Gibbonstrength posted:

This i claim is a good point. If anything it seems like the way people define these mental illnesses (like bpd and narcissism) is design to quarantine those conditions off into a few extreme cases. In a way it's our society's defence mechanism: define narcissism so narrowly and tied so such a rare constellation of symptoms that it's never about me, it's always about somebody else, some mythical weirdo. You could say the dsm definition of narcissism is a narcissistic defence.

I see what you mean about the "mythical weirdo" but I feel it's more that people now reserve the right to place their erstwhile allies and lifelong enemies alike outside the borders of sanity & unreachable by discussion based on what they happened to say this week, that this behavior is cheered on as sportsmanlike or even heroic. I've been guilty of it as well. This is part of a mechanism where everyone has come to expect it and accept it from others, so much so that many people have started to cast about for accepted ways to be officially infantilized and degraded by certain sets of these assumptions to avoid getting called the wrong sort of crazy at a vulnerable time. That sadly to me seems reasonable as a self-defense strategy in certain ways.

You claim your own diagnosis, get there first with a cooperative provider, and anchor it to bourgeois institutions and their records so other people constantly trying to lay an antagonistic diagnosis on you from afar, using "common wisdom" against you, can be refuted by an appeal to medical authority. "Acting crazy" in this growing sense isn't about trying to prove to yourself or others that you're a dangerous edge case or even that you're oppressed, it's about beating all the little wannabe psychiatrists around you to the punch, at your job, among your friends, your family, your spouse or partner, or if you're in the public eye, anyone writing anything that might get picked up by the press - beating these roving pseudo-physicians by getting the "real" diagnosis down on paper that can be put in a drawer somewhere and brought out to argue against a "misdiagnosis", whether to maintain what you have or struggle to survive when it's taken away "at will".

The most often cited of these is how psychiatry has affirmed changing social norms about trans identity and gender dysphoria by keeping the disorder on the books but changing the treatment to hormones, surgical reassignment etc. per the comfort of the patient. Some radical feminists sometimes try to follow this down a trail of pure divine logic and "point out" that identity disturbance isn't treated this way on the same books, like it's an earth-shaking discovery they've made that it would be considered abusive and harmful to handle identity disturbance under the same "rules". Or they argue that someone with severe identity disturbance wouldn't be considered a protected class under current legal theories of discrimination and try to use that to attack laws to protect trans people in the workplace or in public accommodations.

That seems cosmically beside the point to me because obviously people who are indisputably disordered under existing social norms, like BPD patients, also have to "cheat" if they want to live a life that matches their relative ability to function or even allows them to stave off suicide. They have to "reassign" themselves with a professional's help to a diagnosis that's considered treatable because the institutional one that matches their symptoms was used as a sort of wastebasket taxon and a way to discipline patients for failing to satisfy therapists' bourgeois ambitions in earlier generations, especially women.

If you "are" BPD under the current model, and you can work a job if given treatment, and indeed want to work a job, you can't "be" BPD, not in a lot of places and certainly not under a private insurance regime. To agree to treatment that might (and I stress, might) be effective in helping you pursue not only individual, but collective and political goals, you have to disown the diagnosis that recommends that treatment and find a professional willing to maintain the lie for you to provide it regardless. And I mean, forget investigating etiology further or developing more effective treatments when it's a disorder with a high risk of suicide and you're required to use private insurance. People aren't going to risk death revealing themselves even when promised privacy, and they're smart not to, because under the current economic and social system even collective benefits down the line seem unlikely as an outcome.

So on that basis it's hard for me to look at people who wrap themselves up in their self-assigned (or "official") diagnoses in online communities together and see edge cases or freaks, or anything but the likely near future of much of humanity in the West, for all of us beneath the bourgeoisie, only we'll all be required to perform similarly and reproduce those performances on cue in order to stay employed and employable, or, barring that, to receive public assistance and thus survive. We may already be there or close to it given the wild spikes in mood disorder diagnoses among the described population. Like, the nightmare on both the political left and right in literature and other media for decades has been all of us controlled through prescription drugs, but I think it's maybe a lot scarier if we're all taking drugs, or pretending to take drugs, that actually do jack shit while we're forced to affirm their effectiveness in treating conditions we're required to "have". Using the term loosely, that's a hell of a lot of surplus repression.

roseweird posted:

http://samvak.tripod.com/

http://www.bpdcentral.com/narcissistic-disorder/hallmarks-of-npd/

OK, so this is my blog and I'll digress if I want to. A Facebook friend who writes a colum about technology for seniors (oh my God I now fit into that category) asked, "I'm writing a column about smartphones and why everyone should have them. Tell me why you don't juse them and I will conveince you that you should." I justify writing a blog about this because I am a lonely author who works out of my home.

So why don't I use a smartphone? Who knows; I may in the future. But not now. People talk about why it's so great. But there are lots of things I don't have to worry about.

As I said, keep in mind I work as an author at home and don't live the life of a traveling execdutive. And by the way, these are all true stories.

I don't worry about not enough battery time and not having wi fi. I don't wory how much I have to pay for all this. I don't worry I am going to lose every bit of data in one device.

When I go to lunch with friends, I don't have to stack my phone on the table and play the game of whoever picks up theirs first pays the tab. If I have friends coming in from out of town I don't automatically attack my phone after dinner as a habit while they are sitting there saying, "Hey, we came here to visit you."

Friends can't get away with texting me "I guess I'm not going to be there after all" or "I'll be late" because I know people who WOULD be late just because they could do that. I don't worry about not having access because if I am of desperate need of information from the net (like an address) there are many ways of getting it (last time I asked the secretary at a reception desk to look something up).

When I travel to Mexico I don't need to worry when I only had the address of the hotel on my cell and now I don't know where it is because I don't get reception because it's in the wilds of Mexico.

I don't worry about having the latest and greatest technology to impress my friends and find strangers to ...meet for coffee, let's just say. I don't worry that I am missing apps because I when I go out (and too rarely it is) I want to be OUT, not in again.

I don't worry about people reaching me when I'm on vacation. I don't worry about my relationships with people getting shallower. I don't worry I am going to text and drive. I donj't worry about cell phone addiction. I don't worry I am going to fall into the ocean because I am texting.

However, now I DO worry that others are texting and driving. I worry that we now have to have public service messages to combat a whole new level of stupidity.

(And we don't need a new level of stupidity. I just saw a guy on TV stop people in the street and ask them if they knew what political party president Obama belonged to. You would not believe the number of people who had no idea.)

I saw a lovely T-shirt the other day of a satirical picture of the classic painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" except everyone was texting instead of enjoying a day at the park. I gave it as a present to a friend. He would have thanked me, he said, except I didn't text and it was too hard to communicate any other way.

We are all doomed.....

roseweird posted:

shriekingviolet is that you, at your job

black robe and spooky pumpkin head is my life

glomper_stomper posted:

i'm gonna be getting drunk at a "lo-fi synthpop" whinefest in a shed and projecting all of my hatred of the political system onto the despicable art people there so i don't have to waste any time on the election tomorrow.

all power to the soviets or whatever

"lo-fi synthpop" sounds like my jam