[ SECRET POST #2636 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2636 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 086 secrets from Secret Submission Post #377.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[(Anonymous)]

but people can also be socially awkward and bad at social interactions and grow out of that too, it doesn't necessarily mean they have asperger's.

i guess my skepticism comes from the fact that so many parents these days seem to be in such a rush to diagnose their kid with autism or asperger's if they're even the slightest bit socially awkward - not "perfect," in other words. my mother works in a school and she sees this sort of thing all the time - kid isn't getting straight a's? THEY MUST HAVE A LEARNING DISABILITY, it can't possibly mean that they're just naturally a c student. so then they give the kid a battery of tests and nope, turns out there's nothing wrong with the kid, they're just a c student. it's like the parents can't accept that their child is anything less than 100% perfect and need some sort of medical diagnosis to justify it.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, masking their shame and embarrassment at a poorly parented child with a mental disorder is what a lot of those parents do. Kinda shitty on the kids who have mental problems being lumped in with just those who have crap parents who just want an easy out of the embarrassment.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[(Anonymous)]

it isn't even always about poor parenting, sometimes a kid is just going to be a c student because they aren't all that bright - and there's nothing wrong with that. it's not the kid's fault or the parents' fault, it's just the way the kid is. but it's definitely shitty to treat the kid like they're somehow deficient because they aren't as smart as you wanted them to be.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[nyxelestia]

In a supreme twist of irony, while my mother (childcare giver and teacher, so trained to look for this stuff) has speculated I might have it based on almost all of the Asperger's criteria but the social element, this is also the reason I never tried to get it formally tested.

Sorry I'm not perfect like you were, dad, but you don't get to hope I have Asperger's to "justify" me having anything less than straight A's. I've managed life this far with only self-administered intervention, so whatever I have or don't have is irrelevant. You're just going to have to deal with it.

(...also, I'm going into a career in which having Asperger's could be very detrimental and I don't trust my school or my family to keep this under wraps if push comes to shove).

But yeah, I tend to be very critical of many mental disorders because so often, they stem from people having this ideal image of "what they should be" and not realizing the averages are just that - averages - and people can deviate from the norm and still be okay. If you have Depression, yeah, maybe it's a neurological problem...or maybe it's because you've been at a bad place in your life for a while now and it's taking a toll on you. THAT'S OKAY.

Discalculia - people can suck at math without it being some kind of mental disorder. Society has always done better when people were also great at a few things instead of good at everything. Specializing moved the freaking species forward, let's stop pretending everyone is either "perfect" or "deficient", people can be imperfect and just fine the way they are without needing to pump them full of drugs for it.

My biggest problem with all of this, though, is that most of these ARE fucking real issues, but when you have people rushing to label themselves or their kids with disorders and mental illnesses, that tends to detract from the reality of people who actually have serious conditions. >.<

We need to stop diagnosing every bored and energetic child with ADHD so we can focus on the kids who actually have ADHD.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[nyxelestia]

I've seen kids who genuinely who would genuinely suffer and be unable to even get through a day of school without medication because of their ADHD. I've also seen kids who were just bored out of their minds and restless because school is boring and it's hard to get good exercise in the city, and getting drugged so their parents and teachers wouldn't have to deal with them and not getting any real benefit from the regimen.

I get that there is a reason for having official diagnoses for these things, and major advantages to them. And they're good reasons and very valid points! My biggest problem is that a lot of times, they get used as excuses, anyway, and cheap cop-outs to avoid dealing with the real problem.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not a medical practitioner of any sort, a teacher, or even a parent. But at least in the case of ADD/ADHD, wouldn't many of the typical medications make a wrongly diagnosed person more hyper, rather than less, because many drugs that work as stimulants on the general population do the opposite in people with ADD? So if someone was wrongly diagnosed with that and the meds made them more distracted, wouldn't it be obvious that they had something else/the meds weren't working properly?

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[nyxelestia]

Seeing as I am not a medical practitioner, either, take my words with a grain of salt, BUT:

a.) I'm not sure how much of that is a prevailing trend among ADHD cases and how much of it may be/actually is an inherent part of ADHD,

b.) there are a variety of drugs out there, so that could also further confound things, and

c.) people react strangely to certain chemicals and drugs without disorders, too - caffeine puts me to sleep as often as it wakes me up, but I'm pretty sure I don't have ADHD, and alcohol can have strange effects on people regardless of what they do or don't have, but it's technically a depressant.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[(Anonymous)]

Oh man, I thought I was the only one who had that problem with caffeine! I hate it because I can never predict what it's going to do to me, but on the plus side, I also don't suffer from any sort of caffeine withdrawal if I just spontaneously decide to stop drinking it for a while.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[(Anonymous)]

but why does everyone need to be able to do well in every subject? why isn't it okay for people to excel in some subjects and be only average in others?

i agree with nyxelestia - i think a huge part of the problem is that we expect everyone to be good at everything when that just isn't possible for most people. it is, at its heart, treating people as if they're deficient when they don't meet up to an arbitrary standard. not being good at math is not a bad thing, nor is it a deficiency. some people just aren't wired for math and scientific concepts. for some people, no amount of tutoring is going to help them understand a subject. rather than trying to make this into a disorder, it would be a lot more beneficial to recognize that some people just don't do well in certain areas and instead let them focus on the things that they ARE good at.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[(Anonymous)]

some students genuinely can't, though. you can explain something over and over again to them, have them do dozens of practice problems, and they still won't get the concept well enough to be able to do it on their own. i don't think something like that should be called a disorder, because that implies some sort of deficiency or problem.

i guess what i hate is how these days everything has to be a "disorder" instead of just recognizing that hey, people are different, and someone can be bad at math or have a short attention span or be somewhat socially awkward without actually having anything wrong with them.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[nyxelestia]

if someone sucks at math so badly that they are getting held back and just thinking about math tests is making them flip out

The problem is that kids who suck at math but aren't NEARLY that bad are getting caught in the same net as the ones who are actually that bad. There's a big difference between what you described and the kid who just needs to repeat a math class in elementary school in order to catch up, but the way a lot of schools, families, and even medical professionals handle things leads to people not really seeing that difference.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[nyxelestia]

a.) I would assume that a strain on community resources would be a given - there are never enough affordable and legal doctors, tutors, and caregivers around in my experience. All too often they're affordable but illegal, or legal but unaffordable, but they need to be both to be of any help when it comes to taking advantage of using official diagnoses to cover the costs of resources (if they even do so in the first place, and don't end up just marginalizing the kid by the school with no compensating resources because the school is poor and the insurance company/policy is a dick).

b.) Discalculia is a very mild example, and in this instance the biggest problem is that it perpetuates the attitude that every minor flaw is some kind of disastrous disorder rather than a normal deviation from the norm - sure, on its own, it doesn't mean or do much, but it is part of a much larger problem, and shouldn't be ignored because of that.

c.) More pressing examples are situations like false-positive ADHD - in which kids are taking unnecessary medication to help out their parents rather than themselves, and their grades don't get better and their personal lives suffer - to things like assuming every instance of getting sad to the point of it interfering with your life is some kind of neurological disorder, instead of just a reaction to life circumstances (immediate or otherwise) that is severe because the originating problem is severe in and of itself. In both those cases, the unnecessary medication on its own is problematic, and that's before accounting for the possibility that messing with brain chemistry like that can actually cause problems on its own. And both of those are problems that are still ahead of the social impact of people being labelled with these disorders.



In other words, it wouldn't be such a problem if 'the system' worked smoothly, but not it does not always work smoothly, there really is no cohesive system, which means it's far too easy to fall through the cracks and for having various false-positive diagnoses ultimately do more harm than good because of this.

Re: Fandom and Anxiety

[(Anonymous)]

You're being a star in this thread, thank you. - The usual anon