I love your writing. This is a really good interrogation of something I've noticed on social media. The other disturbing part of this is it tries to ensnare you. Especially if you've had a mental health crisis, so many institutions are set up to encourage you to make that part of your identity not just on social media but among therapists themselves. It's actually difficult to find a provider who doesn't buy in to this culture of valid feelings etc. Lots of learned helplessness going on. Now, at 26, I am sick to death of my feelings being affirmed; instead I want to feel better.
Also, I want to admit to being one of the "it's just elite colleges, it doesn't matter" people. I thought they'd start working at Goldman Sachs and become boring Obama liberals.
Add the new Disney/Marvel show Moon Knight to the list of pop-culture portrayals of DID. Also there is a sub-Reddit r/fakedisordercringe that documents this trend quite well, you can even see a while back Tik-Tokers we’re obsessed with pretending they had tics from Tourette’s, got bored with that then moved on to DID. What disorder will they pretend to have next? Only time will tell
"They would like the laurel of victimhood without the actuality of being victimized."
Yes. This phenomenon exists with sexual identity as well. I've said before that the rise of identifications like "gray ace demisexual" (aka having a normal sex drive) is because kids today want to be Queer but they don't want to be queer.
My son was "diagnosed" with this, DID, by a substance abuse counsellor when he was a raging alcoholic. It was so handy that it wasn't really him trashing the house, terrorizing his girlfriend and getting DUIs.
Ever wonder if everyone’s mental health was better when they had to hunt for berries and small game or maybe carry water around in a re-purposed animal bladder? ( My friend does, am asking for them.)
"Ideas core to the toxic mental health ideology that kids are absorbing on TikTok include
That intense childhood trauma is universal or near-universal, despite the fact that it simply isn’t, and thank god
That trauma is somehow ennobling, a maker of meaning, a creator of identity, a way to be unique and special, rather than something terrible we should do everything we can to prevent
Correspondingly, that to be mentally healthy is undesirable, when it’s a condition we should aspire to secure for everyone
That mental illness is an identity, the most important and central element of someone’s self, rather than an unfortunate detail, and that the right way to have a mental illness is to revel in it, celebrate it, fixate on it completely, act as though there’s nothing else interesting or meaningful about you than your mental illness
That any critical thinking or questioning of their rhetoric about mental illness is inherently a matter of “stigma” and thus illegitimate, and that the job of doctors and therapists is always to affirm their self-diagnoses, not to act as independent and dispassionate agents
That anything they feel is valid, that their emotions are a perfect guide to their reality, and that anything that contradicts their intuitions or their desires is by definition the hand of oppression."
Victim status is highly prized in the West these days. Victim status trumps any argument, even to the point where any and all malfeasance is excused and even praised if committed by the right sort of victim.
The irony of course, is that if early childhood trauma were so universal and damaging, imagine how people must have suffered in the olden days, or in the Third World right now.
This has been around for 40 years in a general form. That long ago I used to work for a firm in the Denver office that also had a group in Manhattan. I noticed in one large group get-together in Denver, and when visiting the NYC office often, that all the Coasties could talk about their personal lives was their visits to Psychiatrists. Of the group in NY, only one was obviously dysfunctional - except not in his professional life, which was a huge success. Either the Boss was artful at picking mentally suffering people as employees, or more likely, it was a way to achieve status in a group. A way of communicating out East. The people in Denver rolled their eyes when they couldn't be seen. So it's mutated from adults to young adults, and to kids. To people who really suffer from mental illness, these people are a bunch of terminally selfish counterfeits. They are so self-absorbed that their skeletons are on the outside.
Again it seems exactly like the consumptive chic movement of the 19th century where women adopted the look of the consumptive because dying of TB was glamours and real and made you special.
A more recent example might be the stereotypical benzo (mommy’s little helper) addict 1950s housewife. Only boring average common women were happy being a housewife - those with depth suffered and needed to medicate that suffering.
Playing with identity has ever been the privilege and recourse of the young, that is to say, people who are still figuring out what they're going to do and what they've got to do it with. That's fine as far as it goes, and can be both enjoyable and useful. But I'm not sure there is any longer a distinction to be made between play and work - certainly the "grind" or "hustle" cultural concept argues that there's not; by that rubric, if you're not doing work, you're wasting time. From a perspective like that, no such thing as play can even exist. And a lot of the Internet, these days, lives and breathes that concept. Can you blame them? The algorithm eats that shit up, so especially on as algo-driven a platform as TikTok, which by all accounts is actively hostile to and quite good at preventing users curating their own experiences, that mindset is liable to be at the core of most or all of what you see.
Hence trivially the escalation, because it's a Red Queen's race: you have to run as fast as you can all the time, just to avoid losing ground. If you actually want to earn, if you want to have an audience at all, you have to stand out. I think all of what you describe pretty much falls out of that. It's of a piece with Logan Paul's exploitation of a suicide, or with that guy who deliberately crashed a plane for YouTube views a little while ago - same purpose, same outcome, and if the blast radius of that plane crash was smaller then that's only by happenstance.
It's not identity play any more, because on the Internet not much of anything can be play at all any more - not that there aren't places where it still can, but they're very niche and not geared to generate engagement, and even there you see the effect on people of the prevailing culture. It's identity *work*, identity as personal brand, and I'm less worried about it somehow poisoning the wider culture - the wider culture is already poisoned! - than I am about the effect it's going to have on the people who are tied up in it now. I don't see that they ever really had much of a chance, and while it's reasonable to expect people to rise above their circumstances, it's a bit Calvinist to ignore the fact that not everyone has that in them, or should need to.
I'm just glad I had the good fortune of a chance to mostly figure out who I am before all this shit came along. I don't know how the hell anyone who didn't have that luck is going to deal with the same problem, and I'm glad that's not a problem anyone expects me to try to solve.
(It's also worth noting that all you're going to see on TikTok or Twitter, unless you know how to look and expend the effort in doing so, is the people who've found the most success in this Red Queen's race that the modern public Internet has largely become. Just being aware that these algorithms exist and do what they do does not suffice to render you immune to their effects.)
FWIW, in terms of the prediction that this will graduate from TikTok nonsense to real-world nonsense, I do personally think the tide has shifted and some of the crazy is starting to drain away. People are still getting incredibly mad about it, but it feels like every day criticizing wokeness becomes a little bit more possible. It's also possible I'm just projecting from my own experience here of course. But still, it feels to me like the direction of the wind has shifted.
I love your writing. This is a really good interrogation of something I've noticed on social media. The other disturbing part of this is it tries to ensnare you. Especially if you've had a mental health crisis, so many institutions are set up to encourage you to make that part of your identity not just on social media but among therapists themselves. It's actually difficult to find a provider who doesn't buy in to this culture of valid feelings etc. Lots of learned helplessness going on. Now, at 26, I am sick to death of my feelings being affirmed; instead I want to feel better.
21st Century Salon has a similar article: https://bprice.substack.com/p/tiktok-tics-and-mass-sociogenic-illness?s=r
Also, I want to admit to being one of the "it's just elite colleges, it doesn't matter" people. I thought they'd start working at Goldman Sachs and become boring Obama liberals.
Add the new Disney/Marvel show Moon Knight to the list of pop-culture portrayals of DID. Also there is a sub-Reddit r/fakedisordercringe that documents this trend quite well, you can even see a while back Tik-Tokers we’re obsessed with pretending they had tics from Tourette’s, got bored with that then moved on to DID. What disorder will they pretend to have next? Only time will tell
"They would like the laurel of victimhood without the actuality of being victimized."
Yes. This phenomenon exists with sexual identity as well. I've said before that the rise of identifications like "gray ace demisexual" (aka having a normal sex drive) is because kids today want to be Queer but they don't want to be queer.
My son was "diagnosed" with this, DID, by a substance abuse counsellor when he was a raging alcoholic. It was so handy that it wasn't really him trashing the house, terrorizing his girlfriend and getting DUIs.
Ever wonder if everyone’s mental health was better when they had to hunt for berries and small game or maybe carry water around in a re-purposed animal bladder? ( My friend does, am asking for them.)
You wrote:
"Ideas core to the toxic mental health ideology that kids are absorbing on TikTok include
That intense childhood trauma is universal or near-universal, despite the fact that it simply isn’t, and thank god
That trauma is somehow ennobling, a maker of meaning, a creator of identity, a way to be unique and special, rather than something terrible we should do everything we can to prevent
Correspondingly, that to be mentally healthy is undesirable, when it’s a condition we should aspire to secure for everyone
That mental illness is an identity, the most important and central element of someone’s self, rather than an unfortunate detail, and that the right way to have a mental illness is to revel in it, celebrate it, fixate on it completely, act as though there’s nothing else interesting or meaningful about you than your mental illness
That any critical thinking or questioning of their rhetoric about mental illness is inherently a matter of “stigma” and thus illegitimate, and that the job of doctors and therapists is always to affirm their self-diagnoses, not to act as independent and dispassionate agents
That anything they feel is valid, that their emotions are a perfect guide to their reality, and that anything that contradicts their intuitions or their desires is by definition the hand of oppression."
Victim status is highly prized in the West these days. Victim status trumps any argument, even to the point where any and all malfeasance is excused and even praised if committed by the right sort of victim.
The irony of course, is that if early childhood trauma were so universal and damaging, imagine how people must have suffered in the olden days, or in the Third World right now.
This has been around for 40 years in a general form. That long ago I used to work for a firm in the Denver office that also had a group in Manhattan. I noticed in one large group get-together in Denver, and when visiting the NYC office often, that all the Coasties could talk about their personal lives was their visits to Psychiatrists. Of the group in NY, only one was obviously dysfunctional - except not in his professional life, which was a huge success. Either the Boss was artful at picking mentally suffering people as employees, or more likely, it was a way to achieve status in a group. A way of communicating out East. The people in Denver rolled their eyes when they couldn't be seen. So it's mutated from adults to young adults, and to kids. To people who really suffer from mental illness, these people are a bunch of terminally selfish counterfeits. They are so self-absorbed that their skeletons are on the outside.
Again it seems exactly like the consumptive chic movement of the 19th century where women adopted the look of the consumptive because dying of TB was glamours and real and made you special.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-consumptive-chic-carolyn-day-bloomsbury
A more recent example might be the stereotypical benzo (mommy’s little helper) addict 1950s housewife. Only boring average common women were happy being a housewife - those with depth suffered and needed to medicate that suffering.
I clicked on the video...
How do the alters have different ages? How come some are American?
I see a different etiology, I think.
Playing with identity has ever been the privilege and recourse of the young, that is to say, people who are still figuring out what they're going to do and what they've got to do it with. That's fine as far as it goes, and can be both enjoyable and useful. But I'm not sure there is any longer a distinction to be made between play and work - certainly the "grind" or "hustle" cultural concept argues that there's not; by that rubric, if you're not doing work, you're wasting time. From a perspective like that, no such thing as play can even exist. And a lot of the Internet, these days, lives and breathes that concept. Can you blame them? The algorithm eats that shit up, so especially on as algo-driven a platform as TikTok, which by all accounts is actively hostile to and quite good at preventing users curating their own experiences, that mindset is liable to be at the core of most or all of what you see.
Hence trivially the escalation, because it's a Red Queen's race: you have to run as fast as you can all the time, just to avoid losing ground. If you actually want to earn, if you want to have an audience at all, you have to stand out. I think all of what you describe pretty much falls out of that. It's of a piece with Logan Paul's exploitation of a suicide, or with that guy who deliberately crashed a plane for YouTube views a little while ago - same purpose, same outcome, and if the blast radius of that plane crash was smaller then that's only by happenstance.
It's not identity play any more, because on the Internet not much of anything can be play at all any more - not that there aren't places where it still can, but they're very niche and not geared to generate engagement, and even there you see the effect on people of the prevailing culture. It's identity *work*, identity as personal brand, and I'm less worried about it somehow poisoning the wider culture - the wider culture is already poisoned! - than I am about the effect it's going to have on the people who are tied up in it now. I don't see that they ever really had much of a chance, and while it's reasonable to expect people to rise above their circumstances, it's a bit Calvinist to ignore the fact that not everyone has that in them, or should need to.
I'm just glad I had the good fortune of a chance to mostly figure out who I am before all this shit came along. I don't know how the hell anyone who didn't have that luck is going to deal with the same problem, and I'm glad that's not a problem anyone expects me to try to solve.
(It's also worth noting that all you're going to see on TikTok or Twitter, unless you know how to look and expend the effort in doing so, is the people who've found the most success in this Red Queen's race that the modern public Internet has largely become. Just being aware that these algorithms exist and do what they do does not suffice to render you immune to their effects.)
FWIW, in terms of the prediction that this will graduate from TikTok nonsense to real-world nonsense, I do personally think the tide has shifted and some of the crazy is starting to drain away. People are still getting incredibly mad about it, but it feels like every day criticizing wokeness becomes a little bit more possible. It's also possible I'm just projecting from my own experience here of course. But still, it feels to me like the direction of the wind has shifted.