I think a lot of it is down to the medium, as well. And it's not so much pop culture - it's the way people brand themselves on social media, especially the tik toks I've seen, like they even dress and act like a Cal Arts mad science kid (also I'm old AF so there's maybe that, but I feel like it's the lame shit from my generation or the o…
I think a lot of it is down to the medium, as well. And it's not so much pop culture - it's the way people brand themselves on social media, especially the tik toks I've seen, like they even dress and act like a Cal Arts mad science kid (also I'm old AF so there's maybe that, but I feel like it's the lame shit from my generation or the one just after, rather than some new shit that's making me yell "get off my lawn").
I noticed the r/adhd subreddit is a lot less into the whole "neurodiversity" thing, even though there's some crap on there too. That's because on reddit, for all its flaws, having to self-brand isn't built into it. It's largely anonymous. No one can remember who was called Haunted_bacon or what they said. On twitter, tumblr, instagram, probably tik tok, if you get a diagnosis, there's virtually no way for you not to rebrand, especially if you go on there to connect with other people with the same diagnosis. You might call yourself something with your disability in it, or put it in your profile, so people know how to treat you. So, immediately, you're going to keep your brand a little bit more kawaii than what a neurological disability actually entails, because it's your identity now. Some as someone with Crohns doesn't want to smear bloody poop on their face and call it "contouring", it's going to be a lot of "TFW insert family-friendly fart joke here". And, as usually happens on social media, you start to adapt your language so as to appear in on the jokes, which are largely the repetition of the language and, ultimately, your thinking adapts too, out of fear of the kind of domino row of associations that drives social media.
Someone like ADHD Alien is a good example, because she clearly either has done the research, or has a team. Her comics are very accurate, and she goes into details that not many other influencers do in terms of the behaviour and emotional states that the condition entails. Then there's the whole "alien" part. I even get the posts with the lists of explained behaviours, because a lot of them come across as kind of intentional or even defiant or spiteful, if you don't know why it happens. Like, if you're an extremely serious person with ambitions and projects, but then you're always flaking out because your brain just won't cooperate, people who wanted to work with you will undoubtedly and correctly judge you to be unreliable. But when the behaviour contrasts with your personality and values as a whole, it's worse than that: it can come across as spiteful, or even deliberately insulting, like it's specifically them you decided you didn't want to work with. In fact a symptom of ADHD is also to blow people's reactions out of proportion and see them as rejection of you as you're crap. But it's the overlay of promoting neurodiversity to fight against stigma that's the problem, because it implies it's all just illusion based on misunderstanding, and if anything it implies that, on top of everything, you're incapable of judging your own behaviour as crap when it actually is, because of "internalized ableism", which also undermines your ability to accept when you've actually achieved something good. It has this kind of neutralising effect on your own capacity to judge what you've done, and how people are treating you, that parallels the effects of ADHD itself, and turns you into this kind of empty vessel blown about by the assumption of correct or incorrect social conditioning, and then everything is reduced to feelings, or "ADHD emotions", where what feels good or bad entirely depends on perspective. It's basically shooting yourself in the foot and then apologising for it, or "empowerment" as it's known.
It's no surprise that most of these influencers are women, because it can take us literally decades to notice something is ever so slightly inconvenient to us and not just to everyone else. Like, if you were doing a research project and you just couldn't do the reading, even though you stared at all the pages trying to toilet-plunge the words into your brain, and then even where you did get some ideas, you couldn't get them together in a coherent fashion, for sure that's annoying to everyone but, mostly, you're the one who didn't get to read the book, or do the work, or get anywhere. That is bad on its own merits, for a start. And then, that alone is fuel for all kinds of thought spirals, before you even add in letting people down: the knowledge that you have this potential, but it's worthless unless it's actually put to use - every newborn baby has potential - and you can't put it to use, so what are you hear for? Then someone says shit like "you are enough" or "people should accept you for you", which is totally beside the point. So for a start, if you want to make things worse for someone with just about any mental health condition, think up some snappy self-help slogans that rhyme and leave them around where they can see when they're distressed (I saw this advice actually offered to someone with bipolar once - horrifying). Saying "You are enough" to someone with ADHD basically confirms their worst, most self-destructive thoughts. It also implies that nothing we can be involved in is more important than some kind of hobby that makes you feel like your true self and is interchangeable with something else that will fulfill the same function, and what more does a good girl need? And, really, fuck that.
I'm also often around people, in my family or at work, who clearly would do well to get help, but that's something that's hard to face, and they don't realize how rampant their shit is because they're used to it (been there). With ADHD, I noticed that I can still do a lot of things, at the price of great effort, with the correct crutch. If people have, say, a blindness to whole aspects of human behavior, or things they can never learn, I can imagine that's a lot harder to face, and I know a few, who are too old and right-wing to be into the whole neurodiversity thing, but act in a very similar way. In order to cope, they start to see their deficits as signs of their genius. Anyone who complains about their behavior just can't deal with someone who thinks differently. Or they project the symptoms that are hardest to face for them onto other people, all the while branding them as normies who don't understand. Which is basically neurodiversity. They also tend to be raging randroids, because being utterly individualist makes it hard to face personal deficits, but also it helps you not have to face them. Plus the approach implies that the "neurodiverse" are a community who understand each other and it's soothing to be around each other or, if not, we have a duty to be more understanding to each other, otherwise that's internalised ableism. I know for a fact I'm not a soothing presence. And the less soothing behaviours of my executively dysfunctional peers are among the least soothing to me.
Getting back to the neurodiversity movement on the internet, its branding or flavour is left-wing. But it's absolutely randroid to its core: it's a market logic based on absolute raging individualism and self-delusion, encouraging you to go it alone and fuck the consequences, in place of actual healthcare, in a world where the latter is harder and harder to come by. It also boils down or flattens out neurology and human relationships into emotions and vibes conditioned by invisible social forces: liking the colour pink is the same process as constantly losing your keys, or having intrusive thoughts. The flipside is that whether someone gets treated as a beautiful neurodiverse unicorn who needs to be accepted, or a Karen poltergeist deserving of death threats, really depends on what boils down to aristocratism, or whether you're Someone, with a Vibe. Plus, the way social media works, people who post aren't the end users or customers, but more like the fuel and raw material, so social media "narcissism" is really a total effacement of everything about yourself, besides a set of adjectives and nouns that constitute "your identity" but are even less tangible than what's in your passport, as your mental health conditions, along with every other characteristic that human beings might have, are harnessed to generate profits for Google and Twitter. We should be pissed. But we're too busy being grateful to feel seen, plus it's kind of hard to coordinate all being pissed at the same thing at once in these conditions.
I think a lot of it is down to the medium, as well. And it's not so much pop culture - it's the way people brand themselves on social media, especially the tik toks I've seen, like they even dress and act like a Cal Arts mad science kid (also I'm old AF so there's maybe that, but I feel like it's the lame shit from my generation or the one just after, rather than some new shit that's making me yell "get off my lawn").
I noticed the r/adhd subreddit is a lot less into the whole "neurodiversity" thing, even though there's some crap on there too. That's because on reddit, for all its flaws, having to self-brand isn't built into it. It's largely anonymous. No one can remember who was called Haunted_bacon or what they said. On twitter, tumblr, instagram, probably tik tok, if you get a diagnosis, there's virtually no way for you not to rebrand, especially if you go on there to connect with other people with the same diagnosis. You might call yourself something with your disability in it, or put it in your profile, so people know how to treat you. So, immediately, you're going to keep your brand a little bit more kawaii than what a neurological disability actually entails, because it's your identity now. Some as someone with Crohns doesn't want to smear bloody poop on their face and call it "contouring", it's going to be a lot of "TFW insert family-friendly fart joke here". And, as usually happens on social media, you start to adapt your language so as to appear in on the jokes, which are largely the repetition of the language and, ultimately, your thinking adapts too, out of fear of the kind of domino row of associations that drives social media.
Someone like ADHD Alien is a good example, because she clearly either has done the research, or has a team. Her comics are very accurate, and she goes into details that not many other influencers do in terms of the behaviour and emotional states that the condition entails. Then there's the whole "alien" part. I even get the posts with the lists of explained behaviours, because a lot of them come across as kind of intentional or even defiant or spiteful, if you don't know why it happens. Like, if you're an extremely serious person with ambitions and projects, but then you're always flaking out because your brain just won't cooperate, people who wanted to work with you will undoubtedly and correctly judge you to be unreliable. But when the behaviour contrasts with your personality and values as a whole, it's worse than that: it can come across as spiteful, or even deliberately insulting, like it's specifically them you decided you didn't want to work with. In fact a symptom of ADHD is also to blow people's reactions out of proportion and see them as rejection of you as you're crap. But it's the overlay of promoting neurodiversity to fight against stigma that's the problem, because it implies it's all just illusion based on misunderstanding, and if anything it implies that, on top of everything, you're incapable of judging your own behaviour as crap when it actually is, because of "internalized ableism", which also undermines your ability to accept when you've actually achieved something good. It has this kind of neutralising effect on your own capacity to judge what you've done, and how people are treating you, that parallels the effects of ADHD itself, and turns you into this kind of empty vessel blown about by the assumption of correct or incorrect social conditioning, and then everything is reduced to feelings, or "ADHD emotions", where what feels good or bad entirely depends on perspective. It's basically shooting yourself in the foot and then apologising for it, or "empowerment" as it's known.
It's no surprise that most of these influencers are women, because it can take us literally decades to notice something is ever so slightly inconvenient to us and not just to everyone else. Like, if you were doing a research project and you just couldn't do the reading, even though you stared at all the pages trying to toilet-plunge the words into your brain, and then even where you did get some ideas, you couldn't get them together in a coherent fashion, for sure that's annoying to everyone but, mostly, you're the one who didn't get to read the book, or do the work, or get anywhere. That is bad on its own merits, for a start. And then, that alone is fuel for all kinds of thought spirals, before you even add in letting people down: the knowledge that you have this potential, but it's worthless unless it's actually put to use - every newborn baby has potential - and you can't put it to use, so what are you hear for? Then someone says shit like "you are enough" or "people should accept you for you", which is totally beside the point. So for a start, if you want to make things worse for someone with just about any mental health condition, think up some snappy self-help slogans that rhyme and leave them around where they can see when they're distressed (I saw this advice actually offered to someone with bipolar once - horrifying). Saying "You are enough" to someone with ADHD basically confirms their worst, most self-destructive thoughts. It also implies that nothing we can be involved in is more important than some kind of hobby that makes you feel like your true self and is interchangeable with something else that will fulfill the same function, and what more does a good girl need? And, really, fuck that.
I'm also often around people, in my family or at work, who clearly would do well to get help, but that's something that's hard to face, and they don't realize how rampant their shit is because they're used to it (been there). With ADHD, I noticed that I can still do a lot of things, at the price of great effort, with the correct crutch. If people have, say, a blindness to whole aspects of human behavior, or things they can never learn, I can imagine that's a lot harder to face, and I know a few, who are too old and right-wing to be into the whole neurodiversity thing, but act in a very similar way. In order to cope, they start to see their deficits as signs of their genius. Anyone who complains about their behavior just can't deal with someone who thinks differently. Or they project the symptoms that are hardest to face for them onto other people, all the while branding them as normies who don't understand. Which is basically neurodiversity. They also tend to be raging randroids, because being utterly individualist makes it hard to face personal deficits, but also it helps you not have to face them. Plus the approach implies that the "neurodiverse" are a community who understand each other and it's soothing to be around each other or, if not, we have a duty to be more understanding to each other, otherwise that's internalised ableism. I know for a fact I'm not a soothing presence. And the less soothing behaviours of my executively dysfunctional peers are among the least soothing to me.
Getting back to the neurodiversity movement on the internet, its branding or flavour is left-wing. But it's absolutely randroid to its core: it's a market logic based on absolute raging individualism and self-delusion, encouraging you to go it alone and fuck the consequences, in place of actual healthcare, in a world where the latter is harder and harder to come by. It also boils down or flattens out neurology and human relationships into emotions and vibes conditioned by invisible social forces: liking the colour pink is the same process as constantly losing your keys, or having intrusive thoughts. The flipside is that whether someone gets treated as a beautiful neurodiverse unicorn who needs to be accepted, or a Karen poltergeist deserving of death threats, really depends on what boils down to aristocratism, or whether you're Someone, with a Vibe. Plus, the way social media works, people who post aren't the end users or customers, but more like the fuel and raw material, so social media "narcissism" is really a total effacement of everything about yourself, besides a set of adjectives and nouns that constitute "your identity" but are even less tangible than what's in your passport, as your mental health conditions, along with every other characteristic that human beings might have, are harnessed to generate profits for Google and Twitter. We should be pissed. But we're too busy being grateful to feel seen, plus it's kind of hard to coordinate all being pissed at the same thing at once in these conditions.