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Online Neurodivergence Ecosystems

Orphia Nay

Penguilicious Spodmaster., Tagger
Orphia Nay
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"For Teen Girls, Rare Psychiatric Disorders Spread Like Viruses on Social Media

Researchers argue that a massive sudden spread of unusual psychiatric problems follows the pattern of “psychosomatic social contagion.”"

https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/1...isorders-spread-like-viruses-on-social-media/

TikTok’s “sick-role subculture” leads to children taking on the characteristics of rare psychiatric diagnoses, according to an article in Comprehensive Psychiatry. Kids—especially teenage girls—are presenting with self-described Tourette’s, eating disorders, autism, and dissociative identity disorder (DID)—but suddenly, and in a way that doesn’t match how these diagnoses have previously been identified.
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“There has been a recognition of vast online ‘neurodivergence’ ecosystem in which classical mental illness symptoms and diagnoses are viewed less as mental health concerns that require professional attention, but rather as consumer identities or character traits that make individuals sharper and more interesting than others around them,” the researchers write.
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I've come across DID groups online that reaffirm the poster's (self- or otherwise) diagnosis. I've also seen three people self-diagnose ADHD, though they have had some contact with psychologists, just not official final diagnoses.

Has anyone else noticed a trend towards self-diagnosis and a drift contrary to the stigma formerly associated with mental illness?
 
Tens now a days are morelikely to diagnose themselves, and several family members with 'something'. And the larger communities and school systems are likely to have suicide awarenesss days and mental awareness months...multiple. So this idea of some mental crisis is around them much much MUCH more than any of us had as kids.

It is also more normalized... so that a fear of bees or perhaps a sensitivity to others' chewing noises is a mental illness with a name they can find on their iphone. Everyone is mentally ill if you look enough!

Also, tiktok is braintrash.

my limited source?: I have a 15 year old in high school, in California.
 
Sherkeu said:
Tens now a days are morelikely to diagnose themselves, and several family members with 'something'. And the larger communities and school systems are likely to have suicide awarenesss days and mental awareness months...multiple. So this idea of some mental crisis is around them much much MUCH more than any of us had as kids.

It is also more normalized... so that a fear of bees or perhaps a sensitivity to others' chewing noises is a mental illness with a name they can find on their iphone. Everyone is mentally ill if you look enough!

Also, tiktok is braintrash.

my limited source?: I have a 15 year old in high school, in California.
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"Everyone is mentally ill if you look enough!"

I follow some meme groups, and many popular memes these days feature some sort of mental illness symptom and a common occurrence most of us can sympathise with. I can see how teens and even adults can start thinking they have certain diagnoses.
 
 
Orphia Nay said:
"Everyone is mentally ill if you look enough!"

I follow some meme groups, and many popular memes these days feature some sort of mental illness symptom and a common occurrence most of us can sympathise with. I can see how teens and even adults can start thinking they have certain diagnoses.
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I think that is partly because we've long ignored how prevalent mental illness is. So is it that people are misdiagnosing themselves and each other or simply now recognising the symptoms of mental illness?

I know I still have a problem with accepting people being "on the spectrum*" who live a pretty "normal" life, I would describe them as "shy" or "socially anxious". But I suspect that is me at fault and my conditioning when younger the "not to cry", to keep a stiff upper lip, never show a weakness, suck it up to use an Americanism and so on. I suspect this is a generational thing in many ways, first of all the first generation to grow-up constantly online and constantly sharing their lives on-line in a way that is completely alien to me and a generation that has been told it is OK to talk about feelings and to "admit" to mental illness and mental illness symptoms.

Then we have to add in the issue of, to use a quick and dirty phrase, "social contagion".

What I do know is that it is bloody complicated.




*note I am not denying autism exists, I know some severely autistic people - one of my neighbours across the road has a son I've known for 20 years, now in his early 30s totally unable to cope with life and deal with everyday situations now living in assisted accommodation. It can be a totally disabling condition. I was using this as an example of how an old git like myself is not always the best person to make these judgements of youngsters because of my own "generational" bias.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
I would venture to say, conditions like cognitive dissonance are just as much a mental illness as ADD.
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Not at all. Cognitive dissonance is a state of attempting to make mutually incompatible beliefs fit. Everyone can have it from time to time particularly when not wanting to confront an unwelcome conclusion. But ADHD is a disorder which someone will have regardless of how much they try to think straight. They may be able to manage the symptoms through certain strategies but that doesn’t mean they can get rid of it entirely.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
I would venture to say, conditions like cognitive dissonance are just as much a mental illness as ADD.
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Cognitive dissonance is the state of perceiving incongruent beliefs or behaviours. In itself it doesn't automatically have positive or negative consequences (other than the unpleasant emotional arousal produced) and is not an 'illness'. It could have negative consequences if somebody adopts an irrational belief or behaviour to reduce dissonance (like uncritically adopting a belief to fit in with a social or political group).

ADD isn't really an illness either - it's a neurodevelopmental condition (present from childhood, even if not diagnosed till later). It is classified as a disorder because it can cause functional impairment or distress, but it involves long-term neurodevelopmental characteristics rather than a state that is aberrant for that person.

The main feature distinguishing the socially contagious conditions is their rapid onset, links to social influence, and prevalence amongst female adolescents.
 
Elaedith said:
Here are links to the original paper and a couple of others on the topic.

Haltigan, J. D., Pringsheim, T. M., & Rajkumar, G. (2023). Social media as an incubator of personality and behavioral psychopathology: Symptom and disorder authenticity or psychosomatic social contagion?. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 121, 152362.

Fremer, C., Szejko, N., Pisarenko, A., Haas, M., Laudenbach, L., Wegener, C., & Müller-Vahl, K. R. (2022). Mass social media-induced illness presenting with Tourette-like behavior. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2168.

Hartnett, Y., & Cummings, E. (2023). Social media and ADHD: implications for clinical assessment and treatment. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 1-5.
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Read the first two descriptive papers. They do show there should be concern about "social contagion".

My meagre opinion is there is more than enough information for us to be very restrictive with kids access to the internet especially regarding social media companies, we need to keep remembering that they are profit making companies using kids as both consumers and the consumed. And there is a need for us to exert control on how social media interacts with children. This whole algorithmic push to up "engagement" is a pernicious evil that infiltrates all the major players (apart from the ISF of course).

In the UK there has been a lot of discussion about our "Online Safety Bill", and it has come in for plenty of (deserved) ridicule, but at its heart there is a truth and that is we need to legislate for online safety, protecting people especially children is a necessary evil that the state has to enforce, we now know we can't leave it up to the mysterious all-knowing "market".
 
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Addiction.

To say that social media is just as addictive as alcohol, drugs etc. is absurd. That's the same kind of hyperbole that people said about video games that was totally debunked, for example, in Markey and Ferguson's "Moral Combat. Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong."
 
thines said:
To say that social media is just as addictive as alcohol, drugs etc. is absurd. That's the same kind of hyperbole that people said about video games that was totally debunked, for example, in Markey and Ferguson's "Moral Combat. Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong."
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As you say there isn't the evidence in the case of video games however in this case the evidence is building that the "engagement" model social media companies use to make money is harmful to children. It may not be addictive - and I don't think it is - that does not mean it isn't (or can be) harmful.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
The internet/social media is just as addictive as alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Why not restrict minor access and make it a crime to provide access to minors?
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thines said:
To say that social media is just as addictive as alcohol, drugs etc. is absurd. That's the same kind of hyperbole that people said about video games that was totally debunked, for example, in Markey and Ferguson's "Moral Combat. Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong."
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Darat said:
As you say there isn't the evidence in the case of video games however in this case the evidence is building that the "engagement" model social media companies use to make money is harmful to children. It may not be addictive - and I don't think it is - that does not mean it isn't (or can be) harmful.
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Skeptical Greg said:
It's as easy as Googling "Social Media Addiction "...
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I don’t know if addiction is the main problem with all of the things mentioned. It is the attendant harms that come with the addiction. People can be addicted to coffee without it being as harmful as addiction to cigarettes. The ostensible problems with video game addiction, if it was addictive, was not the addiction itself but the purported claims of making people violent. Similarly, the problems with internet or social media addiction is that it makes people depressed or anxious or radicalized by cults, etc… or, according to the OP, people on on social media self-diagnose because they put undue trust in their ability to filter through the nonsense on TikTok and pull out the diamonds of objective truth.

No idea how much of the claims in the case of social media is actually true, but it is best to focus on those issues rather than the mere addiction.
 
One thing that's interesting to me about these "online neurodivergent ecosystems" is that they seem to not actually be neurodivergent? Getting caught up in a fad isn't neurodivergent, it's neurotypical. Joining a cult to feel like you belong is neurotypical. Pretending to be something you're not, for acceptance or inclusion is neurotypical. This situation is interesting because playing at being neurodivergent is the cult/fad that's pulling in the normies.

Though, periodic browsing of r/fakedisordercringe does lead me to suspect that a lot of these "neurodivergency cosplayers" do have, or will give themselves, a real psychological disorder - just not the one(s) they're cosplaying.

What concerns me the most is that these kids aren't getting healthy socialization, or real help when they need it.

What concerns me second-most is when they bring their contagion to school, and spread it that way - or when their teachers have already caught it and are spreading it. Restrict internet access for minors, sure. But maybe also we should take a good look at the kind of social environment we're required by law to send our children into, five days a week.
 
Aren't sexual deviations and oh so modern transgenderism part of it ? It's clear number of transgender children is way above expected levels among Hollywood actresses .. but that's more an issue of the parents. It is likely similar phenomenon.
Also known for ages with fresh medicine students. Them thinking they have all those diseases they learn about, not transgenderism.
 
theprestige said:
What concerns me second-most is when they bring their contagion to school, and spread it that way - or when their teachers have already caught it and are spreading it. Restrict internet access for minors, sure. But maybe also we should take a good look at the kind of social environment we're required by law to send our children into, five days a week.
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Maybe kids could study online to prevent them being exposed to bad ideas in the classroom?
 
Dr.Sid said:
Aren't sexual deviations and oh so modern transgenderism part of it ? It's clear number of transgender children is way above expected levels among Hollywood actresses .. but that's more an issue of the parents. It is likely similar phenomenon.
Also known for ages with fresh medicine students. Them thinking they have all those diseases they learn about, not transgenderism.
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The proposed mechanism here is hypochondria? Like the character in Three Men in a Boat who reads the Medical Encyclopedia and decides he has every ailment described in it?
 
Hmm...

I have a couple of things to add to this discourse.

Firstly, as part of the Masters program, we had to attend a single lecture on 'abnormal psychology' (because the wrong people can really damage organisations).

The lecturer warned the whole class, that it was likely that many, if not all of us, would be thinking: "OMG, that's me!" as the various conditions were identified and described.

She explained that this was entirely normal, and something that all psychology students experience...

Secondly, some conditions definitely are affected by the way we manage them, for example, I stopped going to fibromyalgia support groups, because my symptoms were always much worse after associating with other people who were suffering more than me.

BTW. Just a final note.

"On the spectrum" doesn't mean that there is a sliding scale from 'normal' to 'autistic'.

There are many small characteristics that we probably all have to some degree, but are much harder to manage for someone with Autism or Asperger's.

In my case, I'm on the spectrum, because of elements of OCD, social anxiety, difficulty in interpreting peoples' hidden agendas, etc. but I'm neither Autistic or Aspie. :D

Just generally much happier when I don't need to deal with people face to face.

(Far from being detrimental to me, my personality disorders seemed to have enabled me to have a highly technical career.)
 
I've seen people go 'that's a thing? that explains a lot' about common features of disorders in both thoughtful and thoughtless ways, and occasionally about things that aren't even a thing but rather just a video someone made while laboring under a misapprehension.

ADHD and executive dysfunction 'life hacks' often help me with **** I've been struggling with for years. I think a lot of people are sort of 'soft self diagnosing' on a basis like that, in a 'the shoe fits and the shoe inserts help me walk more comfortably' kind of way.

Of course many of these are general hacks that help whether or not you have Condition. But most people don't resort to taking the doors off their kitchen cabinets because they finally accept that otherwise they will continue to accidentally live as though the insides of the cabinets don't exist. On the one hand there probably is some way to train yourself to use normal cabinets normally; on the other hand now I am actually using my cabinets. Stuff like that. Is it actually ADHD? Shrug? I might casually describe always having 4 cold cups of tea as ADD behaviour, nonetheless. Much the same way one might call any old arthropod a bug.

If youngsters start out with self diagnosis and struggle enough to go get checked out, imo, that's fine. If they don't struggle, they can wear it if it suits them.

Communities that encourage eating disorders or wallowing in harmful self hatred are a different kind of problem, and have been around for decades. Dealing with them is thorny.

The really weird ones are out there too. Kids arguing about being able to jump realities, the (now old!) 'kin' stuff, some modern takes on the indigo child stuff. You never know whether they're just really invested in some deep layers of roleplay or if they're exploring unusual ways to deal with their emotional relationships or if they are bug **** nuts.
 
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Orphia Nay said:
I want to thank everyone posting so far for their overwhelmingly insightful comments.



Fascinating group!
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I should perhaps explain that r/fakedisordercringe is a subreddit dedicated to pointing and laughing at (and condemning) people who pretend to have psychological disorders, and often appear to be extremely active in online neurodivergence ecosystems. Trending on that sub right now are posts about Pluralpedia, which is one such ONE.
 
Lithrael said:
...

Of course many of these are general hacks that help whether or not you have Condition. But most people don't resort to taking the doors off their kitchen cabinets because they finally accept that otherwise they will continue to accidentally live as though the insides of the cabinets don't exist. On the one hand there probably is some way to train yourself to use normal cabinets normally; on the other hand now I am actually using my cabinets. Stuff like that.

...
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I met an older guy with dementia who still lives at home, alone.

A 'life hack' for him, is printed lists on the cupboard doors that explain the contents of the cupboards.

He said that this helped in two ways:

1. Saves him having to look in every cupboard every time he wants things; and,
2. Makes it much easier to put away the groceries/dishes/washing etc.

I think I identify with that guy. I'd probably want to stay 'home' as long as possible, and can see myself doing similar things.

(NB. I already have some labels on some of my drawers (inside of drawers) but that is because my ex bought a label maker and went full 'Batman' around the house.)

I'm not sure that I have the heart to remove all of the labels, but the visible ones are all gone.
 
One possibility that's often overlooked in discussions of social media and its effects, particularly on children, is the possibility that social media use may be the symptom rather than the cause of some of these problems. For instance, an association between social media use and suicidal ideation in young women is explainable by social media use causing increases in depression, but it's also explainable if depressed, lonely kids who don't have access to other forms of socializing turn to social media. The problem (in that case) would be the lack of access to those social experiences that kids crave, and the social media use would be a symptom of that problem.

Free play (free from adult supervision) and other forms of socializing, again without adult supervision, is down in children, and that does seem to me to be at least contributing to the problems that are often blamed on social media. This doesn't mean that there's no room for social media use to exacerbate these problems, but this does seem like at least a potential part of the problem that's often overlooked.

This is analogous to seeing an association between homelessness and alcoholism. Does the alcoholism lead to the homelessness or do people who are homeless turn to alcohol as an escape? My guess is that there's some of both, but it would be a mistake to ignore the latter factor. And the same sort of thing is, I suspect, true of social media.
 
Roboramma said:
One possibility that's often overlooked in discussions of social media and its effects, particularly on children, is the possibility that social media use may be the symptom rather than the cause of some of these problems. For instance, an association between social media use and suicidal ideation in young women is explainable by social media use causing increases in depression, but it's also explainable if depressed, lonely kids who don't have access to other forms of socializing turn to social media. The problem (in that case) would be the lack of access to those social experiences that kids crave, and the social media use would be a symptom of that problem.

Free play (free from adult supervision) and other forms of socializing, again without adult supervision, is down in children, and that does seem to me to be at least contributing to the problems that are often blamed on social media. This doesn't mean that there's no room for social media use to exacerbate these problems, but this does seem like at least a potential part of the problem that's often overlooked.

This is analogous to seeing an association between homelessness and alcoholism. Does the alcoholism lead to the homelessness or do people who are homeless turn to alcohol as an escape? My guess is that there's some of both, but it would be a mistake to ignore the latter factor. And the same sort of thing is, I suspect, true of social media.
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While I agree with the above, may I suggest that you may have left out part of it?

There is an engineering term, positive feedback, which means that something reinforces something, pushing it further from the desired, stable state.

I believe that the reinforcement offered by social media, may exaggerate existing problems, making them worse.

These feedback loops can be seen in many aspects of human behaviour, for example:

Person feels lonely and unattractive leading to excess eating of 'comfort foods'. Weight gain makes the person feel more lonely and unattractive leading to more excess eating.

My example of meeting people struggling with pain management, causing my own pain management issues to worsen.

Depression leading to alcohol consumption, leading to more depression.

It seems to me that people, generally, are vulnerable to that kind of loop, and the worst of social media makes things worse.

(Initial cause or not)
 
novaphile said:
While I agree with the above, may I suggest that you may have left out part of it?

There is an engineering term, positive feedback, which means that something reinforces something, pushing it further from the desired, stable state.

I believe that the reinforcement offered by social media, may exaggerate existing problems, making them worse.

These feedback loops can be seen in many aspects of human behaviour, for example:

Person feels lonely and unattractive leading to excess eating of 'comfort foods'. Weight gain makes the person feel more lonely and unattractive leading to more excess eating.

My example of meeting people struggling with pain management, causing my own pain management issues to worsen.

Depression leading to alcohol consumption, leading to more depression.

It seems to me that people, generally, are vulnerable to that kind of loop, and the worst of social media makes things worse.

(Initial cause or not)
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Yeah, this is a very good point! The analogy the weight management is also very clear.

I also think that social media can have both positive and negative effects here. For instance, I have a WeChat group with my family members that we use to keep in touch. My relationship with my brother has grown a lot stronger over the last couple of years since we started exchanging voice messages on WeChat. I'll often send him 10 minutes or so of voice messages, and he'll reply a day or two later with 10 minutes of his own. Because we live on opposite sides of the planet, we used to talk on the phone maybe once/year, but now we have these sorts of exchanges around once a week. Similar WeChat groups with friends also keep me in touch with them, and chatting there often leads to us getting together in "real life", which also seems positive.

Contrast that with just scrolling on instagram or twitter, or WeChat's 朋友圈. Those things seem much less pro-social and more likely to be a part of the negative feedback loop you're talking about. But there's something going on where both sides of the coin are happening in the same apps (my friends also have a much more active chat group on instagram, I just haven't been able to get on it since my VPN stopped working).
 
I came across a free app in the App Store for people with DID to "manage their alters" or "let their alters know who is fronting".

At first I thought this was a terrible scam that would lead to worse proliferation of DID self-diagnosis.

But the app only has 37 reviews and has not been reviewed or updated in a year.

I think people with "DID" are already too confused to try and cope with organising their thoughts this way, and if they did manage it, they might soon think more clearly and maybe discard their belief in having DID.

The app is also intended for sharing their experiences, so, while it could bolster MPI, it seems to be pretty unsuccessful.
 
Neurodivergent is cool now.

That said, I have listened to people speaking about the symptoms that led them to get an actual diagnosis, and I've been surprised at how often I say "yeah, I do that too".
 
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