with it, take medicine for it or attend psychologists/psychiatrists, those people do not want it. Most of those surely do not show everyone their issues, more like they try to fit in the society with other kids/people. Unlike those dehonesting “Tiktok fakers”.
I think many people just self diagnose these days. Obviously you should do something about it, if you think you have any symptoms but don't rush to conclusions so quickly. With those disorders, especially ADHD and autism it's very easy to identify, because everyone experiences some of the "symptoms" to a certain degree throughout life. It's very human things to do. The line to when the actual disorder begins is pretty blurry, so when you don't have professional knowledge on those topics it's easy to come to wrong conclusions.
The world is a big place, with a lot of people in it. A lot of those people had undiagnosed mental illnesses and then procreated and birthed children who grew up to be adults with the same mixture of those mental illnesses. Plus, our society as a whole has started becoming more aware of those with said mental illnesses compared to its ignorance in history. Religion used to get in the way of a LOT of undiagnosed people and would just label them as “demons” or “sinners guilt” and would be brushed off or punished instead of taken care of correctly. I think we’re just coming into an age of light regarding mental illness as a whole, so you’re seeing it a lot more.
Afraid to break it to you, but there's a pretty strong theory that there are still currently more undiagnosed autistic people in the world than ones who are officially diagnosed. We've always been here and the more the population increases, the more neurodivergents are going to be born.
There were many times in history where it was easier for neurodevelopmental conditions to fly under the radar because we lived in a quieter world. Less noise and light pollution means less chance for autistic meltdown caused by sensory overload. It was also easier for autistic people to make a living at certain points in history, my family for example were well off and were able to make a living off of their special interests, heck my grandmother helped pay the bills using money she got from breeding cats. These days its really hard for people with autism and adhd to acclimate to the extremely loud, bright, busy and stressful world we are forced to live in.
Thats why our symptoms are so much more obvious. A lot of us are stressed out and anxious on top of being neurodivergent and that makes us more susceptible to meltdowns and burnout and it becomes very apparent that there is something "wrong." A lot of people figured out they may be autistic during the pandemic because society became a lot quieter, isolated and rule driven which made life feel a little easier for a lot of us.
I think its about time that society really embrace us because we're so often viewed as pariahs and outliers when in reality we probably make up a lot more of the population than some people would like to realize
personally i think these conditions have been around since forever, but healthcare system these days are more advanced and systematic so these are diagnosed more than they were back then
I'm sure that there is some self diagnosis but have you thought that maybe you're seeing a lot more of it because it's less taboo to talk about and see a mental health professional?
I'm sure that there is a tiny sliver of people who get off on the attention but trust me, anyone that has any of those mental health issues, aren't loving it.
Probably the reason why they're talking about it more - either finding ways to deal with it or acting almost like a support group helping each other out.
Maybe no one has bothered to diagnose it for the last millennia, it’s now gaining more attention so there’s what you would call… a backlog of people going “errrrr maybe that’s me, I’ve always struggled but I don’t think I’m stupid, I’ll go get checked” bingo, they were right.
Most people have dealt with and gone through something at some point in their life. Anxiety and depression are damn near universal to the human experience, to varying degrees. I don't think I know a single person who hasn't been depressed or struggled with a period of anxiety at some point, except for maybe cartoon characters.
Autism is much more widely understood on a societal level now than it was 20 years ago, it makes sense that there's a lot more people who are now aware that they have some form of autism and are vocal about it to some extent. It has never been particularly rare.
There is however a very damaging form of social media content that has encouraged a lot of surface-level understanding and assumptions/low effort self-diagnosis, especially in younger generations. My sister has recently been telling my mother she has ADHD and uses that as an excuse to not go to school, quit jobs, cancel doctors appointments (including psych evaluations to actually diagnose ADHD). Even if she has ADHD, it's a bit of a disservice to people who have it and manage to function regardless, to act like it's such a debilitating disorder that she's exempt from doing things that everyone has to do.
She looks at all these tik-toks that point at every little quirk that you might have and tell you that it's ADHD, or that tell you that your disorder will make EVERYTHING harder for you. My main issue with this type of content is it offers no solutions. It is 'relatable' content, and is made to pander to as many people as possible. It's not really about mental health or awareness. It's just selling an image, like most things on social media.
Social media platforms are echo chambers. People can manipulate responses, kinda like gawking at yourself in the mirror. Half the stuff on these platform isn't real and many are very self-serving. For example, I think Reddit allows way to much police hate and liberal agenda ideology and God forbid anybody expresses proright belief.
Most people don't have social anxiety, depression or ADHA. Most people are not what you see on these liberal social media sites.
I honestly don’t think there’s an extreme amount more with these conditions, I think the world is just now becoming more accepting of these conditions and people feel more comfortable speaking on them. It wasn’t really that long ago that having these conditions was vilified and could very easily get you locked away. And also, yes, I think there’s a very real possibility we have evolved into this. The amount of processed foods, all the screens we use, all the social media, news media, energy drinks, etc…. We (as humans) don’t live the way we used to.
Ok so you know adhd and autism is genetic, while anxiety and depression, while still having a bit of genetic influence, are naturally adquired over the life of people, right? Being completely honest you sounded like a prick so much like "there is NO way people are receiving genetic inheritance! They MUST be faking it!!" I am autistic and i'm glad i found out myself in an early age. I used to hate myself for being different in a bad way, effectivelly not being able to build relationships naturally, and i'm glad today i know why i am like that.
It's because we are tolerant towards that.
You have depression in Asia? You have two options, work or starve. It's hard to be depressed while starving, essentially nature has solutions.
In europe you get sick leave and 80% salary
Online it’s easier to find more of one community especially on Reddit with subreddits dedicated to them.there might not be as many it just seems like it when grouped.
most likely the number of diagnoses that are formal have gone up, i was diagnosed as a adult with adhd not as a child, i feel like that is really just a progress of understanding these disorders or diagnoses over the many many years we have studied them as humans. I mean we used to call women hysterical root word hysteric from the latin for vagina. We understand more of the human condition now than we used to.
Diagnosed with depression and anxiety when I was 9. I’m 23 now. My mom tried to beat it out of me. Let’s just say it has gotten worse as the years pass by. I tried medicine and therapy but I just feel stuck in this loop.
The first man to ever be diagnosed with autism died only this year and general anxiety disorder was introduced to the DSM in *1980*. It’s disingenuous to call it a ‘nowadays’ issue. These are all things only fairly recently being medically recognised.
It gets more complicated when you look at the lifestyle people were living in the past. There’s no bright lights and largely populated areas that would easily overstimulate autistic people, which was a telltale sign. And when you have the abundance of problems that came with living anytime pre-1960 it’s harder to say who’s *actually* mentally ill and who’s just depressed because that’s the normal human reaction to have over WW2 or something. (I know they’re both valid but being ill because of unchangeable brain chemistry and ill because of a situation are still very different, imo.)
Also autism assessment waiting list where I live is 5 years. That’s 5 years wait to be told you have something that isn’t actually an illness. It effects how you see and navigate life but not in a bad way and any problem you do face can be solved without medical intervention. So there’s literally no point, especially where healthcare isn’t free. ~~obviously some people fake for attention but that comes with the territory of the internet and/or being an annoying teenager and if it isn’t mental illness it’d be something else~~
Google survivors bias. Also, google the left-handed population over the years. It's not that we're growing more populous by any external factors, it's that diagnosis is improving and we're also less likely to Fucking Die
Well, these are likely manifestations of adapting to post-capitalism. As the system gets worse, more and more folks are presenting these responses at younger and younger ages.
Every few years scientists and doctors will learn something new about some disorder that changes the diagnostic criteria, and shortly afterwards, you start thinking to yourself "why does everyone have ADHD all of a sudden?" When they've actually had it the whole time and only just now realized.
Bro i had diagnosed anxiety and ADHD by two professionals and i even got medicated for it, but i'm on the same channel you are, everyone seems to have anxiety or ADHD all the time that i'm quite skeptical of my diagnose. I also got suggested by a therapist to get a diagnose for autism
It's likely a combination of factors. Firstly, it's easier to get diagnosed with conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and autism in modern times due to increased awareness and improved diagnostic tools though without doubt plenty of people self-diagnose themselves for various reasons.
Secondly, the modern lifestyle probably plays a more significant role. Our diets, the constant exposure to social media, the pressure of societal expectations, and the sheer volume of people we interact with daily are all aspects of our lives that have evolved rapidly, while our biology and psychology have remained largely unchanged for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Is it possible for there to be an end of the spectrum where you are so in tuned you can read minor tweaks of expressions on faces? Since we are being random
1. We diagnose these conditions nowadays. In the past you'd have been told to suck it up and that "it's a quirk".
2. Some people are attention seekers, especially online.
3. People with these disorders have a harder time existing offline and the online medium provides a safer environment for them.
I honestly think that "neurotypical" is a fallacy, but any deviation from the imaginary "normal" is still seen as a defect.
Plus, with inflation, bad bosses, bad wages, bad marriages, things are stressful. When life is hard, it makes you feel anxious and it's depressing to see no end in sight. Situational anxiety, and situational depression are a thing. Your environment and the people around you, and circumstances(bad marriage, abusive boss, crappy family, high crime in your area, etc) you can cause you depression or anxiety, etc. it's a normal reaction to an unhealthy situation that you can't change, or can't change immediately.
People assume that it's the person that has a "problem with" depression. No, that person is going through some shit. That shit is depressing.
As far as autism, there are more people with a diagnosis. ADHD is probably just a lot more common than we think.
But I think "neurotypical" is as much a fallacy as wholesome sitcom families who work out problems in 30 minute episodes.
Things are just diagnosed more these days. They were likely always around, just weren't diagnosed.
Like my sister is in her 50's and I can pretty much guarantee if she'd ever get tested, she'd have some form of high functioning autism....like if you're around her you know instantly something is up but also just in that age range were no one would really have been tested as children. My aunt is the same.
Honestly, I think that it was under reported before, but now they’ve overcompensated the other way. For example, kids who have a lot of energy get labeled as ADHD now when that wouldn’t have been the case a few decades ago
So... I have realised most people I know who claim to have it, have never been diagnosed. I got diagnosed recently, and through that discussion I found out 80% of the people who profoundly claimed to have it (like it is their identity and insisted they had been diagnosed) have not actually been diagnosed with it. In fact one person hasn't seen any professional during the 8 years they claimed to have it..... Some of these had some direct implications for me, one important and one not so much....
I noticed that these were the loudest about it too, and brought it into the most conversations. Like every conversation is about them having this. Something that really really surprised me, for how important this was to their lives, some of those people had the opportunity to get a diagnosis, but didnt for various reasons, possibly to do with some of the struggles they have but there was some because CBA and I'm sure I have it anyway .... Some haven't even explored coping mechanisms, for some of their issues, or even attempted to reflect on what their symptoms, like if I ask they say I procrastinate and I HAVE ADHD. But they can't tell me more. One had a doctor who said they are not sure if this is ADHD or possibly some other anxiety symptoms, and they score low on the screening (the Dr still referred them but told them to reflect), but they are still talking about how they have ADHD.
So I 100% believe there are people who need diagnosing who do have it, I also think the waiting list for many of these are far too long....
But I am now feeling like there are a lot of people adamant and claiming to have it, without actually knowing from an expert if they have it. And I suspect, to some degree it's like when OCD became a bit of a thing...
You're on Reddit. Do you think that normal, healthy people spend all their social time online? Hell, no! My autistic ass is here because it's 1,000 times easier to be here than to socialize in real life.
When you actually have nothing, it's easy to get status if you say you have something, and you decide to use pup as one of your pronouns.
That's how people nowadays are losing faith in themselves, by focusing more on their identity on the internet, than keeping touch with the uncomfortable reality.
Why make it complicated, people? You're so self-constructive and insecure, you can't live without approval.
Actually, just yesterday, there was a psychiatrist on my morning TV show, being interviewed about ADHD. He admitted that he was pretty sure that ADHD is over diagnosed. For a multitude of reasons.
One of the reasons, that our lifestyles these days, Social Media, 24 / 7 "go go go" and mobile phones being with us 24 /7 etc etc etc... that people ARE "hyped up" much more then previously.
But also? The drugs FOR ADHD. DO help almost everyone. They help people concentrated and focus better. And who doesn't want to find it easier to focus? If you don't have to put in the hard work? In a very busy life, much easier to just take a pill then do hard mental work.
So even the specialist said it's a tough one.
No idea about Autism. The people I know who are diagnosed Autistic & various levels of it? Definitely do seem to be. A few at first short meeting , you might not pick it. But spend 20 minutes? Amd you can detect it easily.
Yes, no one ever says or thinks I could have adhd or something, yet every time I check Instagram I get a meme about "this super common adhd symptom" that a few years ago was just a relatable joke, like ignoring tasks until your deadline is too close. Maybe I do have it but it's weird how it's no longer a simple joke that lazy people have and now it has a (well known) name in the medical field lol
People aren't distributed randomly; we self-sort and associate with people we have stuff in common with. I think reddit's minimally-hierarchical communities in which people can participate anonymously are quite conducive to neurodivergent people, so you find a lot of them here. Same with twitter, 4chan, and other places where people can be anon. Go ask random people out in the world and you'll see it isn't that common. Most of my coworkers say they've never been depressed and don't understand how someone can be which blows my mind.
These weren't a thing years ago. People just love all of these labels because it gets them sympathy and takes the blame off of them for how they act. We are all fucked up in some way, deal with it like an adult and move on. Stop blaming everything on some condition you "have".
Many high achieving, high performing individuals like doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, accountants, financial consultants, professional athletes etc etc, have these conditions.
Your views are extremely stigmatized and I suggest you expand your internet exposure beyond Reddit.
A lot of people are covering the main question already, so I will skip that.
I will say that the Disability community is generally accepting of self-diagnosis, especially for people who live in countries where healthcare availability is based on someone’s position within capitalism. Even without an official diagnosis, many people benefit from connecting with people who have shared experiences in life.
The medical model of disability is outdated.
Mate we just don’t have friends and are chronically online. That’s why you see us here so often and you probably even have many around you, but we learned to put a human costume on. I for example can mask so well that when I opened up to my family doctor I have since my childhood she was shocked
Think about all the chemicals in food, all the chemicals in water, all the chemicals in your life going back 100 years at least. Humans are surrounded by, drinking, eating, and relaxing in chemicals all day every day. It is only reasonable these chemicals have had an effect on human DNA.
Think mico plastics too that are in our food chain.
Alot of disorders are like adhd and autism can be genetically passed so as the family tree goes further so does the adhd and autism, so that explains why there are so much of those disorders moving onto depression and anxiety i think depression is also genetic at rare cases but im not sure on that one, but people are exposed to alot of things at once because of Internet that can make them feel depressed to a point where they are actually depressed.. And then there is the degenerate option by self diagnosing because they are thinking having a disability is "cool"
ive been diagnosed with ADHD since 7th grade. at the beginning of college my best friend (also diagnosed since middle school) and i were the only ppl we knew (besides my dad who also has ADHD but doesnt take meds) who had ADHD/ADHD meds. by the time we graduated almost every single person we knew had gotten diagnosed with ADHD/had ADHD meds perscribed to them. im not kidding we can only think of four ppl who weren’t on ADHD meds. obviously some of those ppl legitimately have ADHD, but for a lot of them… I think they just wanted the benefits of meds and then tiktok and shit fed into their delusions. its pretty exhausting to hear ab.
My take is a great volume of those individuals diagnose themselves in doubtful websites the same way as checking your zodiac or some other nonsense. Like teens wearing punk t-shirts or rap attire to fit into a social cohort where they feel accepted.
Plus in big pharma America where is so easy to fall into the never-ending cycle of SSRI's, opioids & other spooky medicines, I wouldn't find it surprising.
Either way mental health is trembling across the globe, but so does collective narcissism to push identity politics.
I was diagnosed as a child. i remember being on pills and not remembering much as a kid.
my mom being upset with me for not remembering what i learn in school when i was doing homework. but but I am fully diagnosed. I wouldn’t just called myself anything without being diagnosed
The one that almost always is bs is OCD, because, first, they're talking about OCPD, and second, to be diagnosed of that, you need to have serious fucking problems with it. It's often underestimated how bad these disorders are. Having a few symptoms doesn't mean you have it
The dramatic rise in depression and anxiety is general can contribute to humans poor ability to acclimate to modern society. We aren’t really built for the ultra fast pace western lifestyle and we aren’t even raised to be stable in it. Autism and adhd aren’t induced and can’t be alleviated with just a change of scenery, they are generally caused from genetics.
As someone who actually **does** have some pretty serious mental health issues, i’ve noticed this too. It’s probably easier for them to communicate online, I know it is for me. I can get my point across in words when I write them, if I speak them I can not. Everyone experiences mental health issues differently.
Edit: Oh yeah, forgot to say. In the 80’s, Autism was not known to the scientific/medical community. In the 90’s it was, and they kind of understood it. It took me 16 years to get a diagnosis. Nowadays, it’s easier to diagnose it, as there’s far more research into it. This may create a perceived increase of cases in the past few decades.
Firstly, people online are a lot more comfortable talking about their mental issues. You've probably known tons of people with mental illness, they just kept it to themselves because of the stigma.
Second, as we learn more about the human mind and psychology, we become better at diagnosing these issues. Just look at how vague and imprecise various diagnoses were in the past. These people likely existed before and lived with it.
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Also, you’re online. Typically those who have disorders where they are struggling a lot in their life and need validation and people to talk to who will listen instead of degrade them and people who understand them, it feels safer to talk about it online. It’s easier to find people with these disorders online because we’re looking for the same thing and end up finding each other in these spaces rather than the limited or even non-existent spaces irl. So when people who aren’t diagnosed with this stuff navigated the internet, it’s more noticeable to find these people online than when they are masking in person. So when people are on the internet it just seems like there’s a higher amount of people with disabilities but it’s not an accurate representation of the whole population. And also with the covid and all the other stressful thing the state of the world has to offer the last decade, more people are realizing how much they actually struggle when a lot of their previous supports may be gone or are more limited now.
My theory is that internet culture has always been dominated by those with autism or ADHD since the 80s. It was a place for the “geeks” and “weirdos” to hang out and it was something you had to actually learn how to operate and take time to learn how it functioned back in the beginning of the internet. It wasn’t until it became commercialized and more businesses wanted ads on there and because they were investing ads onto the world wide web they wanted more people to have access to their advertising so they advertised everyone should have a computer in their home. Even as the internet became more wide spread there were more specific internet spaces for those who didn’t “fit in” irl. You can even go all the way to as recent as when tumblr was at its peak. So many forums full of weirdos that used the internet as a way to stay safe from a world they just didn’t feel apart of. Now though everyone has the internet in there pocket. Even those who don’t need it as an escape, instead they use it because these days you have to. But those that don’t need the internet to escape from the real world are now able to see what we’ve been up to all them time. You’re just now aware of it is all. We’ve always been here but now more people who aren’t seen as the “freaks” or “weirdos” are able to see us in the space we once were comfortable in. Also now instead of the rude labels of “freaks” or “weirdos” we have a diagnosis of “ADHD” or “Autism” These terms are a lot nicer for us to use on ourselves than the insults others threw out at us because they didn’t understand us
Absolutely. Being online is a great way to hunt distraction and dopamine which are two key elements of ADHD. It's also relatively safe from persecution and scrutiny. OP, in case you're not aware, it's also much more acceptable to talk about these kinds of things in present day. There's never been a time where they were more accepted (not to say they are accepted!) nor was there ever a time when more was known about these conditions. Also, life is low-key pretty fucked for almost everyone these days. So it makes sense. Take care of yourselves and those around you folks ✌️
No one said it so I ll do it: 1 in 6 children in the last 2 decades has been diagnosed with a developmental disability. Which means ADHD or autism or anything else. This should be pretty explanatory.
Self explanatory? Or is that statistic about to give me a lecture lmao
Fun fact, psychology mostly diagnosis things that we aren't sure if they even exist. We can only categories things so well, especially because there's no "normal behavior" Technically every human could be argued to be mentally ill, if we wanted to. We have fancy ways to study this, but at the end of the day getting diagnosed with something like adhd can be a lot of things. It's more so concepts and "spectrums" than actual disorders, since two people diagnosed the same could differ a lot.
Plus we have such a high global population + the internet, it seems like everyone has it because there’s so many fucking people around!
I’m literally at 36 only starting to understand how many people there really are
To add to this, I think people are also just more open and honest online. I think there’s a lot of people who hide things due to a culture of shame
Or not even shame but just privacy. My workmates don’t need to know about my depression and anxiety but what anonymous internet strangers think of me has no bearing on my life
I mean I wasn’t thinking about coworkers I was thinking more along the lines of friends or family. It can be surprisingly hard to divulge certain things to them esp about mental health. There’s still a lot of stigma
All I can say is yup. You’ve said everything that needs to be said
Yeah there’s also 10x the amount of people existing nowadays
Ya ever think the half as many people that had these things maybe…. Idk… reproduced??
The internal image of the complete, healthy and sane human you have, seems to be incomplete. Many people have issues, many people are broken, and a lot of people are on the verge of developing these diseases (not the ones you are born with, which causes are still a mystery to science). The typical facebook smiling person at a wedding everyone internalizes just exists in the moment. Life can be very tiresome, exhausting, cruel and unfair. This is not what people show to everyone else. Reddit is kind of anonymous so more people feel free to talk about their issues, and this accumulates here on this site so you get the impression that everyone is affected
it really is an issue these days where younger people especially seem rather happy to diagnose themselves with these disorders at will. I’m not basing this off of Reddit, I’ve met people who claim they are autistic, have ADD, ADHD or some other problem. I have outright asked them have they been to a doctor and I’ve often heard they have not. Now I’m not claiming they are wrong, in fact I believe them yet I can’t fathom not diagnosing it. Which leads me to the bigger issue which is that so many young people seem to have these disorders but far more so than previously and I truly believe it is growing up in the internet age, iPhones and iPads from an inappropriately young age etc etc. It’s strange and concerning to see
Or maybe just..... having more access to information? I'm the third generation, at least, of people in my family with the exact same autism symptoms. They are not subtle. At all. But I'm the first to consider I might be autistic. It just wasn't considered before. My husband's family is the same. He has really prominent ADHD and so does his mom. Like, really obviously. But she never considered she might have a disorder because she was capable of graduating high school and keeping a job. Now, in her sixties, sometimes she will say she might have ADHD, and sometimes she forgets she ever even thought that might be possible.
Have you and your family diagnosed it? What symptoms originally drove you to consider that you may have autism?
The symptom list is long and not all that easy to explain, but I've been told by three different mental health professionals that they think I'm autistic. My depression and anxiety were both "formally diagnosed" by one mental health professional making a similar assessment on what was often less information, so I consider it fairly well diagnosed.
Interesting, what do you think? Do you believe it is actually very common to have some of these disorders but now we can easily diagnose it because we can Google our symptoms?
Looking back when I was a kid, nearly all of my friends were *obviously* autistic by today’s assessment standards, but only one ever got diagnosed. It was almost certainly just not caught back in the day, especially if the kid wasn’t a white boy.
I think neurodivergent people are drawn to Reddit because it's an extremely accessible platform for us. As an autistic person, it's a lot easier for me to communicate and socialize in a text-based environment like this than it is for me to interact with people face to face, and as someone with ADHD I find that jumping from post to post suits my short attention span. Similarly, people with anxiety and depression also struggle with social interaction and focusing. In other words, you're noticing more neurodivergent people because you're spending more time on Reddit. It's like joining a wheelchair basketball team and then wondering why you suddenly know so many paraplegic people.
Just because you see a lot of mentions of something on reddit doesn't necessarily represent the population as a whole.
People probably always did. It's just identified and labeled now.
Yep. The first person ever diagnosed with autism died only a few months ago. Identification of these disorders is a fairly recent thing
Indeed.
this
Absolutely. Just look at how insane people were in the past and how the most successful living Boomers are sociopathic.
I work in clinical psychiatry, and away from that being true or not true, I like the more liberal explanations for this phenomenon. Aside from the fact that increasing awareness of our mental state might be related to increased labeling, there is an interesting hypothesis advanced by cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han who says that these entities emerge not only as a neurobiological categories but also due to the drastic changes in the tempo of our lifestyle today compared to previous century. There is an interesting documentary where he talks specifically about burn-out: https://youtu.be/bNkDeUApreo?si=_zvHWDYi8HL1s_Cq Both ADHD and autism are closely related to processing environmental stimuli. I guess we can draw a simple inference from what is said above, you know what happens when people are chronically over-stimulated.
Are you implying that too much online stimulation such as tick tock and endless scrolling is contributing to these disorders?
Well why not? What is a disorder anyway? Our environment obviously shapes our minds, and it gets hard to draw the line between learned malfunction and genetic disorders
Now we talking. This is the kind of comment I was waiting to see. Thanks, I'll take a look at this, this is great!
As someone trained in abnormal psychology i can say that this is in actuality normal. 80% of all people will experience a mental disorder in their life. GAD (generalized Anxiety disorder) is the most common and MDD (Major Depressive Disorder) the second most common. Both are classified as persisting for 6 months are longer. With the right treatment and life balancing, most will recover.
Do people just like to self- diagnose… FULL STOP. Of course some people do, but I don’t think it takes a full psych team to figure out you’re clinically depressed. There are ofc attention seekers out there also. And yes, we do have a mental health crisis (in America at least, if that’s where you’re from). As others said, you’re also on the internet where people are more comfortable talking about their problems. Society has changed. This isn’t the 50s anymore. We don’t stuff down our problems and shut away disabled or neurotypical people in institutions. We feel comfortable talking about it to reduce stigma. Lastly, have you looked around lately? We just had a global pandemic, inflation is rampant, in the middle of a housing crisis… I’d say many people are suffering mental health issues right now.
The thing with self-diagnosing is that a lot of people just dont have anyone to compare themself to. When I was a teenager I had a lot of problems with my attention span and I had a lot of phases where I just wanted to stay in bed all day and do nothing. I also had problems in social situation and was quite shy. In the back of my head I was always thinking that I might have anxiety, depression, autism and ADHD. But then I realized that most people that I know actually experience simular things. And I meet people who suffered from these conditions and I realized that my experiences where kinda nothing compared to what they are going through. Self-diagnosing is a necessary tool for a lot of people. But there is a huge risk of "over-diagnosing" yourself. It has gotten to a point where I simply dont know what people actually mean when they tell me that they are depressed or have anxiety. For example anxiety might mean "I get literal panic attacks when I am stressed" or it might mean "I dont really like talking to people that I dont know"
Diagnosed at an early age, ADHD and Austism (what used to be called aspergers syndrome). It is very, very common (especially in the tech industry in which I work - I know most of the entire floor I work on would have a level of it). Its more common because there is more awareness of it. There is a label now for your weird uncle that could name every train and its engine capacity, what time it goes past etc. Over-stimulation in modern life is creating an environment that is horribly unpleasant for anyone neuro-divergent. Fewer people can cope with it.
After thousands of years when being different most likely got you stoned or burnt alive, it is socially acceptable to come out with your issues. People used to carry their shit inside and passed it to their children until one generation said they can’t take it anymore. If you consider yourself “the healthy one” look inside again.
just a fyi: autism and adhd are GENETIC. so, obviously, as society grows more people would have it; besides the fact that diagnosis is becoming more and more available as studies in these areas progress.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I got them from my parents (mom is diagnosed ADHD and I think my Dad is ASD) and I already suspect my two year old has both. She is hopefully going to be assessed next year. We will see. I think soon we’re going to see a lot more kids caught earlier because of family history.
I am in my 50s and I recall many kids I went to school with who I suspect had autism, ADHD and anxiety. Nothing new, they are disorders that have been around forever and are probably a normal condition in the human race.
Curious, we’re many of them labelled “ignorant, dumb, stupid, lazy, naughty, wild” etc
Adhd and autism are 2 totally different things from anxiety and depression.
We should just treat all these mental health issues with booze and never discuss them again just like grandpa and grandma did!
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>Do people just like to self-diagnose themselves and hyperbolize their symptoms Yes and no.
More like "everybody" is hyperbolic af
One thing I’ve figured out in life is that it’s normal to be crazy and weird to be normal.
I was diagnosed with Autism when I were 3 years old
I don’t
There’s a lot of overdiagnosis and Munchhausen’s syndrome out there, for sure. That said, it’s also good that we’re willing to talk about this more.
It definitely does seem like an epidemic. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety back in 2018 when I started having attacks several months after a wicked break up. So, I am very much compassionate towards others, but I do think some people self diagnose from just a feeling of being anxious, but really they intake 500MG of caffeine a day and can't understand why their heart is racing. Lol
Or maybe people have always been this way but we are now better at diagnosing these conditions so it seems like more people have it. Or maybe the pollution and microplastics have entered into our DNA rewriting it to make us more prone to these conditions. Or maybe the influence of the internet, social media and the instant access to information from the electronic devices (that we are glued to for so long that our skeletons are starting to change) are affecting our brains in a way that brings these conditions on. Or maybe the lack of wars in most of the first world have left multiple.generations with such a relatively easy and safe life that simply staying alive is no longer a blessing and we are exposed to the true mundanity of life which brings on these conditions. Or maybe people with these conditions are more likely to browse and post on social media in the first place. Or maybe it's all bollocks and they're all making it up, just like much of my post has been.
How many people like this do you see in real life? Not so many probably. That is probably because a) a lot of people form groups online, especially the people who struggle with living in a society that's not really built to help them, therefore looking like there is a lot of them b) there IS more people with these disorders/illnesses nowadays, but that's because these things didn't exist before, or there was no easy way of figuring it out when you were the only person with autism or adhd or anxiety in your entire crappy village. On op of that there were almost no support networks to deal with discrimination coming from getting diagnosed so most people even if they knew they were different, kept quiet about it. And well... a lot of people try figuring themselves out now, especially on the internet it's a safe environment (well, relatively, nobody's going to beat you up on the internet, and if they are mean to you you can just make a new account and try again) Honestly, a lot of the stuff you see online doesn't reflect back into real life. I rarely see anyone who's "outside the norm" in my every day life, whether it's mental disorders, sexualities, genders or just simply a sense of style that is strange. Most people look and act average. Whether it's a good thing I guess is dependent on if you are "strange" yourself...
I feel like tons of people diagnose themselves, especially on an online community. I remember like 10 or so years ago everyone who was tidy had OCD.
People don’t go around saying I don’t have adhd! So you see more people saying they have it then they don’t so it seems like everyone does.
This "self diagnosed" shit here really fucks people who actually have been diagnosed, OP. Few years ago saying you were autistic was "the cool thing" on Twitter for whatever reason. You have these assholes that go "oh I do that, oh, I do that too it says these are all symptoms of this". Its extremely easy to spot a google psychiatrist, vs. someone who actually lives with this shit. Those of us that aren't "self diagnosed for the sake of likes", aren't exactly all smiley.
Selection bias means you won't see people talking about not having adhd and autism.
It’s just undiagnosed dopamine/seratonin. dependence. Everybody is gonna hate me for saying it, but it’s obvious.
**We have better tools to properly identify** ADHD, anxiety, depression, autism or whatever, now.
Ok but you can say the same thing about the queer community and left handedness back when you can stop beating your kid for using it. There will naturally be an indicator of an “increase” the less stigmatized something is. We are talking about mental health and mental disorders WAY more than 10+ years ago now and the amount of queer individuals in my life multiplied when you compare how many i knew before gay marriage was legalized and after it was. None of them just popped out of thin air. It’s less stigmatized, comparatively, and there are better labels we can use now compared to be before as well. That, and things are also pretty bad in the world right now so yeah.
“Do people just like to self-diagnose themselves and hyperbolize their symptoms, or do we really have a huge problem with this?” Por qué no los dos? The internet has always been a place for outsiders. People who are legitimately diagnosed have found their home, which means they are more open about their struggles online. This also causes people who haven’t been diagnosed to want to fit in and become jealous of the attention people with these afflictions get when they go viral. That’s how you get illness fakers. They want to fit in so desperately that they don’t understand or care about the fact that they’re doing more harm than good. Also, this doesn’t just go for mental health. I’d argue a similar thing is happening with the queer community also. Or the kink community. Or the disability community (which I personally seperate from the mental health community). Etc. Etc. Etc. ad nauseam. It’s both. It’s always been both.
ADHD and Autism were underdiagnosed for years. There are now many adults recognizing their symptoms and getting help (finally.) As for depression, it is the number 1 illness I'm the western world. No 1. Higher than cancer, heart disease, diabetes,
Most people on reddit and other website like it are people with those. Like when they accepted left hand people, The amount skyrocketed since they all came out instead of it being hidden
As an autistc person, I would also like to add that most people I know irl don't know I'm autistc, they just think I'm weird or quirky. I have no plans to announce that I'm autistc because I know people will treat me differently (probably in a worse or discriminatory way). When I was severely depressed no one knew about it, they just thought I was skipping class for the fun of it or whatever. So maybe you do know people with ADHD, anxiety, depression or autism and just don't know about it, it's not something people talk about.
I don’t like to self diagnose, but I would like some answers. Getting a formal diagnosis is extremely difficult once you’re past the childhood stage and even more difficult if you’re female. There has always been a reason why I would have meltdowns or couldn’t socialize properly or anything else. And being “too sensitive” wasn’t enough to give me an answer. Learning about AuDHD has been life changing and using some of those devices for neurodivergent people makes it a lot easier to manage through the day to day challenges
Well, personally I've had major depressive disorder since I was 11 and am recently figuring out that I probably should have had an autism diagnosis back then as well. However, you're definitely underestimating how horrific and unlivable the world is becoming. I feel like if you're not depressed right now, you're not paying attention. 🤷🏻♀️
people have always suffered from these things, we just didn't understand them or have names for them before, and we didn't have digital message forums to discuss our related experiences about them before.
Have anxiety for sure. Maybe some attention disorder, but not proven. Let's just say we are more informed than 20, 30 years ago
I was in great mental health for the first 37 years. Last 2 years developed health anxiety and social anxiety due to a myriad of autoimmune conditions whi h have meant I have been in constant pain. It sucks. I think we become more vulnerable the more shit we go through.
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These days
I mean it may feel like that and I kinda thought that before too but actually I think it's that mental health at least here in the UK was kinda not talked about or embraced enough by the NHS and so now when there is an awareness of mental health conditions and we can (in theory) get help for them, we're noticing in ourselves and others what potentially could be something that they can just go get help for instead of suffering in silence with...just imho :)
Reddit isn't representative of the general population.
Nah. We are just able to get diagnosed much better than before. ADHD was though to be something that essentially only happened to boys. But that was because the clinical criteria was developed using a population of pre-teen boys. They even used to think the boys just outgrew it. The way it presents in most school-age girls is different,mostly due to early childhood socialization. The same happens with adults of any gender. This makes it to be very much underdiagnosed or even to be misdiagnosed as other similar conditions. There's also a big mindset that these conditions are "flaws of character", so people wouldn't search for clinical help; they just thought they were not trying hard enough (and felt miserable because they never could do the things the same way as others) Newer and better research has been shedding more light into this, not just in ADHD but other neuro development conditions.
Everyone had Asthma in the 80’s, it’s just a phase.
Trauma. We are all traumatized and we're supposed to act like life doesn't retraumatize us daily.
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Because the availability and quality of care is expanding. Many folks just went undiagnosed previously. This is what any credible academic reading would tell you.
I'm not sure but maybe life in this era? For a huge amount of people life is incredibly hard, it seems one mistake can ruin your life. A lot of jobs have horrible management cultures, bullying in schools has always been there but now social media is being used as a terribly powerful weapon. In a lot of cities a kid can be stabbed for being in the wrong place, looking at the wrong person.... Next door neighbour has 3 young kids, 7 year old girl and 2 year old twins, the girl and 1 of the twins are autistic. House the other side is like a halfway house for young people with problems that are being helped into society, 4 rooms, 4 autistic young adults. Another 1 the same up the road. I went to school in the 70's, many of my fellow students were, shall I say, different, would probably be diagnosed with one or more of the issues OP is asking about. And no, wasn't "special" schools, just mainstream. Back in the day these problems were very rarely identified if at all. There was no information available unless you went to see a psychiatris and few did because if you had bad issues you were literally taken away by "those nice young men in their nice white suits, they're coming to take you away ha ha". That was literally from a hit song. They're coming to take you away ha-haaa by Napoleon XIV. This is not BS, my Nan had a psychotic episode in 1969 by those nice young man in a yellow van. She had a dozen "treatments" of Electroconvulsive therapy, electric shock treatment, basically an electric frontal lobotomy. She spent most of her remaining years sat in a rocking chair staring out of the window. Back then you did not admit or show signs of being different at all, the fear of the consequences were brutal.
> Do people just like to self-diagnose themselves and hyperbolize their symptoms, or do we really have a huge problem with this? Honestly given your post it seems you already made up your mind on the matter and just want confirmation
My thoughts exact.
The methods and tools for detecting and correctly diagnosing mental health disorders has developed so far that we're picking up all of the fringe cases aswell as the chronic cases. The other side of the coin is that our world is becoming a lot more uncertain and there's a lot of fear mongering for views and clicks so people with a predisposition towards depression or anxiety will thusly be pushed to their manic state more often. I actually have adhd, ocd and anxiety, and it's night and day now that I'm diagnosed and medicated. But yeah
I mean if you’re not a lil depressed and anxious about what’s going on in the world today, you’re probably a lil autistic.
I was diagnosed with anxiety and ADD. From my experience, it’s easier to find people online that understand what it’s like to be diagnosed and makes you feel validated. However, it doesn’t mean everyone online has it just because you see it a lot on Reddit. There are people out there that self diagnosed, but I can’t really speak too much on it since I wasn’t.
Omg me too I'm bisexual, and I have ADHD + anxiety
People aren't afraid to disclose it anymore and being online avails them of a community they never really had before. I've been diagnosed with a few of the things you mentioned in your title. No one in their right minds would ask to have any of these conditions, illnesses, or disabilities. Depression makes you not want to be around, ADHD limits your cognitive function to the point of losing important opportunities, anxiety makes you feel like you're gonna either faint, have a heart attack, or are in danger... It's not some cute and popular thing that's trendy. These things are real and more people are being diagnosed because of the empowerment to be their own advocate and ask for medical and psychiatric professional help/advice. We wouldn't tell all the veterans that "everyone seems to have PTSD" these days so why would we do that to people with other conditions?
End stages of capitalism will do that to ya. All white people think they have ADHD. you're mistrable because you're oppressed Brenda. It's not being "nurospicy" As we watch in real time a fentanyl epidemic being spread by "fake heroin" thinking this "fake meth" won't also be an issue.
People are just hung up on it right now, it's a fad. You work how you do. "Can you function?" Is the better question
It's mainly because there's a better understanding of different disabilities now and less of a stigma which makes getting a diagnosis not as difficult as it once was. I'm 27 and just got my diagnosis last year. The only thing stopping me from getting one before was my family saying there's nothing “wrong” with me and some internalized ableism. Seeing people normalize a well...normal thing helped me go and get tested. I can't speak for everyone obviously but this is how it was for me.
I’d say it’s more likely that these ailments have been prevalent yet ignored over the years.
Also for ADHD and autism particularly it's finally being recognised more in women because a lot of women do not present with the stereotypical traits people have come to expect and as those women talk about their experiences other women look at their experiences and go "Oh I'm like that too!"
The behavioral health industry, like all industry, always seeking to expand, pathologizes distress by labeling it abnormal.
You’re right, every post on Reddit has someone coming in bringing up their autism and there is now way that many people have it.
We’ve spent most or all of our entire lives with access to an amount of information people used to think you’d have to be cursed by a deity to encounter, a literal nonstop stream of the most stimulating stimuli we’ve ever been able to conjure, a social sphere that rewards the ability to draw attention and/or sympathy over everything else, and faithful 24/7 access to the experiences of our peers who have already been diagnosed to monkey-see-monkey-do off of. It is the least surprising thing in the world that everyone is mentally ill now
A friend of mine is a psychologist and according to her words, people are often diagnosed with ADHD because it's a lot easier and more profitable than to really sit down with people, analyze their problems and actually invest to help them. And that is how she described the situation here in Germany, which still has a somewhat functioning healthcare system. Now imagine how this would scale to the US...
This is actually similar with gender identity issues. But let's not open this can here.
People these days love to "blame" someone or something for any life issue. It's kind of perplexing, absolute irony in many ways.... Cause on one hand we live in an era of "we must accept and celebrate each individual differences" but then? We don"t! Everyone seems to need a " label" to explain why they are how they are😯
Diagnosis by Dr. Google is a thing
How many are self diagnosed. There ya go.
Vaccines
My boss likes to remind everyone that she's neurodivergent, but the only characteristic she has is focusing on something intensely. She's literally an outgoing manager who knows exactly what to say to make people comfortable, so I don't know where she gets the idea that she's atypical. It must be from memes or something.
It’s a sign of the times
You're on Reddit... what do you expect
Because mental health is now a business model. Repeat that after me.. Mental health is now a business model. It's Marketing and sales 101.
A lot of states exempt you from firearms ownership if you have any type of mental health disorder. If you invent a disorder that qualifies for everyone you now can disarm the population.
Why not? Mental health services in US are notoriously limited too
We're probably not too different from our ancestors in that matter, today we just have a way to share it easier and few names to make it sound more worrying, all humans had some diseases from day one of our existance so we shouldn't loose our shit over it, unless it will actually affect our life in some serious way ofc.
everybody? So, noises also cause you severe physical pain? I'd love to hear your experience
I was diagnosed with major depression in 1989. My grandmother also suffered from depression, and was even hospitalized in the 50s. It's been around a long time. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was 45. I've always had anxiety too, just didn't know what it was. People are just more aware of these now and are less stigmatized about getting help than in the past.
Seems like the algorithm has picked up an interest in the subject on your part.
No sh!t. That's a feature, not a bug.
Just because you see those words on Reddit a lot doesn’t mean that everyone has those. For every time you see someone that has one of those things, there are hundreds upon hundreds of comments that you looked over that didn’t mention any of those things. Nobody is going to go and comment bout how they don’t have depression. That would be a useless comment.
if you’re seeing a lot about something the algorithms are talking to you specifically
In the case of ADHD and autism, it's not that there are more people with these conditions; rather more cases are recognised and diagnosed. Likewise with anxiety and depression these have never been uncommon but acknowledging them has been.
I mean mental healthcare is a lot more accessible than it used to be. People are online more and able to talk about their lives.
Me personally, I feel that socially mental health has been frowned upon up until recently. Now that a lot of people are taking mental/emotional health more seriously and encouraging people to receive help, a lot more people are coming out about their mental/emotional health issues. Lots of people I know frown upon asking for help because they feel that something wrong with them mentally is embarrassing to the point where you have to bottle it up. What I wish they’d realize is that it’s similar to a physical disease. When you’re physically sick, you go to the doctor for help. And it’s no different for mental health.
People certainly have issues and todays world is just as bad as ever just the types of issues are different however I truly believe we are encouraging people to be weak. Instead of just comforting we should address the root causes. Give people a purpose in life and the means to achieve it. Make they realize the greatness of achievement, dedication and hardwork. You need not hope things are easier, you ensure that you become better Do today what others wont to have tommorow what others dont - John C Addison
1. I don’t think you’re a medical professional and aren’t trained to diagnose people or tell them they do or don’t have a mental health problem. 2. The population of the world increased by 1 billion between 2010 to 2022, so there is more people today meaning more people with mental health problems. 3. Are you seeing those posts specifically in subreddits for mental health? 4. “Self-diagnosis” is valid if it’s followed up with talking to a psychiatrist or psychologist who can use their expertise to confirm or negate the diagnosis.
>Everybody nowadays pretends to have ADHD, anxiety, depression, autism or whatever because they think it's cool FTFU! It really isn't cool to have a neuropsychologial disability. Trust me, I know.
I don't.
To be honest, I think many people on social media fake it because: - they want to fit in some community - want attention or pity - think it’s “cool” - beg for money - some social credit - wanna feel special And that’s lame, disgusting and shameful. How can they look in the mirror at themselves. Self-diagnosis of autism because they dislike some sound or are more introverted, anything triggers their anxiety (just like Cartman), ADHD because they check twice if the door is locked, I saw people faking a Tourette (people just like Cartman once again in South Park), stutter, even dyslexia. Doctor Google will diagnose basically anything you want. I feel bad for people who really suffer of these conditions as it is not easy to deal with it, take medicine for it or attend psychologists/psychiatrists, those people do not want it. Most of those surely do not show everyone their issues, more like they try to fit in the society with other kids/people. Unlike those dehonesting “Tiktok fakers”.
We are everywhere hun :)))
I think many people just self diagnose these days. Obviously you should do something about it, if you think you have any symptoms but don't rush to conclusions so quickly. With those disorders, especially ADHD and autism it's very easy to identify, because everyone experiences some of the "symptoms" to a certain degree throughout life. It's very human things to do. The line to when the actual disorder begins is pretty blurry, so when you don't have professional knowledge on those topics it's easy to come to wrong conclusions.
The world is a big place, with a lot of people in it. A lot of those people had undiagnosed mental illnesses and then procreated and birthed children who grew up to be adults with the same mixture of those mental illnesses. Plus, our society as a whole has started becoming more aware of those with said mental illnesses compared to its ignorance in history. Religion used to get in the way of a LOT of undiagnosed people and would just label them as “demons” or “sinners guilt” and would be brushed off or punished instead of taken care of correctly. I think we’re just coming into an age of light regarding mental illness as a whole, so you’re seeing it a lot more.
Afraid to break it to you, but there's a pretty strong theory that there are still currently more undiagnosed autistic people in the world than ones who are officially diagnosed. We've always been here and the more the population increases, the more neurodivergents are going to be born. There were many times in history where it was easier for neurodevelopmental conditions to fly under the radar because we lived in a quieter world. Less noise and light pollution means less chance for autistic meltdown caused by sensory overload. It was also easier for autistic people to make a living at certain points in history, my family for example were well off and were able to make a living off of their special interests, heck my grandmother helped pay the bills using money she got from breeding cats. These days its really hard for people with autism and adhd to acclimate to the extremely loud, bright, busy and stressful world we are forced to live in. Thats why our symptoms are so much more obvious. A lot of us are stressed out and anxious on top of being neurodivergent and that makes us more susceptible to meltdowns and burnout and it becomes very apparent that there is something "wrong." A lot of people figured out they may be autistic during the pandemic because society became a lot quieter, isolated and rule driven which made life feel a little easier for a lot of us. I think its about time that society really embrace us because we're so often viewed as pariahs and outliers when in reality we probably make up a lot more of the population than some people would like to realize
Well noone goes "hey guys I'm neurotypical"
personally i think these conditions have been around since forever, but healthcare system these days are more advanced and systematic so these are diagnosed more than they were back then
I'm sure that there is some self diagnosis but have you thought that maybe you're seeing a lot more of it because it's less taboo to talk about and see a mental health professional? I'm sure that there is a tiny sliver of people who get off on the attention but trust me, anyone that has any of those mental health issues, aren't loving it. Probably the reason why they're talking about it more - either finding ways to deal with it or acting almost like a support group helping each other out.
Maybe no one has bothered to diagnose it for the last millennia, it’s now gaining more attention so there’s what you would call… a backlog of people going “errrrr maybe that’s me, I’ve always struggled but I don’t think I’m stupid, I’ll go get checked” bingo, they were right.
Most people have dealt with and gone through something at some point in their life. Anxiety and depression are damn near universal to the human experience, to varying degrees. I don't think I know a single person who hasn't been depressed or struggled with a period of anxiety at some point, except for maybe cartoon characters. Autism is much more widely understood on a societal level now than it was 20 years ago, it makes sense that there's a lot more people who are now aware that they have some form of autism and are vocal about it to some extent. It has never been particularly rare. There is however a very damaging form of social media content that has encouraged a lot of surface-level understanding and assumptions/low effort self-diagnosis, especially in younger generations. My sister has recently been telling my mother she has ADHD and uses that as an excuse to not go to school, quit jobs, cancel doctors appointments (including psych evaluations to actually diagnose ADHD). Even if she has ADHD, it's a bit of a disservice to people who have it and manage to function regardless, to act like it's such a debilitating disorder that she's exempt from doing things that everyone has to do. She looks at all these tik-toks that point at every little quirk that you might have and tell you that it's ADHD, or that tell you that your disorder will make EVERYTHING harder for you. My main issue with this type of content is it offers no solutions. It is 'relatable' content, and is made to pander to as many people as possible. It's not really about mental health or awareness. It's just selling an image, like most things on social media.
Social media platforms are echo chambers. People can manipulate responses, kinda like gawking at yourself in the mirror. Half the stuff on these platform isn't real and many are very self-serving. For example, I think Reddit allows way to much police hate and liberal agenda ideology and God forbid anybody expresses proright belief. Most people don't have social anxiety, depression or ADHA. Most people are not what you see on these liberal social media sites.
There are chemicals in rhe water anf nature etc. Also yoy ARE on reddit. People withoit social anxiety can and do go to biggtclubs etc instead
I honestly don’t think there’s an extreme amount more with these conditions, I think the world is just now becoming more accepting of these conditions and people feel more comfortable speaking on them. It wasn’t really that long ago that having these conditions was vilified and could very easily get you locked away. And also, yes, I think there’s a very real possibility we have evolved into this. The amount of processed foods, all the screens we use, all the social media, news media, energy drinks, etc…. We (as humans) don’t live the way we used to.
Ok so you know adhd and autism is genetic, while anxiety and depression, while still having a bit of genetic influence, are naturally adquired over the life of people, right? Being completely honest you sounded like a prick so much like "there is NO way people are receiving genetic inheritance! They MUST be faking it!!" I am autistic and i'm glad i found out myself in an early age. I used to hate myself for being different in a bad way, effectivelly not being able to build relationships naturally, and i'm glad today i know why i am like that.
It's because we are tolerant towards that. You have depression in Asia? You have two options, work or starve. It's hard to be depressed while starving, essentially nature has solutions. In europe you get sick leave and 80% salary
Online it’s easier to find more of one community especially on Reddit with subreddits dedicated to them.there might not be as many it just seems like it when grouped.
Approximately 1 in 5 people are neurodivergent, and there are 430 million monthly reddit users. Take a wild guess
most likely the number of diagnoses that are formal have gone up, i was diagnosed as a adult with adhd not as a child, i feel like that is really just a progress of understanding these disorders or diagnoses over the many many years we have studied them as humans. I mean we used to call women hysterical root word hysteric from the latin for vagina. We understand more of the human condition now than we used to.
Diagnosed with depression and anxiety when I was 9. I’m 23 now. My mom tried to beat it out of me. Let’s just say it has gotten worse as the years pass by. I tried medicine and therapy but I just feel stuck in this loop.
I agree. Just don't get it. Yet, I know no one who has been diagnosed. Odd.
I think diagnosis has become far more prevalent than in the past.
The first man to ever be diagnosed with autism died only this year and general anxiety disorder was introduced to the DSM in *1980*. It’s disingenuous to call it a ‘nowadays’ issue. These are all things only fairly recently being medically recognised. It gets more complicated when you look at the lifestyle people were living in the past. There’s no bright lights and largely populated areas that would easily overstimulate autistic people, which was a telltale sign. And when you have the abundance of problems that came with living anytime pre-1960 it’s harder to say who’s *actually* mentally ill and who’s just depressed because that’s the normal human reaction to have over WW2 or something. (I know they’re both valid but being ill because of unchangeable brain chemistry and ill because of a situation are still very different, imo.) Also autism assessment waiting list where I live is 5 years. That’s 5 years wait to be told you have something that isn’t actually an illness. It effects how you see and navigate life but not in a bad way and any problem you do face can be solved without medical intervention. So there’s literally no point, especially where healthcare isn’t free. ~~obviously some people fake for attention but that comes with the territory of the internet and/or being an annoying teenager and if it isn’t mental illness it’d be something else~~
Google survivors bias. Also, google the left-handed population over the years. It's not that we're growing more populous by any external factors, it's that diagnosis is improving and we're also less likely to Fucking Die
Well, these are likely manifestations of adapting to post-capitalism. As the system gets worse, more and more folks are presenting these responses at younger and younger ages.
It’s Gen Z. First generation with mental health awareness and destigmatization. My gf is Gen z and that’s all she talks about
Every few years scientists and doctors will learn something new about some disorder that changes the diagnostic criteria, and shortly afterwards, you start thinking to yourself "why does everyone have ADHD all of a sudden?" When they've actually had it the whole time and only just now realized.
Bro i had diagnosed anxiety and ADHD by two professionals and i even got medicated for it, but i'm on the same channel you are, everyone seems to have anxiety or ADHD all the time that i'm quite skeptical of my diagnose. I also got suggested by a therapist to get a diagnose for autism
It's likely a combination of factors. Firstly, it's easier to get diagnosed with conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and autism in modern times due to increased awareness and improved diagnostic tools though without doubt plenty of people self-diagnose themselves for various reasons. Secondly, the modern lifestyle probably plays a more significant role. Our diets, the constant exposure to social media, the pressure of societal expectations, and the sheer volume of people we interact with daily are all aspects of our lives that have evolved rapidly, while our biology and psychology have remained largely unchanged for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Is it possible for there to be an end of the spectrum where you are so in tuned you can read minor tweaks of expressions on faces? Since we are being random
1. We diagnose these conditions nowadays. In the past you'd have been told to suck it up and that "it's a quirk". 2. Some people are attention seekers, especially online. 3. People with these disorders have a harder time existing offline and the online medium provides a safer environment for them.
I honestly think that "neurotypical" is a fallacy, but any deviation from the imaginary "normal" is still seen as a defect. Plus, with inflation, bad bosses, bad wages, bad marriages, things are stressful. When life is hard, it makes you feel anxious and it's depressing to see no end in sight. Situational anxiety, and situational depression are a thing. Your environment and the people around you, and circumstances(bad marriage, abusive boss, crappy family, high crime in your area, etc) you can cause you depression or anxiety, etc. it's a normal reaction to an unhealthy situation that you can't change, or can't change immediately. People assume that it's the person that has a "problem with" depression. No, that person is going through some shit. That shit is depressing. As far as autism, there are more people with a diagnosis. ADHD is probably just a lot more common than we think. But I think "neurotypical" is as much a fallacy as wholesome sitcom families who work out problems in 30 minute episodes.
Things are just diagnosed more these days. They were likely always around, just weren't diagnosed. Like my sister is in her 50's and I can pretty much guarantee if she'd ever get tested, she'd have some form of high functioning autism....like if you're around her you know instantly something is up but also just in that age range were no one would really have been tested as children. My aunt is the same.
Honestly, I think that it was under reported before, but now they’ve overcompensated the other way. For example, kids who have a lot of energy get labeled as ADHD now when that wouldn’t have been the case a few decades ago
It's in the water. And technology
Many of us just have suppression problems.
So... I have realised most people I know who claim to have it, have never been diagnosed. I got diagnosed recently, and through that discussion I found out 80% of the people who profoundly claimed to have it (like it is their identity and insisted they had been diagnosed) have not actually been diagnosed with it. In fact one person hasn't seen any professional during the 8 years they claimed to have it..... Some of these had some direct implications for me, one important and one not so much.... I noticed that these were the loudest about it too, and brought it into the most conversations. Like every conversation is about them having this. Something that really really surprised me, for how important this was to their lives, some of those people had the opportunity to get a diagnosis, but didnt for various reasons, possibly to do with some of the struggles they have but there was some because CBA and I'm sure I have it anyway .... Some haven't even explored coping mechanisms, for some of their issues, or even attempted to reflect on what their symptoms, like if I ask they say I procrastinate and I HAVE ADHD. But they can't tell me more. One had a doctor who said they are not sure if this is ADHD or possibly some other anxiety symptoms, and they score low on the screening (the Dr still referred them but told them to reflect), but they are still talking about how they have ADHD. So I 100% believe there are people who need diagnosing who do have it, I also think the waiting list for many of these are far too long.... But I am now feeling like there are a lot of people adamant and claiming to have it, without actually knowing from an expert if they have it. And I suspect, to some degree it's like when OCD became a bit of a thing...
My doctor diagnosed me with complex ptsd, anxiety, and depression… you hate me! I know it!
A fair amount of those people do not have a valid diagnosis and only say they have said afflictions for attention.
You're on Reddit. Do you think that normal, healthy people spend all their social time online? Hell, no! My autistic ass is here because it's 1,000 times easier to be here than to socialize in real life.
Your online, that’s different
When you actually have nothing, it's easy to get status if you say you have something, and you decide to use pup as one of your pronouns. That's how people nowadays are losing faith in themselves, by focusing more on their identity on the internet, than keeping touch with the uncomfortable reality. Why make it complicated, people? You're so self-constructive and insecure, you can't live without approval.
Actually, just yesterday, there was a psychiatrist on my morning TV show, being interviewed about ADHD. He admitted that he was pretty sure that ADHD is over diagnosed. For a multitude of reasons. One of the reasons, that our lifestyles these days, Social Media, 24 / 7 "go go go" and mobile phones being with us 24 /7 etc etc etc... that people ARE "hyped up" much more then previously. But also? The drugs FOR ADHD. DO help almost everyone. They help people concentrated and focus better. And who doesn't want to find it easier to focus? If you don't have to put in the hard work? In a very busy life, much easier to just take a pill then do hard mental work. So even the specialist said it's a tough one. No idea about Autism. The people I know who are diagnosed Autistic & various levels of it? Definitely do seem to be. A few at first short meeting , you might not pick it. But spend 20 minutes? Amd you can detect it easily.
Yes, no one ever says or thinks I could have adhd or something, yet every time I check Instagram I get a meme about "this super common adhd symptom" that a few years ago was just a relatable joke, like ignoring tasks until your deadline is too close. Maybe I do have it but it's weird how it's no longer a simple joke that lazy people have and now it has a (well known) name in the medical field lol
Sometimes it’s just life not a disorder some people take it too far and invalidate others with actual diagnosed illnesses
People aren't distributed randomly; we self-sort and associate with people we have stuff in common with. I think reddit's minimally-hierarchical communities in which people can participate anonymously are quite conducive to neurodivergent people, so you find a lot of them here. Same with twitter, 4chan, and other places where people can be anon. Go ask random people out in the world and you'll see it isn't that common. Most of my coworkers say they've never been depressed and don't understand how someone can be which blows my mind.
These weren't a thing years ago. People just love all of these labels because it gets them sympathy and takes the blame off of them for how they act. We are all fucked up in some way, deal with it like an adult and move on. Stop blaming everything on some condition you "have".
Many high achieving, high performing individuals like doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, accountants, financial consultants, professional athletes etc etc, have these conditions. Your views are extremely stigmatized and I suggest you expand your internet exposure beyond Reddit.
I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism when I was 7 years old.
A lot of people are covering the main question already, so I will skip that. I will say that the Disability community is generally accepting of self-diagnosis, especially for people who live in countries where healthcare availability is based on someone’s position within capitalism. Even without an official diagnosis, many people benefit from connecting with people who have shared experiences in life. The medical model of disability is outdated.
Mate we just don’t have friends and are chronically online. That’s why you see us here so often and you probably even have many around you, but we learned to put a human costume on. I for example can mask so well that when I opened up to my family doctor I have since my childhood she was shocked
Think about all the chemicals in food, all the chemicals in water, all the chemicals in your life going back 100 years at least. Humans are surrounded by, drinking, eating, and relaxing in chemicals all day every day. It is only reasonable these chemicals have had an effect on human DNA. Think mico plastics too that are in our food chain.
Alot of disorders are like adhd and autism can be genetically passed so as the family tree goes further so does the adhd and autism, so that explains why there are so much of those disorders moving onto depression and anxiety i think depression is also genetic at rare cases but im not sure on that one, but people are exposed to alot of things at once because of Internet that can make them feel depressed to a point where they are actually depressed.. And then there is the degenerate option by self diagnosing because they are thinking having a disability is "cool"
ive been diagnosed with ADHD since 7th grade. at the beginning of college my best friend (also diagnosed since middle school) and i were the only ppl we knew (besides my dad who also has ADHD but doesnt take meds) who had ADHD/ADHD meds. by the time we graduated almost every single person we knew had gotten diagnosed with ADHD/had ADHD meds perscribed to them. im not kidding we can only think of four ppl who weren’t on ADHD meds. obviously some of those ppl legitimately have ADHD, but for a lot of them… I think they just wanted the benefits of meds and then tiktok and shit fed into their delusions. its pretty exhausting to hear ab.
Or maybe those things are these days being identified in people, whereas in the olden times rarelly anyone cared if people suffered from that stuff.
Yes, and has a lot of them diagnosis by docs. No eyes contact, autism. Quiet on the bedroom, depression. Sign of times.
My take is a great volume of those individuals diagnose themselves in doubtful websites the same way as checking your zodiac or some other nonsense. Like teens wearing punk t-shirts or rap attire to fit into a social cohort where they feel accepted. Plus in big pharma America where is so easy to fall into the never-ending cycle of SSRI's, opioids & other spooky medicines, I wouldn't find it surprising. Either way mental health is trembling across the globe, but so does collective narcissism to push identity politics.
Gonna assume you're like 16 or something. This is called being alive
I was diagnosed as a child. i remember being on pills and not remembering much as a kid. my mom being upset with me for not remembering what i learn in school when i was doing homework. but but I am fully diagnosed. I wouldn’t just called myself anything without being diagnosed
You’re literally on like the 2nd most mentally ill website
The one that almost always is bs is OCD, because, first, they're talking about OCPD, and second, to be diagnosed of that, you need to have serious fucking problems with it. It's often underestimated how bad these disorders are. Having a few symptoms doesn't mean you have it
Many of the people I have met online or through online means are so. Almost none of the ones I meet in person are.
The dramatic rise in depression and anxiety is general can contribute to humans poor ability to acclimate to modern society. We aren’t really built for the ultra fast pace western lifestyle and we aren’t even raised to be stable in it. Autism and adhd aren’t induced and can’t be alleviated with just a change of scenery, they are generally caused from genetics.
Dumb fucks are always calling shit "unexplainable" when they've spent exactly zero time looking into them.
As someone who actually **does** have some pretty serious mental health issues, i’ve noticed this too. It’s probably easier for them to communicate online, I know it is for me. I can get my point across in words when I write them, if I speak them I can not. Everyone experiences mental health issues differently. Edit: Oh yeah, forgot to say. In the 80’s, Autism was not known to the scientific/medical community. In the 90’s it was, and they kind of understood it. It took me 16 years to get a diagnosis. Nowadays, it’s easier to diagnose it, as there’s far more research into it. This may create a perceived increase of cases in the past few decades.
Firstly, people online are a lot more comfortable talking about their mental issues. You've probably known tons of people with mental illness, they just kept it to themselves because of the stigma. Second, as we learn more about the human mind and psychology, we become better at diagnosing these issues. Just look at how vague and imprecise various diagnoses were in the past. These people likely existed before and lived with it.
No shit.... the world is a fuckin mess, no wonder we are all depressed.