Mental Illness As A Trend

This is something that is more and more common...

You can go onto most social media platforms and find people that are speaking about their mental health, and the struggles that they are having. I have no issue with that, as it gives the world a better understanding of whatever they are dealing with.

However, there is also a rather strange trend where people are claiming to have different mental health issues, or neurological issues that they do not have. Some of these things are exceedingly rare in the world, but if you believed what you saw regarding them on places like TikTok, you would think that you are surrounded by them. One of these would be dissociative identity disorder. DID is exceptionally rare, tends to be extraordinarily difficult to manage for the person with it, and is caused by severe abuse in childhood. There is a great documentary regarding DID that came out in the nineties that you can watch below:

If you took a moment and watched this you will see that there is a pattern that goes along with DID. It comes from horrific experiences as a child, the identities created serve a purpose, and it is very very rare.

What you will see on TikTok are people that claim that they have a system consisting of a thousand or more personalities, some of which are celebrities, or they are not human. DID is claimed by people that have no history of abuse, therefore no reason for them to have it.

This is not the only mental health subject that is being adopted, and mental health is not the only thing that these kids are using to build an identity for themselves. Another would be Tourette's Syndrome. This is another diagnosis that is not common, and the most common presentations of it, such as fiddling with hair, eye blinking, nose twitching, eye darting, among many others, are not what most of these people choose to imitate. If the person has vocal tics, people unfamiliar with Tourette's will often assume that means that they scream obscenities at inappropriate times, or something equally as disruptive. That isn’t the case at all. Vocal tics can be as benign as throat clearing, or clicking noises.

That is not what you will see on TikTok. You will see people that have vocalization or verbal tics only. Things that are performative. You will also see the contagion of these tics translate from one person claiming Tourette’s, to another also making the claim. It would be interesting if the tics could be traced back to their originators, but as I stay as far away from TikToc as I can, it isn’t something I will be spending my time on.

Why do I bring this up? I bring it up because it is only a matter of time before TikToc gets ahold of psychopathy. I have people message me all the time to get confirmation of their psychopathy, and without fail, they are always young people. I have grown annoyed with these types because of their need and desire to be special. They always think that they are much smarter than they are, of course, this is common in teenagers, but they use their belief that they are hyperintelligent to attempt to intellectualize how dangerous they are and to justify behaving like a little twerp in the world.

So, I thought, after receiving yet another message from this sort, to get ahead of the unavoidable attempt to remake psychopathy into an edgelord’s dream over on TikTok. In this particular message, the person wanted to be able to justify their desire to torture people. Often you see this in teenagers that have been bullied. It goes from their desire to do so, into deciding that they are a big bad psychopath, so this desire is “normal”. Obviously, this is a rather emotional process and not one that would happen in a psychopath. A psychopath’s reaction to bullying is fairly straightforward, and that is not to notice.

Bullying only works when there is a reaction from the victim. It is often psychological, but it certainly can be physical as well. This tends to make the victim have a lot of negative self-thoughts, and a desire for the bully or bullies to get their comeuppance.

When someone comes to me and claims that they are a psychopath, or they believe they are a psychopath because of all of their dark thoughts it is a clear indicator that they have emotional responses that psychopaths do not. Interestingly, they get very defensive when I am unwilling to entertain their fantasies.

In all of these instances, the claim to psychopathy comes either from their own sort of fanfiction regarding it, or from reading about the idiots in prisons. This creates a very specific profile.

They are overly friendly to me. This often comes with compliments that are either clearly emotionally manipulative, or are fishing for information. As they are young, they aren’t good at trying to get a person to open up to them. They are always painfully transparent.

Next, they will try to get me to agree with them about their fantasies. It’s totally normal to want to torture a stranger, right? In this last contact, the person asked me a ton of questions, one of which had to do with my response to an answer asking whether or not it was moral to buy a convicted psychopath for their own sadistic pleasure.

Now, I get quite tired of the edgelords, and clearly, the person asking such a question is clearly that. The wannabe psychopath was very perturbed with my response of:

You want to buy a person to torture? Seriously? Reported

They asked me why I would respond in such a way, to which I told them that you create the world in which you want to live, and if you don’t want something to happen to you, don’t do it to others.

That was not an acceptable response to this person and they then whined about how most torturers aren’t tortured, so why couldn’t they do it. It’s not like it was going to come back on them.

Sigh…

The number of people that are unwilling or incapable of understanding personal responsibility in the world is mind-numbing, and here’s one more for the pile. The people that are seeking this validation are doing so for very emotional reasons. it makes them feel powerful and dangerous.

If this becomes part of the pretend mental and neurological health trend the result will be very much like the people that contact me looking for justification and/or confirmation that they are the dangerous psychopath that they imagine themselves to be. That is where comments like this originate from:

I feel like manipulating and dragging ppl to where i want them to be creates a special bond between us, you don't get fun out of anyone so i probably struggle in letting them go. Does that makes me a bit more emotional like normal ppl?Is that a type of neurotypical bond?

White inevitably end up here:

Then could you tell me if i am a psychopath or not?

It is nearly impossible to get someone like this to listen to logic, nor hear how their strong emotional drive to get even with, or show someone that caused them to harm how evil and dangerous they are, removes them from the realm of psychopathy. Psychopaths simply don’t care about other people, or about their drama. It is nonsensical to us, and there will never be a psychopath that is so overly emotional that they are going to contact someone like me to prove just how psychopathic they are. I get questions from genuine people that are curious, but if they are genuinely curious, it is because what I write resonates with them. It isn’t because they are trying to redefine it to match their pretend version of themselves.

I think what is happening on places like TikTok is really unfortunate for the different things these kids are adopting and remaking into something unrecognizable from what it actually is. It also amazes me that it is not being better studied as a social contagion. Some of the DID people will claim that they have a psychopath as an alter. That is literally impossible. Your “alter” does not have a different brain structure than you do, and they do not have the chemical processing that psychopaths do either.

I will say that while watching that documentary on DID, I did find it fascinating that one of the alters one of the participants smoked, but the host did not. It may say something interesting about the psychology of addiction, or it may be that the woman is just not someone that has a propensity to be addicted to smoking, I have no idea.

A person is not a psychopath sometimes. You are born one, or you are not, there is no in-between.

A psychopath isn’t someone that is obsessed with harming people. We don’t even consider other people when we do things, there isn’t a hardwired sadistic streak when it comes to how we think.

Most of the TikTok contagion is passed around by teenage girls. First, teenagers are never psychopaths, we have discussed this, but second, female psychopaths are very rare apparently. This could be due to crappy identification by psychologists, (yet another reason that they should bow out of psychopathy and leave it to the neurologists), or it could, and likely has to do with studying psychopathy in the prison system. Female psychopaths lack the aggression that a male psychopath may experience due to testosterone.

A construct that is defined by mostly males in a prison system sets up a definition for psychopathy that wouldn’t make sense to apply to a female simply because males and females are different. This is, however, the construct that is going to be available to those that are going to take up the mantle of psychopathy for their attention-seeking ways on social media, so that is what we will see attempts at imitating, but through a neurotypical lens.

The more people use things that they do not understand to define themselves and give themselves the appearance of a personality, the more the things that they claim will dilute the understanding of those things. There are enough arguments regarding the veracity of DID as it is. I am not making a statement of fact regarding its existence, because I don’t have that information. I am not someone that is going to take a hard-line stand about someone else’s situation. However, if it is real, the people that are making up stories about it on TikTok are doing damage to the people that actually have it.

I have never understood the romantic notion that some things are assigned by people, but it obviously exists, because there are people flocking to get internet points by playacting something that they have no clue about. It really muddies the water for those that actually are dealing with those things, but worse than that, if they mention it to a new friend or something of that sort, they may be lumped in with these kids making up stories. I imagine that may cause increased stress, embarrassment of even speaking about it in the first place, and possibly shame.

I do think that the trend of this should be studied, however. How interesting it is to see these things spread from one person to another. It isn’t new, it has happened for a very long time, but this is the first time that it can be examined with neuroscience. I think that is a must, but it is also important not to allow this sort of thing to redefine society’s understanding of the appropriated things that are being flaunted as status symbols. If this is happening to you, try to have patience. It will burn out, and something new will take its place. it always does.