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[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

Here is a great video by Dr. Lucy Foulkes, an academic psychologist at Oxford University:

Here is the transcript:

Search for "high-functioning anxiety" on TikTok, and look what happens:

More than 10,000 videos with millions of young viewers.

Many are made by professional clinicians, and they mean well.

But here’s the thing: high-functioning anxiety isn’t a medical diagnosis. It’s a hashtag.

Over the last decade, there has been this massive cultural shift in how we talk about our psychology and our feelings.

Even Burger King cares about your mental health.


Awareness

Awareness is good. It teaches us to talk about our feelings. And it combats harmful stigma.

But all this awareness is not reducing rates of mental health problems. What it is doing is convincing some teenagers that they have a mental illness when they don’t.

Mental illness among teens is rising. Teenage anxiety rates increased 27 percent, and depression rose 24 percent. And that was in the three years before the pandemic.

Teenagers today have lots of reasons to feel anxious and depressed. And some are actually unwell. This is a really difficult argument to make. I don’t want to unintentionally dismiss anyone who is suffering or having difficulty. But I’ve been researching this area for five years. And what I think is happening is a cycle that can be broken down into three stages:


Stage 1 of the Feedback Loop -- Increased Awareness

First, the increased awareness: it’s well-intentioned but not always reliable.

“Are you hurting? If the answer is yes, you have trauma.”

A popular type of video on TikTok is five things you might not realize were a mental disorder. And it’s really generic things, like biting your nails, or fidgeting, or being a people-pleaser.


Stage 2 of the Feedback Loop -- Overinterpretation

All this awareness oversimplifies and maybe even popularizes mental disorders. This leads to the second stage, a phenomenon I call overinterpretation.

More young people are now self-diagnosing based on this flood of information and interpreting normal daily struggles as a mental illness.

So it’s not surprising that the language they’re now reaching for is the language of mental disorder because that’s the language that adults have encouraged them to use. Overinterpretation can then become a self-fulfilling prophecy, the third stage of the cycle.


Stage 3 of the Feedback Loop -- The Nocebo Effect

If you think you have anxiety, you avoid uncomfortable situations. Ironically, this makes you more anxious in the long term. If you think you have depression, every low mood becomes evidence that you have a mental disorder, so you become more depressed. It’s kind of like a reverse placebo. We call it the nocebo effect. And this then ends up feeding back into the loop of increased mental health awareness efforts. And that triggers the cycle to start all over again.


What does all this mean?

A lot of young people are left overly distressed. Meanwhile, legitimate mental disorders are ironically taken less seriously. If everyone is ill, no one is. I’m not saying we should stop talking about mental health. No one should suffer in silence. But we need to be smarter about how we talk about it and not label all our feelings with psychiatric terminology.

What do you think?


I've said this before but it's worth saying again and again: Do not self-diagnose. Never diagnose anyone at all unless you are a doctor and they are your formal patient.

Even if you are a psychiatrist or psychologist, never diagnose your romantic partner, close friend, roommate, or family member.

Finally, please don't support or engage with any kind of "mental health awareness" campaigns or anything that even remotely promotes self-diagnosis or promotes the diagnosis of one's own romantic partner, family member, roommate, or close friend with mental disease or mental disorder or any oversimplifying or dehumanizing label. Even by just liking a post or commenting on it, you are increasing engagement and helping spread it, which will kill people, especially young impressionable children who are most susceptible to the Nocebo effect, self-fulfilling prophecies, and the Pygmalion effect.

Even just giving a view to a video or meme increases its engagement stats and reinforces it to the algorithm, causing more people to see, and causing to further memetically reproduce and be deemed fit in the unavoidable game of memetic evolution and survival of the fittest. You help determine what is fittest and what survives, thrives, spreads, and reproduces. Just viewing a viewing a post, let alone liking or commenting, is enough to help spread it and beat the competition.

To do your part, you might even need to completely get off addictive dangerous services like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram with their dangerous for-profit algorithms designed to be addictive, divisive, and overly sensationalist rather than helpful, truthful, and nuanced. To do your part, you may need to put your extremely valuable time and attention into other websites with less addictive algorithms and less addictive content organization methods.

Whether it's casinos or social media algorithms: If they were healthy, they wouldn't need to be purposely made to be addictive. You are probably better off spending money to pull a lever on a slot machine at the casino than to be on an app like TikTok for the same amount of time, but either way you'll get that addictive dopamine rush as your brain turns to mush and the inertia of your addiction increases leaving you more inert and trapped than ever.

Careful where you choose to go and where you choose to spend your very valuable and very limited time.



With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

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[Sushan]

I think that Foulkes makes some very important points about the possible downsides of being highly vigilant. It is difficult because, on the one hand, when talking about mental health, it is crucial that people feel comfortable asking for help when they need it. Nonetheless, it might become difficult to distinguish between legitimate mental health issues and commonplace feelings when everyone starts diagnosing themselves after seeing a TikTok video. It’s not hard to imagine that constantly telling teens that feeling anxious means they have a disorder can make them more anxious in the long run. We all go through stress, and that’s normal—it doesn’t always need a clinical label.