Folk. I don’t think I’m some clever smarty-pants and I don’t understand why I’m being talked to like I’m shitting on your mother’s corpse.

I also don’t understand how citing books that agree with and informed my position is evidence I’m making shit up. You seem determined to read me as a evil stupid troll.

I understand there’s no point in arguing with people hostile to you. But I genuinely do not understand. This is not me trolling or trying to bait or trick you.

Medical gatekeeping through diagnosis has a long history that you clearly are sympathetic to with your early acknowledgement of how institutionally these experts somehow keep misdiagnosing things. And I’m sure you’re also fully aware how entire medical diagnosis have been invented and uninvented for the purpose of persecution such as for hysterical women and blacks who ran away from slavery. I would argue we see that even today with how gender dysphoria diagnosis criteria has been used to gatekeep trans healthcare. This is not me being bad faith, and if you want me to dive deeper into this I can because it’s a huge topic.

I understand if you think psyches are doing good shit by being on demand well informed people to help people understand themselves. I agree with you!

But most diagnosis really is 15 minutes of questions that’s not a bad faith exaggeration. That’s literally what it is. And then they give their opinion. And it is an opinion. Different equally qualified person will give an entirely different opinion

I don’t know how to convince you I’m not some bad faith troll, and if that’s really what you think I am you would should stop replying. What I am is someone who has seen how the medical diagnosis model abuses people. Tells them, especially women, that they don’t know their own minds and experiences, and how it gatekeeps the poor who don’t get the luxury to shop around until some doctor tells them what they needed to hear.

I don’t think doctors should be ignored. But diagnosis is a deeply flawed system. It’s neither accessible nor proven more accurate than the alternatives. It can do good, and it does do good. But revering it as if it is a hard science is absurd. It’s not like getting a CAT scan for medical diagnosis. It is genuinely, just someone’s opinion which they write so insurance will pay for treatment. And it doesn’t claim to be more than that!

So why should someone who can’t afford it, will be abused and ignored by such a system be required to be legitimized by it? Why do they need that to get the care they need? Why should people have to do that when their symptoms are self evident? So you really think the risk of letting people know themselves based off an informed consent system, is worse than the reality of medical gatekeeping? Do you really think it’s killing fewer people than the alternative? What if they live somewhere where they isn’t an option? What if their family refuses to have them seen? Why add these barriers?

Why aren’t they allowed to be legitimate? Why aren’t they allowed to get care?

Do you actually have any evidence that gatekeeping mental illness behind diagnosis does more good than the harm?

Are people really still convincing themselves this is a 5D chess move.

After everything else, are we still doing that?

Roger that, see yah

I did not say to ignore them. I said they are not a required authority on the subject.

Having people who are informed about this stuff help people recognize this from a 3rd party perspective is good, and doctors can do that

I’m honestly not understanding what you’re trying to say here. But I guess that’s okay. I at least can pick up the condescension and contempt.

The process of diagnosis when it involves actual testing is legitimate. Which does include ADHD. Provided your comfortable gatekeeping it behind only people who can pay hundreds of dollars for neuropsyche testing.

But the process where it concerns anxiety, depression and bipolar? It’s not. These do not have any biomarkers in diagnosis, and psychiatrists are not actually experts at identifying this stuff by asking a handful of questions for 15 minutes. Their years of training doesn’t make them have some magical ability to identify a soup of random incoherent symptoms accurately, and they are not significantly more accurate than moderately well informed patients at identifying themselves. That’s why people are so commonly misdiagnosed. It’s literally just the person’s opinion. And you shop around for the right opinion. Then they actually diagnosis you with whatever is required to get the insurance to pay for the medicine. That’s what diagnosis actually is. It’s a paper to have insurance pay for medical care. And it is not science.

Some books on the subject if you want more authoritative sourcing:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4817669/

https://www.bps.org.uk/member-networks/division-clinical-psychology/power-threat-meaning-framework

I think we mostly agree, given you acknowledge misdiagnosis is rampant within psychiatry. Is it rather that you see the DSM itself as legitimate, and doctor are just misunderstanding it which causes misdiagnosis?

Nah I’m championing it. I’ve spent decades in this system and worked with people who do the diagnosing. Your position of reverence for the process of diagnosis or the authority of those doing diagnosis is not well founded. People who are too poor to get diagnosed are still needing help regardless of wheather an academic has weighted in on the subject. Diagnosis is an opinion, to get insurance to pay for healthcare. That’s all it is. I can recommend you some books on the subject if you actually care to learn more about the topic of how diagnosis actually works.

I think it’s fine what they are doing.

Look, some people are not switching. But if they aren’t going to switch, more negative PR for Reddit is the most they can accomplish. We can speculate all we want about the abstract value of negative PR vs engagement, but at the very least I support this over them being there and silent about disliking it.

The members of a site openly despising the site itself encourages migration too. Keep the attention on how lothesome things are and people are more likely to drift away slowly over time.

Diagnosis is being given a paper that makes dickbags believe your lived experience is legitimate.

You don’t, and shouldn’t, need a diagnosis to know you are neurodivergent.

It’s such a weird question because it presumes we agree there was a consensus goal.

FOR GLORY vs FOR FUN

He also voices Zagreus. Dude is absurdly talented

For the homophobic insult thing, just want to point out we still do it.

Stuff like saying “Trump is Putin’s bitch” or using pictures of them kissing to gross people out for instance. The insult purpose is to alternate you from Trump not from gay people, but it can also do that, and it taps into a knee jerk revulsion to effect those with that specific disgust response.

This isn’t about personally susceptiblity to bigotry. It’s about what the words are doing and achieving socially. There are different things that effect everyone on this level. The aggragate impact is what is relavent.

It sounds like you already have values that align you against him, which makes you not the target of the rhetoric. When people characterize others using ad hominem it’s usually with a subtext of alienating then from empathy.

Calling Musk a Boomer Karen buffoon for example, is much more effective than calling him a hateful fascist to people who aren’t politically opposed to him. Same with posting ugly pictures of him at the beach or calling him super divorced. All of these things are participating in stigmatizing things that should be fine. But they click with people brains and turn society against people sometimes more than accurate descriptors like calling him a fascist.

This same principle applies to the association with reptiles which is stigmatizing neurodivergence.

That doesn’t make all of them the same of course, because people have different priorities and make different judgements on what stigmatizing is too far in different situations. So your assessment of the language accepting a degree of stigma is accurate. Just also want to be clear its a messy layered decision that can’t be reduced to black and white in all context for all stigmatizing, without a lot of tradeoffs.

You’re also right that using rhetoric that throws certain groups under the bus also alienates those groups, and comes with downsides. It can even plant seeds that can evolve into actual bigotry in movements (a lot of the “boomer” talk for example has basically evolved into general ageism against the elderly, and Karen has transformed into something you can call any women who annoys you or is complaining about something).

So there’s a lot of good reason to push back on this stuff. But it can also be effective, particularly with fascists who loath feeling humiliated and form cult of personalities around being charismatic. But also in just turning neutral people into psudo allies. Sometimes. It’s complicated, is all I’m saying.

A weakness of inclusive leftist language is it removes most of the rhetorical shorthand insults that are useful for negative propaganda. What is rhetorically sticky is insulting people looks, behaviors, etc. But it also participates in the stigma of that stuff. Explaining the real reasons your political enemies are bad takes more work, which makes it lose out in comparison to your opponents who don’t have this limit.

There are ways to walk this line, but it’s very difficult. Stigmatizing language is the norm with stuff like “stupid” and “crazy” which are ableist. There often aren’t better alternatives that are equally effective rhetorically.

I don’t really have a point here, just acknowledging that this is an issue that arrives from a conflict that isn’t as easy to solve as it seems at first.