It’s seems important to note that the work of therapy—of good therapy—isn’t to find pathology and disappear. It’s very much the opposite of that. It’s making meaning of your life and your symptoms. It’s about coming to accept your humanness, your humanity, to laugh at your flaws, and get out of your head, finding an internal sense of freedom so that you can engage deeply in relationships.
Freya often mentions the "therapy culture" refering to what you mean (If I understand you correctly). I also believe that this is a good label to distinguish between what therapy is supposed to be (and has been for many many people!), and what many people, particularly the Gen Z, actually do under the label of therapy or attachment style or whatsoever. Still important not to mistake these two and not to blame real therapy, psychology, psychoanalyse, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, etc. for how some people misuse them!
Hear hear. More and more in my practice these days it seems that the initial work in therapy is to ‘de-therapize’ people, to decouple them from the expectations of therapy (set by culture(s)) before the actual work of therapy can be done.
In my classes we spend a great deal discussing therapy from a historical and cultural perspective. I am happy to report that most students are themselves uncomfortable with how society has been trending, in its view of mental health specifically and ‘humanness’ in general, and are eager for something new. Maybe a return to traditional views or maybe to progress, but just something different.
The problem is not that therapists are ruining the world, although they certainly aren't blameless, but rather, as Christopher Lasch noted, that the language of therapy has overridden every other area of life. We see somebody who is assertive and the word that comes to mind is "narcissist"; a person with particularities is "OCD."
It’s true there are a lot of bad therapists out there. But the good ones tend to treat the whole person and aren’t all that interested in symptoms and diagnoses. They understand that insight, depth and relationship are important to our humanity. Neo capitalism in general and insurance companies in particular have brought a culture of “efficiency” with the thought that we can treat symptoms separate from the person and that has trickled down to therapy training programs, therapists, and now individuals who identify as their symptoms and diagnoses. It’s a mess.
> It’s true there are a lot of bad therapists out there. But the good ones tend to treat the whole person and aren’t all that interested in symptoms and diagnoses.
All 3 of them?
This is getting in 'No true Scotsman' territory, but it's like 1 in a 100 that is like what you describe. And even they are problematic. It's not just some bad apple therapists, it's the culture of therapy, and this goes all the way into what we're teaching therapists and into the DSM itself.
Self-diagnosis is the first form of diagnosis *when* it is actually a diagnosis and not just a "cool trend" to be followed. The "self diagnosis" I'm talking about is not actually a diagnosis, it's kids and adults alike applying themselves a label just because it's the current trend.
A good therapist helps you process what life throws at you. I agree Jo-Ann. A good therapist also never wants to see you again once you’ve learned how to process.
When I was a therapist, I’d set the stage by saying that the point of this is so that one day, they stop seeing me. It doesn’t mean life will be easier or bad things won’t happen. It does mean that they’ll be better equipped to move through life, as messy as it can be.
Therapy culture = capitalism. Hijacked by people who have pathologized themselves into a “coaching” career where they WANT people to be “fucked” up so they have clients, hence all the IG posts and tik tok videos and the “therapeutic” language they use. They live outside of the guardrails of the professional job, free to advertise and say whatever, do whatever. Professional therapists, even the bad ones, we’re accountable to some extent.
They’ve also boxed themselves in. They’ve become the “issue” they claim to want to help people with as it’s what they’ve hitched their financial well-being to.
I once had a wise man point out to me that he doesn’t do more advertising or outreach because he doesn’t want to put out into the world people getting hurt so that he can have clients. He’d rather be like a doctor or a professional therapist, someone you reach out to when needed, if you broke a toe, you went through a traumatic experience. You go see them, get treated, then move on.
For all of this recent culture of the old ways suck, sure seems like people are realizing that yeah, old systems need to be reworked, but maybe, just maybe, having official guardrails in place, having elders to mentor/supervisor, having limits and boundaries, having experts, having many years of experience, may not all be a bad thing.
When I was a therapist, I’d set the stage by saying that the point of this is so that one day, they stop seeing me. It doesn’t mean life will be easier or bad things won’t happen. It does mean that they’ll be better equipped to move through life, as messy as it can be.
Therapy culture = capitalism. Hijacked by people who have pathologized themselves into a “coaching” career where they WANT people to be “fucked” up so they have clients, hence all the IG posts and tik tok videos and the “therapeutic” language they use. They live outside of the guardrails of the professional job, free to advertise and say whatever, do whatever. Professional therapists, even the bad ones, we’re accountable to some extent. They’ve also boxed themselves in. They’ve become the “issue” they claim to want to help people with as it’s what they’ve hitched their financial well-being to.
I once had a wise man point out to be that he doesn’t do more advertising or outreach because he doesn’t want to put out into the world people getting hurt so that he can have clients. He’d rather be like a doctor or a professional therapist, someone you reach out to when needed, if you broke a toe, you went through a traumatic experience. You go see them, get treated, then move on.
For all of this recent culture of the old ways suck, sure seems like people are realizing that yeah, old systems need to be reworked, but maybe, just maybe, having official guardrails in place, having elders to mentor/supervisor, having limits and boundaries, having experts, having many years of experience, may not all be a bad thing.
Beautiful piece. In the age of artificial intelligence, lean into authentic humanity. We are not data to be harvested or products to be consoomed. Creating and nurturing new life is the best thing you will ever do. No need to overthink it with demoralizing therapy.
There needs to be a happy medium between the extremes of knowledge and ignorance. I’m immersed in communities that can be extremely resistant to any sort of therapy speak/mental health stuff (religious/conservative/homeschool communities), and I daily see people (especially kids, but sometimes adults) who are clearly struggling, but the social pressure around them is to resist doctors, diagnoses, and medication. The secular culture may have gone too far, but religious communities still have a long way to go.
Thank you, this is along the lines of what I came here to say. There needs to be an in-between. As a young parent I have found it necessary to get curious about myself and go inward for the sake of my relationship with my kids. I literally WAS having trauma responses when my toddler was displaying typical toddler defiance - I would find myself seeing red and acting totally illogically, to the detriment of my connection with him.
I never wanted this. It went against everything I wanted to be as a parent. But I couldn’t just “make myself stop”. I DID have a dysregulated nervous system. That’s a real phenomenon - it’s part of our design. And the reason why our ancestors didn’t have to know about it in order to be happy and well-adjusted is because they had so many physically regulating activities (chopping wood, laundry by hand, etc) built into their daily lives that we don’t anymore. Going inward and untangling the knots within myself, correcting harmful beliefs I picked up in challenging times and was living by only semi-consciously - all of that has freed me to be present and to just live and experience!!
Where a lot of people go wrong is making that knowledge the end goal, and letting corporations profit along the way, as Freya says. But I don’t believe the knowledge itself is wrong. If a disturbing pattern keeps showing up, it’s a good idea to look deeper. I don’t believe God designed us to be mysteries to ourselves. We don’t need “experts”, we just need grace and the willingness to look at ourselves honestly.
Sophia Arredondo, you made an excellent point! I especially appreciate this line: "And the reason why our ancestors didn’t have to know about it in order to be happy and well-adjusted is because they had so many physically regulating activities (chopping wood, laundry by hand, etc) built into their daily lives that we don’t anymore." This is profoundly true. Basic survival of the tribe meant all doing their part in tandem with each other. The physical work alone would have mitigated a lot of the "internal dialogue" and made things make sense. Survival! Bless you, Wendy
Respectfully, I don't share their hesitation, but I fully understand where they are coming from. Their instinct is a misguided "how can we solve this with God and eachother?" Misguided, sure , but it's hard to look at the prescription rates of adhd meds for kids, ssri usage in teens, doctor fuled opiod crises, the old food pyramid suggested refined cards as baseline diet....and pill culture that doctors have collectively NOT pushed back on...and think that maybe they have a point.
I understand as well. I myself have chosen to stay unmedicated for my clinical depression, despite my doctor’s urging (my reasoning, however, is because for me medication would be a band-aid, and not addressing the root issue). However, I’ve seen so many people who believe it’s purely a “sin matter” or a case of “not believing enough” to be incredibly frustrated on behalf of friends who genuinely need some form of medication and are shamed into not even seeking help.
Don’t know you, miss, but you are brave and on the right track. Read, read, read. Poetry and philosophy, especially the ancients. Before psychiatry became du jour life was still lived and many wonderful people lived before us. Meet them on your own terms. Good luck.
Ya, I don't agree with this at all. Firstly there is no doubt that secular culture has gone too far, not as you worded it 'may have gone to far', it has gone way too far. Secondly churches and religion has gotten so woke in the last decade there is now a complete revival to Orthodox Christianity as opposed to the Woke crap that churches are offering, all about subjective feelings.
Ok, and? I’m not talking about churches who have gone “woke” (whatever that means anymore), I’m talking about people who are still so conservative that most of the women still think they can’t wear pants. I stand by what I said.
As Anäis Nin said in her diary, obsessive introspection is cancerous.
“We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads.”
I’ve been suspecting that most of my existential confusion lately is because of the pervasiveness of trying to explain everything without actually living and experiencing. I kind of lost sense of the rhythm and romance in my life for a while. I felt terrified at the thought of being stereotyped, labeled, or even become a caricature since lately it seems like everyone is doing that.
I have found that by giving myself for the sake of others, I have discovered more of myself than I ever did by focusing solely on myself. It's almost as if Jesus was onto something.
So true. The happiest time of my life was when I was busy caring for babies and young children. I had no time to think into anything else! Prior to that time and since that time I have been medicated for bipolar disorder (successfully). But at that time of my life I did fine unmedicated. I’m sure someone can look at this story and find a psychological term to suggest that my happiness in that stage of my life was evidence of dysfunction.
I think there's a correlation between the level of societal anxiety and the tendency to diagnose or categorize. Labels manage anxiety temporarily but they don't provide much flexibility.
This therapeutic obsession isn’t just flattening individuality; it’s fueling a culture of narcissism. By constantly analyzing ourselves through the lens of pathology, we’re training people to see their every mood, quirk, or inconvenience as a grand, central drama. Instead of developing resilience or curiosity about others, we become fixated on self-diagnosis, endlessly scrutinizing how we feel and how others make us feel.
My homeschool co op group collectively thought my child is autistic because she is snarky and likes to crack jokes at inappropriate times. Well has it occured to them that she is 12?
This is an important topic to reflect on. I’m on the tail end of earning my doctorate in community care and counseling, and it concerns me to see complex things become trendy and to see beautiful, unique souls overly identify with their DSM diagnosis, thus losing site of who they are and what future steps they can take to holistically help themselves thrive in whatever context they find themselves in. We are more than our diagnosis. A diagnosis is information; it’s not the place we want to live.
I really think you're touching something true here. And I hope people see the distinction between healthy self-reflection and self-obsession. I think self-analysis and seeking the support of therapy can be life giving (and life SAVING). I also think that we're moving into a space where people are desperate to categorize themselves by increasingly specific minutiae and young people especially are definitely losing themselves in that. I will be thinking about this for a while.
Yes, very much agree with this. Many people seem desperate to reduce others and even themselves -- actually, particularly themselves -- to some ridiculous little category. Every human emotion and action now seems to have a pathological basis. It's so overdone and it seems very fear/control centered. Not a very healthy, wise, or even human response to life.
It seems to me a lot of people are using a diagnosis as an excuse so they don't have to be responsible for their own behavior. Instead it's because there's something wrong with them. I see that as one of the biggest reasons people go looking for an diagnosis, that the lack of personal responsibility parallels the incredible rise and self/professional diagnosis is not an accident.
- hypnosis (specifically self-hypnosis — the stories we tell ourselves; how those stories prime us for confirmation bias)
- our general problem with the concept expressed by all sorts of folks regarding our over-indexing on what we see/know vs. the uncertain and unknown. I like Kahneman's WYSIATI framing the best here: https://www.r-ght.com/wysiati/
- The work done by Iain McGilchrist — his excellent book on The Master and His Emissary
Modern life is a narrative hell. We're fed all these narratives ("frames") non-stop all while being in a suggestive state (think "trance" next time you see someone doomscrolling their phone).
Meanwhile, because algorithms only "win" when they capture and hold attention, the most scary frames win the most attention. Then, couch this in a culture that glorifies victimhood — check! Then, understand how victimhood is a kind of "get out of jail free card" when it comes to taking personal responsibility ...
Cycle this model into the. culture, and what do you get?
• People lowering their guards to suggestion, becoming receptive to narratives/frames, especially ones that are scary and have "murky" symptoms that can be easily mapped to us (How this works: look up the Barnum effect)
• People finding a frame that makes them a victim (better yet, a frame that makes them a victim with hard to disprove — murky — symptoms)
• People who begin to see everything through that frame
• People who return to social media to talk about their beliefs, report their maladies to a culture ready to "believe them," a culture that pushes high receptiveness to "mental health is important"
Nevermind that mental health _is_ important. (No, "health is important" FTFY.) Also that stepping into someone's beliefs is the first step to helping them break free of those beliefs.
I could go on and on. A related book here is Psycho-cybernetics (also Worry and Its Control — out of print. Took simple ideas from that book and helped a kid overcome a two-year bought of stomach problems/nighttime anxiety).
Culturally we need to shift to a world in which we're more on guard against narratives, the mental flexibility and adaptability to embrace uncertainty (possibly the biggest underlying driver of all this), and able to view ourselves through competing narratives ...
And indivdually we need to connect more with each other in the real world so that bad narratives are challenged, which itself is an okay thing to have happen, by other people.
I know I've packed a lot of concepts in here, so apologies for making a lot of assumptions any given reader has enough context to make sense of what I'm writing.
/s/ Your neighborhood communications professional/marketer — see also the work I'm building up on https://unaiify.com
It’s seems important to note that the work of therapy—of good therapy—isn’t to find pathology and disappear. It’s very much the opposite of that. It’s making meaning of your life and your symptoms. It’s about coming to accept your humanness, your humanity, to laugh at your flaws, and get out of your head, finding an internal sense of freedom so that you can engage deeply in relationships.
I wonder how many people exhibiting these behaviours are actually in therapy and how much are just reading/watching stuff online and self-diagnosing.
Freya often mentions the "therapy culture" refering to what you mean (If I understand you correctly). I also believe that this is a good label to distinguish between what therapy is supposed to be (and has been for many many people!), and what many people, particularly the Gen Z, actually do under the label of therapy or attachment style or whatsoever. Still important not to mistake these two and not to blame real therapy, psychology, psychoanalyse, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, etc. for how some people misuse them!
yes! real therapy > therapy culture
Hear hear. More and more in my practice these days it seems that the initial work in therapy is to ‘de-therapize’ people, to decouple them from the expectations of therapy (set by culture(s)) before the actual work of therapy can be done.
In my classes we spend a great deal discussing therapy from a historical and cultural perspective. I am happy to report that most students are themselves uncomfortable with how society has been trending, in its view of mental health specifically and ‘humanness’ in general, and are eager for something new. Maybe a return to traditional views or maybe to progress, but just something different.
The problem is not that therapists are ruining the world, although they certainly aren't blameless, but rather, as Christopher Lasch noted, that the language of therapy has overridden every other area of life. We see somebody who is assertive and the word that comes to mind is "narcissist"; a person with particularities is "OCD."
It’s true there are a lot of bad therapists out there. But the good ones tend to treat the whole person and aren’t all that interested in symptoms and diagnoses. They understand that insight, depth and relationship are important to our humanity. Neo capitalism in general and insurance companies in particular have brought a culture of “efficiency” with the thought that we can treat symptoms separate from the person and that has trickled down to therapy training programs, therapists, and now individuals who identify as their symptoms and diagnoses. It’s a mess.
> It’s true there are a lot of bad therapists out there. But the good ones tend to treat the whole person and aren’t all that interested in symptoms and diagnoses.
All 3 of them?
This is getting in 'No true Scotsman' territory, but it's like 1 in a 100 that is like what you describe. And even they are problematic. It's not just some bad apple therapists, it's the culture of therapy, and this goes all the way into what we're teaching therapists and into the DSM itself.
It's the self-diagnosis that irks me.
Self-diagnosis is the oldest form of diagnosis. Nothing wrong with it per se. "Know thyself" and everything.
Kind of like you can know if you have a cold (and many other aillments) without someone having to diagnose you.
It's the vocabulary and the mindset of the diagnosis that's the problem. And it's still a problem when a "professional therapist" does it.
Self-diagnosis is the first form of diagnosis *when* it is actually a diagnosis and not just a "cool trend" to be followed. The "self diagnosis" I'm talking about is not actually a diagnosis, it's kids and adults alike applying themselves a label just because it's the current trend.
A good therapist helps you process what life throws at you. I agree Jo-Ann. A good therapist also never wants to see you again once you’ve learned how to process.
When I was a therapist, I’d set the stage by saying that the point of this is so that one day, they stop seeing me. It doesn’t mean life will be easier or bad things won’t happen. It does mean that they’ll be better equipped to move through life, as messy as it can be.
Therapy culture = capitalism. Hijacked by people who have pathologized themselves into a “coaching” career where they WANT people to be “fucked” up so they have clients, hence all the IG posts and tik tok videos and the “therapeutic” language they use. They live outside of the guardrails of the professional job, free to advertise and say whatever, do whatever. Professional therapists, even the bad ones, we’re accountable to some extent.
They’ve also boxed themselves in. They’ve become the “issue” they claim to want to help people with as it’s what they’ve hitched their financial well-being to.
I once had a wise man point out to me that he doesn’t do more advertising or outreach because he doesn’t want to put out into the world people getting hurt so that he can have clients. He’d rather be like a doctor or a professional therapist, someone you reach out to when needed, if you broke a toe, you went through a traumatic experience. You go see them, get treated, then move on.
For all of this recent culture of the old ways suck, sure seems like people are realizing that yeah, old systems need to be reworked, but maybe, just maybe, having official guardrails in place, having elders to mentor/supervisor, having limits and boundaries, having experts, having many years of experience, may not all be a bad thing.
End rant 😂
When I was a therapist, I’d set the stage by saying that the point of this is so that one day, they stop seeing me. It doesn’t mean life will be easier or bad things won’t happen. It does mean that they’ll be better equipped to move through life, as messy as it can be.
Therapy culture = capitalism. Hijacked by people who have pathologized themselves into a “coaching” career where they WANT people to be “fucked” up so they have clients, hence all the IG posts and tik tok videos and the “therapeutic” language they use. They live outside of the guardrails of the professional job, free to advertise and say whatever, do whatever. Professional therapists, even the bad ones, we’re accountable to some extent. They’ve also boxed themselves in. They’ve become the “issue” they claim to want to help people with as it’s what they’ve hitched their financial well-being to.
I once had a wise man point out to be that he doesn’t do more advertising or outreach because he doesn’t want to put out into the world people getting hurt so that he can have clients. He’d rather be like a doctor or a professional therapist, someone you reach out to when needed, if you broke a toe, you went through a traumatic experience. You go see them, get treated, then move on.
For all of this recent culture of the old ways suck, sure seems like people are realizing that yeah, old systems need to be reworked, but maybe, just maybe, having official guardrails in place, having elders to mentor/supervisor, having limits and boundaries, having experts, having many years of experience, may not all be a bad thing.
End rant 😂
Beautiful piece. In the age of artificial intelligence, lean into authentic humanity. We are not data to be harvested or products to be consoomed. Creating and nurturing new life is the best thing you will ever do. No need to overthink it with demoralizing therapy.
There needs to be a happy medium between the extremes of knowledge and ignorance. I’m immersed in communities that can be extremely resistant to any sort of therapy speak/mental health stuff (religious/conservative/homeschool communities), and I daily see people (especially kids, but sometimes adults) who are clearly struggling, but the social pressure around them is to resist doctors, diagnoses, and medication. The secular culture may have gone too far, but religious communities still have a long way to go.
Thank you, this is along the lines of what I came here to say. There needs to be an in-between. As a young parent I have found it necessary to get curious about myself and go inward for the sake of my relationship with my kids. I literally WAS having trauma responses when my toddler was displaying typical toddler defiance - I would find myself seeing red and acting totally illogically, to the detriment of my connection with him.
I never wanted this. It went against everything I wanted to be as a parent. But I couldn’t just “make myself stop”. I DID have a dysregulated nervous system. That’s a real phenomenon - it’s part of our design. And the reason why our ancestors didn’t have to know about it in order to be happy and well-adjusted is because they had so many physically regulating activities (chopping wood, laundry by hand, etc) built into their daily lives that we don’t anymore. Going inward and untangling the knots within myself, correcting harmful beliefs I picked up in challenging times and was living by only semi-consciously - all of that has freed me to be present and to just live and experience!!
Where a lot of people go wrong is making that knowledge the end goal, and letting corporations profit along the way, as Freya says. But I don’t believe the knowledge itself is wrong. If a disturbing pattern keeps showing up, it’s a good idea to look deeper. I don’t believe God designed us to be mysteries to ourselves. We don’t need “experts”, we just need grace and the willingness to look at ourselves honestly.
Sophia Arredondo, you made an excellent point! I especially appreciate this line: "And the reason why our ancestors didn’t have to know about it in order to be happy and well-adjusted is because they had so many physically regulating activities (chopping wood, laundry by hand, etc) built into their daily lives that we don’t anymore." This is profoundly true. Basic survival of the tribe meant all doing their part in tandem with each other. The physical work alone would have mitigated a lot of the "internal dialogue" and made things make sense. Survival! Bless you, Wendy
Respectfully, I don't share their hesitation, but I fully understand where they are coming from. Their instinct is a misguided "how can we solve this with God and eachother?" Misguided, sure , but it's hard to look at the prescription rates of adhd meds for kids, ssri usage in teens, doctor fuled opiod crises, the old food pyramid suggested refined cards as baseline diet....and pill culture that doctors have collectively NOT pushed back on...and think that maybe they have a point.
I understand as well. I myself have chosen to stay unmedicated for my clinical depression, despite my doctor’s urging (my reasoning, however, is because for me medication would be a band-aid, and not addressing the root issue). However, I’ve seen so many people who believe it’s purely a “sin matter” or a case of “not believing enough” to be incredibly frustrated on behalf of friends who genuinely need some form of medication and are shamed into not even seeking help.
Don’t know you, miss, but you are brave and on the right track. Read, read, read. Poetry and philosophy, especially the ancients. Before psychiatry became du jour life was still lived and many wonderful people lived before us. Meet them on your own terms. Good luck.
Ya, I don't agree with this at all. Firstly there is no doubt that secular culture has gone too far, not as you worded it 'may have gone to far', it has gone way too far. Secondly churches and religion has gotten so woke in the last decade there is now a complete revival to Orthodox Christianity as opposed to the Woke crap that churches are offering, all about subjective feelings.
Ok, and? I’m not talking about churches who have gone “woke” (whatever that means anymore), I’m talking about people who are still so conservative that most of the women still think they can’t wear pants. I stand by what I said.
As Anäis Nin said in her diary, obsessive introspection is cancerous.
“We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads.”
I’ve been suspecting that most of my existential confusion lately is because of the pervasiveness of trying to explain everything without actually living and experiencing. I kind of lost sense of the rhythm and romance in my life for a while. I felt terrified at the thought of being stereotyped, labeled, or even become a caricature since lately it seems like everyone is doing that.
I have found that by giving myself for the sake of others, I have discovered more of myself than I ever did by focusing solely on myself. It's almost as if Jesus was onto something.
This! That Jesus, pretty smart guy for sure😉
So true. The happiest time of my life was when I was busy caring for babies and young children. I had no time to think into anything else! Prior to that time and since that time I have been medicated for bipolar disorder (successfully). But at that time of my life I did fine unmedicated. I’m sure someone can look at this story and find a psychological term to suggest that my happiness in that stage of my life was evidence of dysfunction.
"It's impossible to heal from being human." So beautifully put.
But there is a sick correlary: only by being inhuman can some feel cured.
very beautifully put.🥹
I think there's a correlation between the level of societal anxiety and the tendency to diagnose or categorize. Labels manage anxiety temporarily but they don't provide much flexibility.
Judge Holden's diary. "That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
This therapeutic obsession isn’t just flattening individuality; it’s fueling a culture of narcissism. By constantly analyzing ourselves through the lens of pathology, we’re training people to see their every mood, quirk, or inconvenience as a grand, central drama. Instead of developing resilience or curiosity about others, we become fixated on self-diagnosis, endlessly scrutinizing how we feel and how others make us feel.
In the future, everyone will be autistic for fifteen minutes.
Screw you, I bought a personality from apple fair and square.
Yeah, but they quit supporting it after few years.
🤣🤣
My homeschool co op group collectively thought my child is autistic because she is snarky and likes to crack jokes at inappropriate times. Well has it occured to them that she is 12?
Needless to say, my family got kicked out.
The smart kid !
This is an important topic to reflect on. I’m on the tail end of earning my doctorate in community care and counseling, and it concerns me to see complex things become trendy and to see beautiful, unique souls overly identify with their DSM diagnosis, thus losing site of who they are and what future steps they can take to holistically help themselves thrive in whatever context they find themselves in. We are more than our diagnosis. A diagnosis is information; it’s not the place we want to live.
I really think you're touching something true here. And I hope people see the distinction between healthy self-reflection and self-obsession. I think self-analysis and seeking the support of therapy can be life giving (and life SAVING). I also think that we're moving into a space where people are desperate to categorize themselves by increasingly specific minutiae and young people especially are definitely losing themselves in that. I will be thinking about this for a while.
Yes, very much agree with this. Many people seem desperate to reduce others and even themselves -- actually, particularly themselves -- to some ridiculous little category. Every human emotion and action now seems to have a pathological basis. It's so overdone and it seems very fear/control centered. Not a very healthy, wise, or even human response to life.
It seems to me a lot of people are using a diagnosis as an excuse so they don't have to be responsible for their own behavior. Instead it's because there's something wrong with them. I see that as one of the biggest reasons people go looking for an diagnosis, that the lack of personal responsibility parallels the incredible rise and self/professional diagnosis is not an accident.
Helpful frames to make sense of this:
- hypnosis (specifically self-hypnosis — the stories we tell ourselves; how those stories prime us for confirmation bias)
- our general problem with the concept expressed by all sorts of folks regarding our over-indexing on what we see/know vs. the uncertain and unknown. I like Kahneman's WYSIATI framing the best here: https://www.r-ght.com/wysiati/
- The work done by Iain McGilchrist — his excellent book on The Master and His Emissary
Modern life is a narrative hell. We're fed all these narratives ("frames") non-stop all while being in a suggestive state (think "trance" next time you see someone doomscrolling their phone).
Meanwhile, because algorithms only "win" when they capture and hold attention, the most scary frames win the most attention. Then, couch this in a culture that glorifies victimhood — check! Then, understand how victimhood is a kind of "get out of jail free card" when it comes to taking personal responsibility ...
Cycle this model into the. culture, and what do you get?
• People lowering their guards to suggestion, becoming receptive to narratives/frames, especially ones that are scary and have "murky" symptoms that can be easily mapped to us (How this works: look up the Barnum effect)
• People finding a frame that makes them a victim (better yet, a frame that makes them a victim with hard to disprove — murky — symptoms)
• People who begin to see everything through that frame
• People who return to social media to talk about their beliefs, report their maladies to a culture ready to "believe them," a culture that pushes high receptiveness to "mental health is important"
Nevermind that mental health _is_ important. (No, "health is important" FTFY.) Also that stepping into someone's beliefs is the first step to helping them break free of those beliefs.
I could go on and on. A related book here is Psycho-cybernetics (also Worry and Its Control — out of print. Took simple ideas from that book and helped a kid overcome a two-year bought of stomach problems/nighttime anxiety).
Culturally we need to shift to a world in which we're more on guard against narratives, the mental flexibility and adaptability to embrace uncertainty (possibly the biggest underlying driver of all this), and able to view ourselves through competing narratives ...
And indivdually we need to connect more with each other in the real world so that bad narratives are challenged, which itself is an okay thing to have happen, by other people.
I know I've packed a lot of concepts in here, so apologies for making a lot of assumptions any given reader has enough context to make sense of what I'm writing.
/s/ Your neighborhood communications professional/marketer — see also the work I'm building up on https://unaiify.com
Thanks for the shout.
Thank you big!
Truly astounding to read! I found myself in your description and I had to stop to think, and stop thinking again. Thank you for the beautiful piece!