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0 pointsMathMonkeyMan1y ago0 comments

So much of psychiatry is like this, though. There are the extreme conditions where everybody agrees "yes, something is wrong with his brain," or "clearly his mind was broken by circumstances and now he needs help," or "that's the most severe case of autism I've ever seen," but there are also more nebulous conditions: anxiety, depression, AD(H)D, autism spectrum, personality disorders, etc.

This isn't to say that those conditions aren't precisely defined or that they aren't real, but they might be at least partially a product of our society.

Your skepticism about whether an issue "can be directly attributed to a singular condition" is just good medicine. As conditions are studied more, often it's discovered that it's actually a few different conditions that share some symptoms. Maybe all of these sometimes wishy-washy "we didn't have this when I was a kid" conditions are just medicine learning more about the mind.

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ty68531y ago

Fundamentally we want to be adapted to our environment. As the conditions for success change, what was prior adaptive is now maladaptive disorder. Being institutionalized in a school after spending hundreds of thousands/millions years out in nature/fighting/hunting/building shelter has consequences.

Much of disorder is likely just maladaptive for, as uncle Ted put it, the post industrial revolution.

pcthrowaway1y ago

> Maybe all of these sometimes wishy-washy "we didn't have this when I was a kid" conditions are just medicine learning more about the mind.

I think it's likely that as well as a healthy dose of "the world was way different when I was a kid, and didn't have as much of X, Y, Z, which contribute to the formation of maladaptive neurological patterns"