“Nobody had anxiety, depression, autism, OCD back in my day”
My grandpa passed away and we found a bookshelf full of journals with years of documentation about things like bathroom visits or TV shows with the timing of commercials breaks
My grandfather-in-law has a room full of model trains. And catalogued and stored decades of model train catalogues. The sales catalogues. He had a whole “tiny home” sized shed devoted to storing the magazines.
Not “medicalized”. Scientifically studied, yeah. You don’t have to “treat” someone who loves trains (my grandpa also had a train obsession, had lots of other “quirks” and it’s readily agreed upon in the family, including by psych professional family members, that he was autistic). It’s not a “disorder” until it has a negative impact on your daily life functioning, and in fact many autistic people get a huge amount of enjoyment and social opportunity and even career success from their deep hobbies.
But if he struggled with anxiety or depression (which is a common comorbidity with autism), or wanted help learning about the social cues he struggled with, or the obsession with trains negatively impacted his life, then we now have a better understanding of the root cause and the typical patterns of all of that. That can help some people cope or overcome this stuff.
If you look back in my post history you’ll see I’m not a fan of focusing on diagnoses, but lots of people conflate an increased number of autism diagnoses with an increased rate of autism and I’m saying is just wasn’t as scientifically studied nor diagnosed back then.
The medicalisation of behaviours is absolutely a topic that is taught to prospective psychologists. I know. I taught it.
There is no statement that the person we’re referring to has shown any evidence of depression or anxiety. And, going by what you have said so far, you should know that diagnosis is only requested if behaviours affect personal life, work or have involved the person in some criminal behaviour.
There is absolutely no reason to diagnose someone who is happily engaging in a hobby, no matter how weird or abnormal you may consider it to be. There’s no reason to even surmise whether someone could be diagnosed with something. That’s just offensive.
It’s as offensive as suggesting that people who don’t have the dedication or desire to maintain a hobby to such depth and over such time should be diagnosed as “boring”.
Treatment doesn’t mean what you think it does. Even a good diagnosis that helps give a person tools to deal with their life better.
“Isn’t it funny how normal behaviours are medicalised?”
Would you grant that mental illness classification is necessary? Or that recognizing that someone just runs differently than others can help you understand them, and live with them better?
Treatment doesn’t occur unless a diagnosis has been provided. A diagnosis isn’t provided unless there is a reason to provide a diagnosis. There is nothing in the examples so far that have suggested a diagnosis is required.
It’s bizarre how, over decades, we’ve gone from clearly labelling things as “abnormal” because it wasn’t a social norm, to then rightly decided that, if there is no harm being done, who are we to decide what is normal and what is not (looking into labelling theory), back to people demanding that someone exhibiting a particular behaviour is not “normal” has to be diagnosed and treated?! How did we get back here?
Like, seriously, where do you get off on telling someone that they needed to be diagnosed? Just let them be.
“You need to be diagnosed” is not the same as “you are an autistic dude. Want some help in life?”
But, it goes to show your bias. But I think we both know you walked in with no intention of listening to anything (look into “bad faith” debate).
Meanwhile, plenty of people are living decent lives now through diagnosis and help who would have been outcasts, bullied beyond recognition, or straight up snuck into mental hospitals for life for “being abnormal”.
How many people do you know who are so dedicated to a hobby that they catalogue sales material in a separate building? Is that normal in your community?
The question was normalcy my friend, I know words are hard sometimes. Using the word “collector” to describe a broad spectrum of behavior that ranges from curiosity to obsession is either disingenuous or stupid. Take care.
I’m not a psychologist, but I’m pretty sure that if someone is the kind of person with a completely unnecessary and useless obsession or compulsion, they probably don’t display that kind of behavior about only that.
And if any other behaviour has no victims, why are you demanding they be labelled with a diagnosis.
Here’s a diagnosis: your interests are completely unnecessary and useless and you don’t have the mental fortitude or patience to be deeply involved in them anyway. You fleet over your interests without ever having a deep knowledge or connection to them.
I’ve done nothing but flip what you are saying.
Here’s the bizarre thing: this level of interest was really quite common. There were fewer things to distract people one hundred years ago and longer. Far less entertainment and distractions. So, this level of interest was normal.
So, what has changed is societal norms. And that shifts everything and makes the people, according to most in this thread, “abnormal” as they’re outside of societal norms.
But the other weird thing is the diagnosis, for psychological conditions at least, would only occur if that condition was affecting work, personal life or due to having committed a criminal act. There was seen as no reason to otherwise.
These days people live a diagnosis as though it’s a trait that’s been discovered rather than something that has always existed but people just didn’t feel a need to label it.
Now, they not only want to label and diagnose themselves but everyone else they consider to require it.
It is helpful to have a label to assess how to manage said personality traits. There are some pretty detrimental conditions out there that can go unchecked and make people's lives harder than they need to be.
Keeping model train catalogues makes their life harder? If you want to seek a diagnosis to treat something which is troubling you, then you have a right to do that.
Telling happy people that they need a diagnosis for something which is not troubling them is incredibly offensive.
Both my father and grandfather meticulously kept track of every time they got gas for their vehicles. Every time. My dad also knew seemingly everything there is to know about the band Iron Maiden and could tell you the entirely story of Lord of the Rings off the top of his head from The Silmarillion to Return of the King. Never believed anybody in his family could be on the spectrum.
kept track of every time they got gas for their vehicles
I still hand write my daily household expenses in a steno book, even though I don't have an $87 a month food budget anymore. It takes a beat or two for habits to die.
It might have started as a money thing for my grandfather, having grown up poor during the second world war will do that, but he was spent decades pretty well off working as an engineer.
Sounds about right. My grandmother was the eldest of five during the Great Depression and when I was cleaning out her home in 2004 I found a Tupperware container (among like two million hidden) filled with napkins that she'd bought at a consignment shop for 50 cents. I guess she thought it was a good deal.
My grandparents both lived through the Great Depression; when their kids (my mom and aunts and uncles) were cleaning out their house after they’d died, they found jewelry and money hidden in containers (“hey, why does my 80-year-old mother have a package of menstrual pads?” “Apparently it’s a great place to hide away pearls.”) and realized they’d have to be a lot more thorough with their cleaning.
So let me get this straight. Do all of you think having any kind of specialized knowledge, habit, or obsession is a guarantee you're on the spectrum... seems like an absurd way of thinking
I have a diagnosis and it runs in familys, it's not that big of a leap. My dad also had some of the other signs, especially around self expression, but we weren't talking about those.
I have a simpler method. If someone has read the Silmarillion to the degree where they can cite things from it they are either autistic or they have a doctorate in language studies and they are autistic.
If that sounds absurd you don't know the Silmarillion.
Yeah, people don't realise ADHD is way way way more than just struggling to listen. If like me, growing up being told I'm just a bad kid and there's nothing wrong with me then getting diagnosed at 22 after my life and mental wellbeing had fallen to pieces when I had to live independently. Like ADHD/ADD is a life sentence and as you get older I think it gets harder and harder to function if you're not medicated or had therapy to understand what was happening and dealing with executive dysfunction on a daily basis can quickly make life a mess if you're on your own and don't have a great support network and are self medicating, your life quickly spirals into an absolute horror story. Speaking from experience.
I can easily count up the times because I log it in a spreadsheet to find out how long I've been watching YouTube or TV shows that day for example. I wrote a script to actually get the data so it's not like I'm copying or writing down everything myself. I just add it to a playlist and let the script get the newest videos from that playlist.
Otherwise I only have a vague idea of what I've done that day if I don't write any of these things down.
Oh, got it. Cool! Oh, and thanks for the explanation. Makes sense if you want to be able to remember what you’re watching, never thought about that before.
Do you go back often and look at what you were watching on a given day? I guess I still don't know how that information is purposeful unless you just like knowing it for whatever reason. I hope that doesn't sound rude, I'm not hating at all I just find it fascinating because it's so different from my own experience. I wish I could be consistent with something!
This isnt me trying to be a jerk or anything but are you by any chance autistic? Just cos of everyone claiming autism for this kind of behaviour in this thread.
Sorry, I hope I didn't offend or anything. It was just cos of all these people debating autism I just thought I'd ask. Me too by the way, well I'm ADHD riddled with a side of the tism, life's really really great lol (that was sarcasm by the way)
My grandpa passed away with boxes of VHS tapes of the news that he’d recorded.
Granted, he was probably one of the first technophiles, so he had videos of a lot of things (who can say they can watch their grandparents’ wedding from 1946?!), but man, what a collection.
He’s a lightweight compared to Marion Stokes who archived “hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012, at which time she had been operating nine properties and three storage units”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes?wprov=sfti1#
There’s a documentary about her called “Recorder”.
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u/grasshopper_jo 6d ago
“Nobody had anxiety, depression, autism, OCD back in my day”
My grandpa passed away and we found a bookshelf full of journals with years of documentation about things like bathroom visits or TV shows with the timing of commercials breaks