This is spot on. My daughters have pretended to have Tourette’s and have self diagnosed themselves with ADHD, autism, and borderline personality disorder. They have also engaged in self harm, eating disorders, and trans identities. All because of social media. If you deny that they actually have autism, for instance, they say the guidance for diagnosis is flawed. They believe they can self diagnose and no one else is right, even a professional.
This is so true. My 17 year old daughter is one of these kids. Her freshman year of high school, almost overnight she went from a happy, healthy girl who had friends, a variety of interests, and did well in school and spent little time on computers, and was a little socially awkward and immature, to being trans identified, tumblr obsessed, and self diagnosed with autism, ADHD, dissociative identity disorder, anxiety, and depression. She is barely passing her classes and I’m not sure she’ll graduate. She has no other activities - all her interests are solitary. She now has a few friends but went two years with none (except online). Letting her on social media was the worst mistake I ever made.
I think what motivates these kids is a deep fear of criticism. They’ve grown up in an environment where everything bad that happens has to be blamed on someone. And that someone is never presented in a nuanced way, a person who made mistakes or used poorly chosen words but also has good points and a capacity to learn. If someone is accused of racism, or sexism, or profiting at the expense of others, they are vilified, with no possibility of redemption. This is what happened to my kid. She was bullied and criticized at her high school for being “privileged” - too white, to “cis-het”, too financially well-off. All of this is a shield against criticism. Kids are looking for explanations that place them in a protected category, that say that it’s not their fault that they’re socially awkward or lack confidence or aren’t the best at everything - it’s because they have a condition!
My observation is that sensitivity and a tendency toward self-blame are the core characteristics of kids who’ve fallen into this mess.
We need to fight the urge to find yet someone else to blame for this and promote a mindset of understanding, forgiveness, and accepting alternative opinions and viewpoints.
My daughter has a developmental disability, and even at 30 years old, finds herself caught up in these trends. She has self-diagnosed many neuroatypical conditions based on shared "diagnoses" on such platforms as Spoon, Discord, and others where teens and adults mix. She'll tell me about her aphasia, or synesthasia, or other condition, which she had never exhibited until she joined these forums. They're rife with sharing. She has never self-identified as trans, or non-binary, however she did tell me that she came out as "Pansexual" to her Spoon cohort, and described the following lovebombing. She had identified as bisexual for many years, and I asked her what the difference is. She treated me like I had rained on a very big parade for her.
The social aspects of the gender phenomenon cannot be overstated, which is why it was so disappointing that Abigail Shrier's book <i>Irreversible Damage</i> was dismissed by medical skeptics. ROGD is credible and is observable.
IMO the single most important and feasible and effective thing concerned, tuned-in, responsible parents can do is deny access to smart phones and tablets to their children at least until they reach the age of 18. And carefully monitor computer usage going so far as to implement parental controls.
I know most parents I just described won't do that, especially not after their children are in high school, for fear of severe backlash. But I contend that worry may be over-exaggerated. Children raised with that kind of parenting probably won't resort to unreasoned backlash. Certainly, some will, but many won't because they haven't been constantly exposed to the worst that social media has to offer, and they feel safe and secure in their parent's care.
Thank you for your thoughtful essay. Everybody wants to belong. Everybody wants to be at least a little special. While exacerbated by social media, this is an extension of behaviors we see in a variety of people including adults. For instance, my father got a lot of attention for being an enthusiastic hypochondriac. Many middle-aged adults (of both sexes) wax prolific about every ailment they have, or think they have. Complaining — and finding others who share your complaints — is an easy way for an adolescent to find an identity. It’s much easier to be “sick” than actually accomplish something for which you might gain attention and notoriety. As a Biological Psychologist, I agree with you that research will be helpful. However, it will take a broad cultural shift to eliminate this problem. Quite frankly, until adults stop complaining all the time and talking about how bad things are, there will be little incentive for our children to do otherwise. Thanks again for the essay, Frederick
Being a parent is always a challenge - particularly in today’s insane age of nutty ideas going viral on TikTok, promoted on the news, and apps like BeReal putting silly spins on the same harmful algorithms to try to placate parents into letting kids on it even though it induces addiction via algorithm like all the rest. It’s rare to look in the mirror and think “yes, I got this right,” as a parent, but on our adamant ban of big social media we can actually say that. I even deleted my own social media a few years ago when my daughter started begging for TikTok and that is a firm no for us - I find do as I do easier to enforce as a parent than do as I say. It helps our kids go to a top ranked conservative private Christian school. Even though it’s large at 1,250 kids, we aren’t alone in blocking them from social media and they aren’t punished socially for it.
I do take issue with “while some social media algorithms act to facilitate the spread of good ideas and accurate information, others can fuel the spread of harmful misinformation and seed dangerous social contagions.”......... it’s never good for algorithms to manipulate human understanding of the world in mass. The Twitter files have shown big tech spread a lot of false narratives at the behest of the woke mobs, self-proclaimed credentialed by incurious “expert” class, and permanent DC. And they did this suppressing demonstrably true information. I have yet to see examples of big tech ensuring vitality of “good” things via algorithmic spread. Computer techies aren’t very good at being arbiters of truth or goodness and AI doesn’t learn human emotions or morality. We should really stop pretending flawed humans can code computer programs to be better than actual humans. So far, all evidence proves the contrary.
This isn't just a phenomenon with children, particularly as it relates to autism. Claiming to have autism adds another intersectional Brownie point to your victimhood resume and is particularly convenient because you can act completely normally but still claim those points because Autism doesn't actually exist in the way that people thing it does.
My six-year-old son has been diagnosed with Autism but what that actually means is that he didn't breath properly for the first seven minutes of his life and spent his first five days in the NICU and suffered a hypoxic brain injury as a result.
His Autism diagnosis is a legal and bureaucratic diagnosis that means insurance has to pay for the therapy he needs, but it has no medical application. The fact you are reading this and now know this about my son tells you nothing. He may have never spoken in his life and never showed any emotion. He might also just be a little awkward in social conditions or particularly shy. He could bang his head against a wall when his daily routine is interrupted. He may know how to code at six. You don't know.
The other day I watched a video on Youtube that had a few people all claiming to have "Autism" and the point was that one of them did not and they were all supposed to guess which one didn't. One of the people claiming to have Autism who did not end up being the plant had absolutely no outward sign at all of any cognitive disorder. All of the others displayed obvious differences. They were intelligent and articulate, but behaved in ways that reminded me of my son, but this one did not at all. She also claimed that the only people who currently knew about her recent diagnosis of Autism were her "wife" and one friend. I submit that the others wouldn't need to tell you they had some sort of disorder, but she apparently went all the way into her twenties with no one the wiser including her family. I call BS.
As the father of a child with real struggles this really bothers me. It's a kind of "stolen valor." She's probably the first person to complain about cultural appropriation but here she is appropriating the struggles people like my son and all those people in the video with her so that when she expresses an opinion it matters just that much more because of the extra points she now can claim. Hanna Gadsby does the same thing. Here she is on stage in front of thousands of people and knowingly being broadcast to millions with no apparent cognitive disability at all claiming the trophy of Autism.
While social media without a doubt greatly facilitated glamorization of mental illness, social media did not create it. The glamorization of mental illness and certain sicknesses among the young has been around for a long long time. It may have come from its association with being artistic (many famous writers, artists and creative people had mental illnesses). It separates one from the ordinary and boring. (A rosy-cheeked happy girl? What could possibly be more ordinary and boring! . If you don't have "crazy" thoughts, you probably have boring and ordinary thoughts, right? If you look happy and healthy, you are probably not a very deep thinker and feeler. ). Social media also had a huge help from the modern focus on individual . Thinking constantly about oneself cannot be good.
It’s criminally professionally negligenct that the medical/psychotherapeutic world is as ignorant about social media and its impact as they are. It’s a large part of why we are where we are with the gender nonsense. If clinicians spent 10 minutes on any of the relevant platforms they’d see the enormous influence, and the ridiculous and dangerous legitimacy given to every kid claiming to be some gender flavor or other would be shut down.
The hard truth is that "normative" standards exist to maintain the sanity of the majority of people. Normalizing mental illness only makes everybody crazy, and does nothing to help those who are struggling to find sanity. "Affirming" mental illness pours gasoline on a fire.
Thank you to the authors. Quite a few years ago while attempting to seek help for my daughter, this article's message is what I tried to express to various therapists, psychiatrists and even a neuropsychologist, all of them seasoned professionals who stared at me blankly and dismissed my concerns because they had no clue this was happening. At least three of them stated they had never heard of Tumblr and didn't know what it was. They thought my observation of online influence was way off base. Of course, this was several years ago when the phenomenon was not yet known in the mainstream. Also, I didn't voice my concerns in such a clear and eloquent way as the authors of this piece have. Additionally, I do not have the training or expertise the authors do, nor were there any sources to cite at that point in time. I was just a mom who could see Tumblr was incfluencing my child to believe that being mentally ill and transgender were some sort of badges of honor or hard-won trophies to be proud of, and this is why my daughter was suddenly claiming all sorts of mental health problems, as well as suddenly claiming to be a boy.
Thank to you the authors for spreading awareness of this dangerous online trend.
Sadly we see the ordinary bullying-driven unhappiness gay boys and girls suffer medicalized into “dysphoria”. Then these children and families are gaslit online into a diagnosis of a problem of self-perception. Internet charlatans say a scalpel is a treatment that will miraculously driving tormentors to flee. As many parents have found, 1:1 loving personal support, physical maturity and an “off” switch is the real cure.
This article speaks to a way children and adults self-medicalize a need for attention, what used to be called hypochondria and “Munchausen’s” syndrome. Soulless, Internet-distributed video is the accurate root-cause diagnosis, and the “off” switch is the actual cure.
No problem. According to the Democrat platform today you can self identify as anything. If you identify as sane when you are insane, no problem. Likewise, if you appear as a white middle-aged male, you can still identify as a gender-fluid, Latinx-black-Asian teenage girl with ADHD, OCD and an eating disorder. It is good to do this because victims of maladies and minority identity get more victims points... get more positive attention... get more LIKES!.
My problem is the myriad of identity choices causing me anxiety. It is so hard to chose!
This is spot on. My daughters have pretended to have Tourette’s and have self diagnosed themselves with ADHD, autism, and borderline personality disorder. They have also engaged in self harm, eating disorders, and trans identities. All because of social media. If you deny that they actually have autism, for instance, they say the guidance for diagnosis is flawed. They believe they can self diagnose and no one else is right, even a professional.
This is so true. My 17 year old daughter is one of these kids. Her freshman year of high school, almost overnight she went from a happy, healthy girl who had friends, a variety of interests, and did well in school and spent little time on computers, and was a little socially awkward and immature, to being trans identified, tumblr obsessed, and self diagnosed with autism, ADHD, dissociative identity disorder, anxiety, and depression. She is barely passing her classes and I’m not sure she’ll graduate. She has no other activities - all her interests are solitary. She now has a few friends but went two years with none (except online). Letting her on social media was the worst mistake I ever made.
I think what motivates these kids is a deep fear of criticism. They’ve grown up in an environment where everything bad that happens has to be blamed on someone. And that someone is never presented in a nuanced way, a person who made mistakes or used poorly chosen words but also has good points and a capacity to learn. If someone is accused of racism, or sexism, or profiting at the expense of others, they are vilified, with no possibility of redemption. This is what happened to my kid. She was bullied and criticized at her high school for being “privileged” - too white, to “cis-het”, too financially well-off. All of this is a shield against criticism. Kids are looking for explanations that place them in a protected category, that say that it’s not their fault that they’re socially awkward or lack confidence or aren’t the best at everything - it’s because they have a condition!
My observation is that sensitivity and a tendency toward self-blame are the core characteristics of kids who’ve fallen into this mess.
We need to fight the urge to find yet someone else to blame for this and promote a mindset of understanding, forgiveness, and accepting alternative opinions and viewpoints.
My daughter has a developmental disability, and even at 30 years old, finds herself caught up in these trends. She has self-diagnosed many neuroatypical conditions based on shared "diagnoses" on such platforms as Spoon, Discord, and others where teens and adults mix. She'll tell me about her aphasia, or synesthasia, or other condition, which she had never exhibited until she joined these forums. They're rife with sharing. She has never self-identified as trans, or non-binary, however she did tell me that she came out as "Pansexual" to her Spoon cohort, and described the following lovebombing. She had identified as bisexual for many years, and I asked her what the difference is. She treated me like I had rained on a very big parade for her.
The social aspects of the gender phenomenon cannot be overstated, which is why it was so disappointing that Abigail Shrier's book <i>Irreversible Damage</i> was dismissed by medical skeptics. ROGD is credible and is observable.
IMO the single most important and feasible and effective thing concerned, tuned-in, responsible parents can do is deny access to smart phones and tablets to their children at least until they reach the age of 18. And carefully monitor computer usage going so far as to implement parental controls.
I know most parents I just described won't do that, especially not after their children are in high school, for fear of severe backlash. But I contend that worry may be over-exaggerated. Children raised with that kind of parenting probably won't resort to unreasoned backlash. Certainly, some will, but many won't because they haven't been constantly exposed to the worst that social media has to offer, and they feel safe and secure in their parent's care.
Thank you for your thoughtful essay. Everybody wants to belong. Everybody wants to be at least a little special. While exacerbated by social media, this is an extension of behaviors we see in a variety of people including adults. For instance, my father got a lot of attention for being an enthusiastic hypochondriac. Many middle-aged adults (of both sexes) wax prolific about every ailment they have, or think they have. Complaining — and finding others who share your complaints — is an easy way for an adolescent to find an identity. It’s much easier to be “sick” than actually accomplish something for which you might gain attention and notoriety. As a Biological Psychologist, I agree with you that research will be helpful. However, it will take a broad cultural shift to eliminate this problem. Quite frankly, until adults stop complaining all the time and talking about how bad things are, there will be little incentive for our children to do otherwise. Thanks again for the essay, Frederick
Being a parent is always a challenge - particularly in today’s insane age of nutty ideas going viral on TikTok, promoted on the news, and apps like BeReal putting silly spins on the same harmful algorithms to try to placate parents into letting kids on it even though it induces addiction via algorithm like all the rest. It’s rare to look in the mirror and think “yes, I got this right,” as a parent, but on our adamant ban of big social media we can actually say that. I even deleted my own social media a few years ago when my daughter started begging for TikTok and that is a firm no for us - I find do as I do easier to enforce as a parent than do as I say. It helps our kids go to a top ranked conservative private Christian school. Even though it’s large at 1,250 kids, we aren’t alone in blocking them from social media and they aren’t punished socially for it.
I do take issue with “while some social media algorithms act to facilitate the spread of good ideas and accurate information, others can fuel the spread of harmful misinformation and seed dangerous social contagions.”......... it’s never good for algorithms to manipulate human understanding of the world in mass. The Twitter files have shown big tech spread a lot of false narratives at the behest of the woke mobs, self-proclaimed credentialed by incurious “expert” class, and permanent DC. And they did this suppressing demonstrably true information. I have yet to see examples of big tech ensuring vitality of “good” things via algorithmic spread. Computer techies aren’t very good at being arbiters of truth or goodness and AI doesn’t learn human emotions or morality. We should really stop pretending flawed humans can code computer programs to be better than actual humans. So far, all evidence proves the contrary.
This isn't just a phenomenon with children, particularly as it relates to autism. Claiming to have autism adds another intersectional Brownie point to your victimhood resume and is particularly convenient because you can act completely normally but still claim those points because Autism doesn't actually exist in the way that people thing it does.
My six-year-old son has been diagnosed with Autism but what that actually means is that he didn't breath properly for the first seven minutes of his life and spent his first five days in the NICU and suffered a hypoxic brain injury as a result.
His Autism diagnosis is a legal and bureaucratic diagnosis that means insurance has to pay for the therapy he needs, but it has no medical application. The fact you are reading this and now know this about my son tells you nothing. He may have never spoken in his life and never showed any emotion. He might also just be a little awkward in social conditions or particularly shy. He could bang his head against a wall when his daily routine is interrupted. He may know how to code at six. You don't know.
The other day I watched a video on Youtube that had a few people all claiming to have "Autism" and the point was that one of them did not and they were all supposed to guess which one didn't. One of the people claiming to have Autism who did not end up being the plant had absolutely no outward sign at all of any cognitive disorder. All of the others displayed obvious differences. They were intelligent and articulate, but behaved in ways that reminded me of my son, but this one did not at all. She also claimed that the only people who currently knew about her recent diagnosis of Autism were her "wife" and one friend. I submit that the others wouldn't need to tell you they had some sort of disorder, but she apparently went all the way into her twenties with no one the wiser including her family. I call BS.
As the father of a child with real struggles this really bothers me. It's a kind of "stolen valor." She's probably the first person to complain about cultural appropriation but here she is appropriating the struggles people like my son and all those people in the video with her so that when she expresses an opinion it matters just that much more because of the extra points she now can claim. Hanna Gadsby does the same thing. Here she is on stage in front of thousands of people and knowingly being broadcast to millions with no apparent cognitive disability at all claiming the trophy of Autism.
It's disgusting.
Why, only a bigot would suggest a special susceptibility to the negative effects of social media in (checks notes) the Tide Pods generation
While social media without a doubt greatly facilitated glamorization of mental illness, social media did not create it. The glamorization of mental illness and certain sicknesses among the young has been around for a long long time. It may have come from its association with being artistic (many famous writers, artists and creative people had mental illnesses). It separates one from the ordinary and boring. (A rosy-cheeked happy girl? What could possibly be more ordinary and boring! . If you don't have "crazy" thoughts, you probably have boring and ordinary thoughts, right? If you look happy and healthy, you are probably not a very deep thinker and feeler. ). Social media also had a huge help from the modern focus on individual . Thinking constantly about oneself cannot be good.
Makes me wonder if some kids seek out or exaggerate a disorder to have an excuse to not take responsibility.
It’s criminally professionally negligenct that the medical/psychotherapeutic world is as ignorant about social media and its impact as they are. It’s a large part of why we are where we are with the gender nonsense. If clinicians spent 10 minutes on any of the relevant platforms they’d see the enormous influence, and the ridiculous and dangerous legitimacy given to every kid claiming to be some gender flavor or other would be shut down.
The hard truth is that "normative" standards exist to maintain the sanity of the majority of people. Normalizing mental illness only makes everybody crazy, and does nothing to help those who are struggling to find sanity. "Affirming" mental illness pours gasoline on a fire.
Thank you to the authors. Quite a few years ago while attempting to seek help for my daughter, this article's message is what I tried to express to various therapists, psychiatrists and even a neuropsychologist, all of them seasoned professionals who stared at me blankly and dismissed my concerns because they had no clue this was happening. At least three of them stated they had never heard of Tumblr and didn't know what it was. They thought my observation of online influence was way off base. Of course, this was several years ago when the phenomenon was not yet known in the mainstream. Also, I didn't voice my concerns in such a clear and eloquent way as the authors of this piece have. Additionally, I do not have the training or expertise the authors do, nor were there any sources to cite at that point in time. I was just a mom who could see Tumblr was incfluencing my child to believe that being mentally ill and transgender were some sort of badges of honor or hard-won trophies to be proud of, and this is why my daughter was suddenly claiming all sorts of mental health problems, as well as suddenly claiming to be a boy.
Thank to you the authors for spreading awareness of this dangerous online trend.
Nice note.
Sadly we see the ordinary bullying-driven unhappiness gay boys and girls suffer medicalized into “dysphoria”. Then these children and families are gaslit online into a diagnosis of a problem of self-perception. Internet charlatans say a scalpel is a treatment that will miraculously driving tormentors to flee. As many parents have found, 1:1 loving personal support, physical maturity and an “off” switch is the real cure.
This article speaks to a way children and adults self-medicalize a need for attention, what used to be called hypochondria and “Munchausen’s” syndrome. Soulless, Internet-distributed video is the accurate root-cause diagnosis, and the “off” switch is the actual cure.
No problem. According to the Democrat platform today you can self identify as anything. If you identify as sane when you are insane, no problem. Likewise, if you appear as a white middle-aged male, you can still identify as a gender-fluid, Latinx-black-Asian teenage girl with ADHD, OCD and an eating disorder. It is good to do this because victims of maladies and minority identity get more victims points... get more positive attention... get more LIKES!.
My problem is the myriad of identity choices causing me anxiety. It is so hard to chose!
I backed away from the online autism communities years ago because of stuff like this.