summer1412
Okay, so I have to admit, and this is just a little bit of a pet peeve... Please pardon me...
But why does everybody have to be "diagnosed" as something? It seems like with pretty much everybody if you harm yourself you're either "depressed" or "bi-polar" or "borderline" or...whatever. I don't understand it and it literally annoys the living hell out of me. Yes, these conditions exist and are serious if not understood and treated properly (PER-INDIVIDUAL, no less, treatments don't work the same for everybody). But just because someone exhibits one symptom of a disorder doesn't mean that they have to be diagnosed. It's ******** annoying.
Diagnoses run through fads, and because a lot of the diagnostic criteria are subjective or based on self-report data, it's really really easy for a psychiatrist to assume a diagnosis that's not there.
Psychiatry also gets perks from the pharmaceutical industry, so they have an incentive to diagnose & put people on psychodrugs. When the pharmacy companies develop a new drug, suddenly psychiatrists start diagnosing in a way that allows them to treat people with that drug. See: Anatomy of an Epidemic.
With that said, when I was taking psychology courses I was taught that, because teenagers are s**t at emotional regulation and they're all whacked out with hormones anyways, you're not supposed to diagnose them until they're out of their teens and still exhibiting those issues. (I was also taught that, under severe enough stress, a mentally healthy person can start exhibiting symptoms -- manic episodes/psychosis/hallucinations/whatever -- which then go away when the stress is resolved. Distress tolerance varies from person to person, but if you overload someone, they WILL go a bit crazy.)
I was *also* taught that pretty much all mental illness is on a spectrum, and it's possible to have "depressive symptoms" or "anxious tendencies" without actually being diagnosably anxious.
So: this understanding is out there; it's just not mainstream.
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I've even seen the term "Aspergers" thrown out there, and as someone who lives with an Autistic individual, that one pisses me off the most. Though they are not one and the same, they are closely linked and I know quite a bit about both. It bothers me that just because someone is socially awkward or doesn't have the ability to "feel" as much as someone else, they're diagnosed as Aspergers. Just like it bothers me that if a child isn't vocal at a certain age, they're automatically lumped in with the ASD crowd rather than possibly verbally delayed or learning disabled.
In real life, most of the people I know who've been diagnosed as Asperger's .... are really, really obviously Aspie. There's a noticeable difference between socially awkward and "completely unable to pick up on social cues".
I feel like most of the "omg, you're not REALLY ASD" stuff comes from people on the internet talking to other people on the internet, and a lot of it is because the internet kind of functions without social niceties anyways, so their claimed dysfunction is less evident. (The internet also functions with nonverbal cue workarounds, which both aspies and NTs use.)
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It just ******** irritates me. People aren't meant to be lumped into categories and viewed as problems to be solved. It really, really ******** irritates me. The people who really and genuinely need to be helped, should be. The people who need to gain the will to help themselves should be helped to build themselves up. But not this, "You have this, take this, go to this sort of therapy, it'll cure you" sort of mentality that everybody seems to have. It's...bordering on insanity, in and of itself.
Again going back to my college psych classes -- the professor differentiated between quirk and problem. Quirk is an oddity; problem is a quirk that causes you/other people distress and makes you less able to function.
In my experience, if you're getting diagnosed, it's because you have a quirk that's impeding your ability to function somehow. If you're able to manage/disguise/explain away that quirk, everyone goes along with it. My sister has Asperger's, but she didn't get diagnosed until she was 18, because 1) she is extremely smart and talented, and generally did well in school, and 2) no one in my family is particularly social -- we're all introverts. It didn't particularly matter to my parents that she didn't have a boyfriend or only had a few friends. But certain issues escalated to the point where everyone was like "ho s**t, ok, that's NOT just a little introverted" and she got diagnosed.
Similarly: I was anxious, suicidal, and self-injurious through most of high school and college. During college, there was at least one occasion where I hurt myself pretty dramatically and then went to the RA and was like "hey, I just tried to kill myself, can I have some gauze and bandage tape? Also possibly a therapist?" But because I was good at communicating and negotiating with adults (and presenting my issues as "something mostly under control, except when I get stressed out"
wink and I was still able to get good grades in school/take care of myself/form social relationships, I never had to go to therapy for more than 3 sessions, I never got put on meds, and I never got officially diagnosed.
Just on this thread, I see lots of people who have a problem, not a "quirk", but are able to fly under the radar. If you're not able to fly under the radar, then your quirk is probably large enough to be problematic, and therefore diagnosable.
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