Post-traumatic stress disorder – a diagnosis I have had in the past – is another one of those conditions people like to claim isn’t real.
Oh. Rilly?
Is “overdiagnosis” the new culture-war buzzword of choice? I had been wondering this for a while, and then Wes Streeting claimed on Sunday that there is an “overdiagnosis” of some mental health conditions. Now I am certain it is.
I first noticed the term being used in relation to anxiety and depression, then attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and most recently autism. Two books on overdiagnosis, Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis and Searching for Normal by Sami Timimi, have garnered attention across the media, adding fuel to a new fire that we might characterise as “Bloody everyone has a label these days, don’t they?”.
This is not to say that these authors and medical professionals don’t have valid points, or that the medicalisation of societal issues isn’t of concern. We all know how “therapy speak” has leached into public discourse, how teens are now throwing around terms such as “trauma response” and “stimming” – lifted from earnest TikToks – with a confidence that must seem startling to some of their elders, who grew up with the idea that you only went to a shrink or a counsellor if there was something “wrong” with you, or you were about to get divorced.
As the lady once shouted at me in outrage, she’s a national columnist at The Guardian, doncha’ know? Thoroughly middle class bint on a good whack and with media fame!
PTSD?
She suffers from TND. (Tedious narcissist disorder.)
I don’t doubt that she’s had a *diagnosis*. What I do doubt, though….
To be fair, if I looked in the mirror of a morning and saw what appeared to be an alien staring back at me, I’d probably have PTSD for the rest of the day.
George Carlin how the left distort the language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM
PTSD? I agree with BF. Try reaching your late ’60s, looking in the mirror, and seeing a gargoyle newly fallen from York Minster leering back at you.
Addolff, of course the left distort language. They live in a world of narrative based on What Ought. As Hume pointed out, this has no logical connection with What Is. A bit of empirical investigation always reveals this, that they are in fact talking bollocks.
Thus the burning need for euphemism to reframe the argument and obscure its disconnection with objective, evidence-based reality. The split is not between Left and Right. It’s between those searching for (self-justifying) meaning in narrative, and those empirically trying to understand how the world works in order to live successfully within it.
It is the second kind of person who has been responsible for all of those scientific and technological breakthroughs that have produced vaccines, modern sanitation, decimated infant mortality, reduced absolute poverty to its smallest proportion of the human population ever, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
But the second kind of person is very much in the minority and always will be. This is the Human Condition.
More communications from Biba, Kensington Church Street, 1971. Isn’t time dilation a wonderful thing?
So veterans of the culture war can suffer PTSD?
It’s easy to make fun of Rhianna, but what if the Mummyblogger has a point? This was in the Guardian the other day:
My adult daughter wants to turn herself back into a teenager
Distorted external referencing can keep her paralysed, because she’s trying to live up to an imagined ideal
The question My daughter is now 34 years old, but she wants to be a teenager again, because she feels that she missed out on the fun she should have had back then. She hates the way she looks, because she thinks she looks older than 16. She wants cosmetic surgery and orthodontics to look younger.
She wants to experience university life as a fresher again and have young fun, but she also doesn’t want to as she feels too old. She wants to earn and have independence, but also fears it. She relies on her mother and me and is not interested in getting a job. She never goes out and has no friends. She has no interests and spends most of her time comparing herself with teenage social-media idols.
My daughter says if she can’t go back to being a teenager, then she wants to die. It is very easy to say the wrong thing. Then she has frightening fits of raging and screaming.
She has tried both medication and therapy, but nothing worked for her. What can we do?
Yes, also tempting to laugh. But imagine if you were an elderly parent with a 34 year old daughter who is severely mentally ill and not being treated effectively? In Victorian days she’d be in Bedlam, or locked up in an abandoned wing of the house. It’s 2025 so she’s on Tik Tok and suicide baiting her terrified Mum and Dad. I believe the Japs call these people Hikikomori.
We have more diagnoses of mentals than ever, but less treatment. People as mentally ill as this woman is aren’t going to get better in group therapy or with a prescription for Sertraline. She needs a long, restful stay at the funny farm with plenty of the good calming drugs. Only some genius closed down all the happy homes, where life is beautiful all the time. So now lunatics get to stay in your house instead, even when they’re begging for help.
If we treated mental illness seriously, the first thing we’d do is abolish Care in the Community, no? There’s a warm place in the afterlife for people who came up with the brilliant idea of abandoning crazy people to their madness.
“There’s a warm place in the afterlife for people who came up with the brilliant idea of abandoning crazy people to their madness.” There’s no doubt of the source: it was the Californian Left in the sixties and seventies.
In my lifetime it’s a rare bad idea that hasn’t started in California. Yet for the early part of my life California was a blessed spot in terms of climate, landscape, prosperity, and so on.
Steve’s God certainly has a capricious sense of humour.
PiP, Californians live in the perfect environment. Endless beautiful weather; glorious countryside; the living is easy, no winter to deal with. So they need to invent shit to be dissatisfied with. Aussies have a similar but less acute problem.
PiP – I wonder if it wasn’t the rarified jenkem of a tragically overconfident generation who were damn sure all those fences Mr Chesterton put up were completely unnecessary and possibly racist?
The reflexive antiauthoritarianism of fools and children. 70’s culture was lousy with stories implying that mental hospitals and orphanages were abusive, and no doubt many were. But they weren’t abusive by design – crazy people do need their pills and rubber rooms and no, they’re not less likely to be abused when we refuse to treat them. No, Nurse Ratched is not representative of mental health professionals. No, orphanages weren’t a monstrous plot by Miss Hannigans.
But turn on your TeeVee and be transported to a parallel universe where residential mental health patients are smarter and saner than the people charged with making sure they don’t hang themselves, and where orphanages are a conspiracy against ginger haired moppets whose only recourse is to break out into song. They were so keen on sticking it to The Man they ignored the fate of all the people The Man was protecting.
This reminds me of a conversation I had in a pub yesterday. Bloke, short but I wouldn’t quite say midget, came up and asked me for a light. He had to make the motions so I got the idea because it was hard for him to speak clearly. We managed though.
Point being, he was obviously impaired (after a day’ s drinking so was I quite frankly) but he wasn’t fucking whinging about it.Just having a conversatkon
People who write newspaper articles about how bad their life is can go fuck themselves.
“I don’t have the brain of Einstein, the speed of Usain Bolt and the looks of Cary Grant! It’s so unfair! It’s so unequal!”
I would ignore Miss Rhiannon, I suspect she either has a genuine psychological disorder and really believes she is the object of constant oppression from all directions, or she’s a charlatan who gets paid to churn out grievance porn for the Graun.
A quick flick through her output will show that every single week she find a new angle about how every aspect of her being is oppressed in some way, she is variously oppressed for being Welsh, for being a woman, for being a parent, for living wherever she is living at the time… the Graun must have her on 24/7 suicide watch!
I think it would be instructive to find out how many people would be diagnosed with various mental conditions, if the related financial benefits were removed.
It’s sad to see how rare it is that people feel ashamed to bilk the benefits sytem out of as much money as possible at other peoples expense. No doubt related to our descent into a third world / low trust society.
Ah, Welsh! I thought I saw an ovine tendency in her face.
The next time you encounter a newly diagnosed ADHD character ask if they know its impact on life expectancy.
It knocks 7 years off for men and almost 8 for women. The condition doesn’t kill you, it’s the dodgy decision making, risky sex, drink and drugs, driving when you really, really, shouldn’t etc that does.
How well the person recognises that behaviour in their own life should tell you a great deal about their ADHD label.
Perhaps there was a time when declaring oneself to be “a national columnist at The Guardian” would have engendered respect, but these days we know it just means a credentialed member of the useless class.
Fucks given – 0
What about the left-handed?
I eventually Googled a look at her.
Oh dearie me no. Blimey. They say any port in a storm but it would have to be a Force 12 before I considered that port. For a millisecond. And then decided drowning would be more pleasurable.
AndrewZ: On the radio this morning I heard somebody describing herself as “I’m a teacher by trade”.
TRADE????? My grandparents would be turning in their graves. They’d “made it” by becoming teachers as they’d entered a valued PROFESSION. Not a fucking *trade*.
“I don’t have the brain of Einstein, the speed of Usain Bolt and the looks of Cary Grant! It’s so unfair! It’s so unequal!”
I share your distress, Norman!!!
1. No one is claiming PTSD doesn’t exist.
2. That it exists doesn’t mean that ‘overdiagnosing’ isn’t real.
3. That it exists doesn’t mean she had PTSD.
Regarding care in the community, I can’t help feeling that if we brought back asylums diagnosis rates would drop significantly.