I couldn't find a thread for this but if this is a dupe just tell me and we'll let it fall down the board.

This is a serious question. Is it now 'cool' to have a disorder? (Bipolar disorder, Paranoid Schizophrenic, Depression, Social Anxiety issues etc)
I think where the idea sparked for me is from this little story.
An unamed girl from a town near mine was diagnosed with Biploar disorder a while back. At times she was really depressed and talked alot to her friend about self harm. The best friend at some point started to self harm (not seriously) and her friends were getting worried she was battling something. She told them she was very depressed and possibly had Bipolar. As her friends they obviously believed her and were trying to help her through it. One night, they all got very drunk and she admitted to being completely sane. Her response to her being questioned about the self harm, "I just thought it was cool".
(Ive told that story best as possible and how I remember it)
Leading on fromt that, and yes I will target Tumblr, it has become some sort of 'trend' to put up pictures of self harm and bony firgured bodies. People call it 'beautiful' and praise people who are anorexic/bulimic and who take 'nice' pictures of their cuts. I am in no way dissmissing some of these people haven't got anything 'wrong' with them, but some people (like my example) negatively promote self harm, fasting etc by praising it and then thinking its okay to do it to themselves.
Just think about in generations to come that it is going to be 'trendy' to show off unhealthy body scarring, to be dangerously underweight and to be depressed?
I just think its rather sad and I want to see what other people think about this touchy subject

I repeat, I in no way dissmiss other peoples problems.

I think people are overextending their reach and trying to view these people as special or of themselves as special for being friends with these people.

They're not special, you're not special for being with them in any way. They are people, just like everyone else, and should be treated as such, with the obvious disability assistance/care needed to those who need it, of course.

In some ways, it has become cool.
I'm seeing a growing amount of teenagers online professing to have disorders that they don't understand and talk about it like it's some fun sort of thing to have.
The root of it may lie in the desire to be 'unique' or 'different'. To seek some sort of online praise for being weird. To have an excuse for acting completely inappropriately.
That said
When I was 15 I was dealing with some problems in life. They weren't enormous problems, but they were distressing to me at the time. I didn't have to cut. I might not have start cutting if I wasn't in a friendship group that accepted it. In a way, I thought it was 'cool'.
Cultures such as these are insidious and poisonous. And on an anonymous medium like the internet - it's become even harder to stop it. There are communities for both anorexics and morbidly obese people to revel in their extreme unhealthiness and claim that they are merely preserving their identity.
People find solace in being part of something. Cutting culture has its own ideas, thoughts and social ins and outs.
I wonder if this 'trend' will last. I hope it doesn't. I also think it's rather sad. And the saddest part to me is that it's primarily confined to teens and young adults, who theoretically should have the most potential in life ahead of them, but are now wasting away in their little bubbles of delusional indulgence.
I can't judge them too much for all this. People are lonely and they'll do anything to be part of something.

It's because of the romantic view that has been thrust on the introvert.

What popular culture has been teaching us over the past 50 or so years is that smart, amazing and philosophical people often suffer from psychological problems. I'd hazard a guess that this is because there is no better plot complication in a film about a genius than his depression playing up. This only started the rolling ball, however; average people in a middle class society want to be the outcast, they want to be the special human that struggles through life. It has been ingrained all too easily into our lives that disorders = deep, or that dysfunctional people will end out in the best relationships or as the nicest friends. This is coupled with a simplistic view on these disorders, very few people without it actually knows what having chronic anxiety actually involves. Movies, because it's so hard to explain, keep depression to "look! Now he's sad and stupid", so people start thinking that depression is just a case of sadness. People start imitating these as, like I said before, a way to feel special and also as a harmless gesture of belief in self accomplishment.

It'll be pointless if we endlessly blamed the people, though; what we need to remove is the corrupting influences that made them think like that.

People want to be different or edgy or whatever and their misinformed views on disorders and the like fit that image.
Like Solace said, popular culture is just romanticizing disorders (Anyone in the Sherlock fandom would know about the 'high-functioning sociopath' trend that went around) and making it easier for people to give shitty self-diagnoses.
People who create popular works, be they writers or actors or musicians, need to do proper research on more sensitive content like depression or anxiety before they use it as a device. Some people can write or portray such things with great accuracy, others cannot.

There are 2 main factors.

1: People want to be the center of attention, that's really it. Saying you have some mental disorder makes you insta-popular, especially obscure ones that people know nothing about.

2: People want to know. People are curious. If a friend of yours suddenly says she has some disorder you don't know a lot about, you'd be at least a little curious what it is like. This is where the media comes in. People will always want attention from others, but because the media is focused on mental disorders, people are more curious about them. That will give the most attention, and so that is what people feign.

So, basically, I think people will act like it for attention, and people will give attention because they are curious. Not extremely complicated in my opinion.

Or it's some complicated psychology shit I know nothing about.

Yes.

You could look at it as a bid for identity. You need to look no further than tumblr to find people content with quickly and concisely explaining the entirety of their persona with a list of terms, like they're a conglomeration of characteristics and not actually unique people.

On some level I think people know that few will bother with long-winded biographies, and on another they know that sympathies and easy connections are a good hook. When you have a profile that reads "I'm an anorexic bipolar schizophrenic asexual demiromantic transgender girl with headmates and ADHD" all people have to do is highlight what they recognize and they can already act like they're familiar without going to the trouble of making acquaintances.

And that, from a certain perspective, can be unhealthy. Because as you said, it promotes identifying yourself with easily recognizable, diagnostic, umbrella terms that aren't really accurate at all. In fact some people will find a term that almost fits them or their ideal persona, and they will try to fit themselves into a square hole just so they can use it.

A little distracted? "That's almost ADD. Just gotta ramp up my attention deficit, right?"
Sometimes moody? "Basically bipolar! Just gotta be more extreme about it!"

It comes with a safeguard, too. Who except the most brash would question (ridicule!!) someone for their ailments? How dare they, after all - you can't help it if you've got every hard-to-accurately-define disorder in the book!

>>8 Yes, that is it exactly. It has been the same with common physical illnesses as well. Got a cold? Well, just say you have Strep Throat. You can't question someone's pain when they have Strep Throat, that just makes you a jerk.

So, I think it is more getting other people to feel sorry for what you've been 'going through'. This especially happens with depression. People who are feeling sad don't get enough attention, simply because everyone gets sad. They want everyone to know how much pain they feel, and when they say they are depressed and are cutting themselves and whatever they want to say, people suddenly feel sorry for them.

Except, now people know more about sicknesses, so questioning people who feign them isn't 'illegal' anymore. However, since a lot of people have little experience with mental disorders, they think they know exactly what they are talking about, and questioning a self diagnosis is socially illegal. Ironic, how we know so little about mental conditions as a society on the whole, yet the average person makes a significant self-diagnosis and everyone believes them, almost ritually.

Maybe I'm looking too much into it, but it seems like this is yet another tool for people to make their experiences known to others. People don't think 'you really know' what they are going through, so if they say they have depression when they are sad, they think people will care.

Something kind of related to this topic is Mental Awareness week that's coming up.

Now that week fucking annoys me. The last thing that 90% of anybody who has an ongoing psychiatric problem wants is people trying to feel good about themselves by raising a massive commotion about it for an entire week. When you have something such as depression, you don't want people in your face being bright and cheerful, you don't want people telling you to be happier and appreciate nature, you just want people to acknowledge that you have it and move on with life. What is doing this going to achieve? It's just some bullshit government initiative in an attempt to make themselves look aware and open to the public. They don't even do anything about mental awareness while the week is on, I have not seen a single person/organization making any special efforts to raise charity money during it. So basically what they are doing is making a big fuss of it for a short period of time which like I said earlier, is exactly what most people don't want.

Not to mention, why does it require a special week to be aware of mental illness? It's a very common thing, social anxiety affects nearly 13% of the population. Just about everybody is affected by a mental illness, either indirectly or directly, at some point in their lives, aren't we aware enough? It doesn't even teach us anything new about mental illness, it just reminds us brashly that they still exist.

A great South Park episode on this subject is 'Bloody Mary', in which Randy diagnoses himself with the "disease" of alcoholism, as an excuse to not quit by himself. I think that may be the scenario that a few people put themselves in. Modern day apathy leads them to feel unmotivated, but instead of fixing that they diagnose themselves with depression; like you guys previously said, they intensify their conditions, I think a lot of the time as an excuse for not wanting to fix mild First World problems.

>>10 As someone with a minor mental disorder, I would agree. It is exactly as you have said, some way to make not just the government feel good about societal 'advancements' but also people themselves. That makes it worse, I have people that think they can 'cure' me because they saw the mental health presentation.

I still think not enough people really know anything about mental health, but having this kind of generalized education week is almost worthless on its own. There needs to be a mandatory course to take. You don't use 'Awareness Weeks' to properly educate people, simple because they don't get properly educated that way.

>>10 i wasn't even aware that such a week existed.. well regardless i do agree with you that it really doesn't achieve much of anything. A lot of "awareness weeks", as i've noticed at least, don't really achieve much. i'm not saying i don't approve of the idea of supporting people who are gay/ lesbian, have mental disorders etc. i just feel like we don't need a week to just fuss over any of it. It's something everyone just needs to accept as part of the world they live in, and decide how they should feel about it existing.

Last year at school, a girl in my computer class was showing people videos of people suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.She laughed at it along with my fellow classmates. I found it to be so wrong and horrible to laugh at someone like that but when I confronted her about it, she just said "it's cool, people act stupid" and i'm not faking this, she actually said that. Later in the class I had mentioned to my friend, that my great aunt has paranoid schizophrenia and depression and the girl had overheard our conversation and had the audacity to ask if she could meet my great aunt. I understand being interested and fascinated by disorders because they are somewhat unknown territory but stating that they're cool and laughing at people with these disorders, is just horrible and inhumane.

When people joke about having disorders they really don't have, it really bothers me. Especially the typical "I'm so OCD lol!" .....I've had OCD for about four years (I refuse to seek help and so forth and let no one else know that I have such disorder,) regardless, it's been tough and definitely not "cool" and when people joke about it; it really hurts me because they have no idea how hard it really is.
I also have some sort of personality disorder, split personalities...it's kind of hard to miss when there are a bunch of opinions swirling around in your pre-conscience and parts of your memories don't add up. One part of me is a psychopath and although before I'd never tell anyone about such an aspect of me (the last place I want to end up is a psych ward....I have dreams and that will get in my way,) I have started to tell a few of my anime-loving friends. The term "yandere" has had a lot of hype and simply naming myself makes me feel a little bit better, instead of being judged as a "crazy b*tch" they consider it rather interesting and even "cool" because they have an insight as to what the term really means.
What I'm trying to say is although there are many calling themselves "psycho, OCD, etc," some of those are speaking the truth, most usually don't speak up at all, but maybe just maybe all the hype is lessening how society views these disorders. If we all could learn more about them, we could understand them and be less judgemental. So just be careful on who you call a "liar", some people even call me that; but I'm only speaking the truth I know about myself.

>>14 It's assumed that a lot of people who claim to have disorders on the internet are liars because they often make bad self-diagnoses and have very poor reasoning behind it/are making mountains out of molehills. As far as I'm concerned, unless a doctor or psychiatrist (someone with legitimate knowledge is what I'm getting at) diagnoses you then you're probably wrong. Not to say that psychiatrists and doctors can't give an incorrect diagnosis; they're just more likely to be correct.

Yeah, I've found a decent 90% miss ratio with people who say they have split personality disorder.

It's not "cool" to have a disorder or 20 of them. I may not have one (or just haven't noticed or been tested XP) but I have an acquaintance who claims to be somewhat dyslexic, OCD, and ADD. She cuts herself and says, "Oh, I'm gonna commit suicide!" and never does. My point being, she's an attention whore. Although she says all of this stuff, I haven't found any proof of her being like this (except for the cutting since it's hard to miss). So yeah. Most of the people who are doing this stuff is trying to grab attention. They get tiresome very quickly... >_>

I really hope I don't offend anyone for my comment. It's just my personal option and experience. So I'm sorry if I do. QAQ

>>13
Aww that's terrible :( I hope they learn about just how horrible they were being one day.

>>14
It's good to know things about yourself. If what you experience affects your quality of life, then it's also good to consult a specialist.
We don't like it when undiagnosed people use these terms to describe themselves, no matter how much they believe it about themselves, because as Blinking says, they're usually wrong, exaggerating or over-thinking.
Every human being has lots of little inconsistencies and weird things in their thoughts and subconscious, but this doesn't mean they have a mental disorder.
That said, understanding people who are dealing with mental issues is incredibly important. I agree that we could all do with a dose of being less judgemental.

There can be only one.

62756D70

>>18

How bad does it have to be to be depression rather than being sad? Where is the line drawn between having OCD and just 'being anal'? Who decides what constitutes an 'official' illness rather than just experiencing pain?

>>19 There are very clear differences between full psychological illnesses and just feeling like x or x.

Depression physically affects both your life and body to the point where it's difficult to function daily and sometimes doesn't even go back to any specific trigger. It's often something you can't put your finger on until after you've been through it. However, it does depend on the person, and some people will stay on the border of it for most of their life. My mom went through years of depression where I almost had to pick her up off the couch to get her to move. She stopped going everywhere. Even just getting necessities at the store- no, even walking out to start the car was more than she could do without freaking out. And although each person has their own depression when it comes around, you can see a clear difference between being 'sad' and being truly and honestly depressed. If you can still have casual conversations with people you know and attend school regularly, you're probably not depressed (but should get it checked out if you're honestly considering suicide).

When you're OCD, you physically cannot concentrate when something is out of place or if you forgot to do something your OCD is centered around. You can't function until you do it and make sure everything is right. It is a repetitive action or thought that you're stuck with and have absolutely no way to shake off. You're often distracted by it to the point where you can barely hold a conversation, and some people even get physically ill. Some forms of OCD are continuously present and keep you from thinking in a regular manner. I've been prone to OCD through my childhood and went through a few forms of it, the most frustrating one being where I had to spell out every single letter and piece of punctuation in my head before I could say anything, and if I wasn't sure how to spell it, I couldn't feel comfortable saying it. I also went through a phase of it where I had to find relations with every single number I saw; if it was 12:03 on the clock, I would think about how those numbers are related and make an equation with them, such as 1+2+0=3, and it actually messed with my emotions a lot when I couldn't find a way to relate the numbers. It got to the point where I didn't even want to go to math class because I physically could not think of anything else; the same happened with the spelling thing - I didn't want to talk to anybody. That is OCD (though I never knew what it was until recently). Making sure the car door is closed or that the oven is off, however, is not obsessive compulsive. Organizing your paperwork is not it.

If it's not getting in the way of your life, it's probably not any mental condition.

On the note of a physical illness, it's exactly what it is. How do you know if it's a bruise or if it's broken? There's a clear difference in the level of pain. How do you know if it's a cramp or an ovarian cist? There's usually a very clear difference, again. Sometimes you may not know the difference because you haven't experienced one or the other, but that doesn't mean it's okay to just pick whichever one you think sounds more cool to go tell everyone you have; rather, that's the time that you go to someone who knows what they're talking about and ask for their professional opinion.

>>19 >>20 Barabi summed up depression and OCD pretty well, but let me talk about pain for a second.
Pain is a symptom of illness. Pain on it's own is not an illness, because pain is merely the sensation we feel when the body is under stress. A disease is usually defined as something abnormal happening in or to the body, and the pain we feel is just our body's way of letting us know that weird shit is happening.
Nowadays, illnesses are defined by specific diagnostic criteria based on collected data and known symptoms/causes. Doctors pair up your symptoms, examine other factors, and decide that the evidence points to whatever disorder is applicable. So I guess medical practitioners are the people who decide what is and is not an illness, but their decisions are back up with real information.
(going off-topic so I'll shut up now)

I don't find faking disorders cool or even acceptable. I was diagnosed with depression, eating problems, social anxiety and self hate, which was hard at the psychiatric discussion with my doctors (and my mom cried). I had a friend who was faking being a bipolar and found it funny to push me close to people and make me panic. She also made my first best friend avoid me, because I was ''needy bitch''. We broke our relationship when no one could go with her shopping, but never broke with my best friend.
Being anxious is not being shy or cute, and I hate when these people use it like that. Depression is not ''sometimes i feel sad'', it is when you just can't stop being sad for no reason. Eating disorder is not a healthy diet, it is making your body go extreme and hurt yourself (I had bulimia, I still have problems with it).
It should be explained to people better. I would recommend when someone speaks about it and fakes it, go to them and explain what it actually is. Trends can be destroyed if they are explained well.

I think television dramas has a lot to do with the way people view disorders these days.
It's trendy and hip to be unique and special.

Fuck.
People disgust me.

It has become apparent that it has. People, more so teenagers, feel the desire to be unique.

The internet allows any symptoms to be readily available to anyone.
Manifestation begins and roles are played.

As someone who has been admitted to psychiatric hospitalization, I've gotten a good glimpse of it.

There are, though, cases were the disorder is present and the person still feels as though it makes them superior, different.
Different is usually viewed bad in majority, but the growing use of faking disorders has made it so it's accepted and looked up upon.

Disgusting.

Normal people claiming to have a disorder isn't "cool" so much as it is validation.
People don't want to admit weakness when it's entirely their own fault, but being able to say that it's because of a disorder allows them to blame something else.

Now, honestly I don't even care that normal people claim to have things that they don't. That alone doesn't matter at all. People who actually have many of these claimed disorders don't just live with it. People who are REALLY depressed often seek and receive help. People who are ADHD get medication. People with suicidal thoughts don't talk about it like it's a freaking accomplishment.

What bothers me is that so many normal people try to claim that they have a disorder, then expect that it's okay to live like an ass and do nothing about it. People with their disorders don't use them as an excuse, neither can anyone else.

>>25 >>23 There are so many better ways to be unique than to fake a disorder or flaunt one you have :c The problem is that the media makes them out to be things only a genius can do. With the kid website designers / etc. they show on the news every now and again, the media jumps right on that like, "Such skill, very mature, wow! One in a million kid!" when it could be (mostly) anyone if they put a bit of effort in. But no. They think they have to be born a genius to do anything decent with their lives before 18 and decide to pull shit like this to make themselves stand out instead of trying to be successful or displaying any skills they have.

/rambles

>>20

This still isn't clear to me.

You've outlined a case where a person 'cannot function', however this varies greatly from person to person.

Not only is 'non-functionality' extremely subjective, but it varies so greatly from person to person. It is essentially the point where whatever mental pain you are feeling is too much for you to bear, however that is obviously hugely different for everybody. Two people could go through the exact same level of mental pain and one could be unable to move or do basic tasks while the other could handle it just fine. Do you call the initial problem depression based on its intensity, or do you call the result of said problem depression based on its intensity?

It's like objects of varying mass: giving each object the same amount of energy will result in totally different speeds. Different people can handle different inputs differently, some very well while other not so much. Whether you base a diagnosis on the problem or the result, it depends almost entirely on the person, which is why I fail to see the benefit of comparing any two cases.

In fact, I fail to see the benefit of diagnosing any person with any mental problem at all. If you look at their individual symptoms, figure out their problem, and solve their individual problem, what benefit does looking at other cases bring about other than saving time coming up with a treatment?

And again, where is the line drawn? At what point does a person become non-functioning as opposed to everyday tasks becoming harder? Is there really an answer to that question, or is it simply a matter of opinion?

I think it is sad to see people using serious mental conditions as a means to justify their pain or experiences. However, it is equally sad seeing so-called mental health experts determining people obviously don't have an 'actual' mental condition, because the pain they are going through isn't bad enough.

>>27 Barabi, the amount of respect I have for you is through the roof.

/justthoughtyoushouldknow

>>27 They're actually doing the opposite of what they intended.
Only making themselves more classifiable.

>>28 A mental disorder isn't just "mental". It's not something that can be easily changed by altering the circumstances around you. It's something that physically affects your body and mind. I didn't say that you have to be non-functioning - it just affects the way you function or your functionality in one way or another.

Yes, it is subjective, to a degree. I can handle a lot more emotional pain than most people without getting depressed. Thus, I would not have depression in the same circumstances that someone else may have it. Just because I would survive alright in their shoes doesn't mean they aren't depressed and vice-versa. You can't base it on the amount of "pain" they're feeling per se but rather how affected they are by that pain because everyone's psyches are different.

Yes, they should be diagnosed because there is a HUGE difference between being sad and depressed. It's a disorder - a legitimate illness. Sometimes, depression is even caused by changes in your hormones or other bodily problems, as are many other mental conditions. It may be a "mental condition", but it's a physical problem. That physical problem may have had a mental trigger, but it's more than just something you can shake off the way you seem to think. Therapy could help it, yes. For many people, though, they need to take medications for these problems, and those medications would never exist if people said, "Oh, just watch them for a while and do stuff to make them feel better." No, that's not treating a disorder at all, and it's ridiculous that you think they can simply be fixed by that. There are many people out there facing the same problems, and by studying these disorders, we've come to realize that they often literally are the same problems. It's not just people exhibiting the same symptoms, Inu.

>>29 I love you too o:
>>30 Yep :I

>>31

I don't think you can just shake off mental disorders. I have personal experience with these sorts of things and I didn't mean to imply that at all. Those problems always start in the brain, and you have to do more than ignore or suppress the symptom to solve the problem. I'm not sure what I said to suggest otherwise.

I don't really get what you mean when you say medications would have never existed if scientists didn't watch patients and do things to make them feel better. I didn't mean that you should just give them ice cream to make them feel better, but that you should observe each individual's symptoms and determine the problem from that. I realize now this process takes many years to complete, however it doesn't really change my opinion of it.

I was prescribed ADHD medication when I was much younger, because I had trouble focusing in class. My parents declined it, because through research they had found data that indicated that particular medicine increased depression and suicide rates in children that took it. It works for some, maybe even most people, but it causes huge problems in others, hence my hesitation to mold symptoms to a common problem.

When you say watching people and do things to make them feel better is not the solution, that is essentially what medication is. I have yet to meet a person with bi-polar disorder that had a brain surgery or other permanent fix; most people I've met take medication daily and simply suppress the symptoms, and that goes for most mental disorders I've personally experienced.

I got a little confused when I read your opinion on how to define depression. You said it can't be based on what you feel, but how you react, which makes sense given that different people can withstand different amounts of pain. However, you then say in your last sentence that depression is not people exhibiting the same symptoms, which means people that can't take very much and end up with the same symptoms as people with depression from much less pain aren't in the same category. I don't really know what you think about that.

You also said there is a huge difference between being sad and depressed, but I still don't know what that difference is. It can't be when your mental pain starts to affect you physically, because almost every person in the world has mental pain that affects them in some way. It has to be the degree to which you are affected, but who decides when the effects are great enough to be labelled depression?

Again, I realize through personal experience that the mental conditions we are talking about (and others are feigning) are serious and are not only mental problems. The mental issues are simply manifestations of an already existing problem, most likely inside the brain. However, I just can't accept the incredibly vague definitions of depression I've been told over the years. Not having a clear definition is what causes this mess in the first place.

I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder myself and let me tell you it makes life difficult I use to be friends with a girl who would tell people she had bipolar and then she'd have them pity her when she would tell them about all the meds should takes when in reality it was my meds.she stole my illness because she thought it was cool. . Also I have noted cutting is a trend in my high school. So I suppose to some it is cool to be sick but to those that actually live with it it really isn't.