Snowflakes Melting: Huge Rise in Personality Disorders Among Millennials

Psychologists are especially worried about a huge increase in I Just Can't Even Syndrome.

Look, I don't want to make fun of people suffering serious mental disorders, but it is kind of my job, so....

If you were to come across someone who cried in the streets, who saw the world in terms of black and white and made death threats against strangers, who cowered in a special room and made public displays of naked self-harm and blood letting, you might conclude that they were suffering from a personality disorder.

All these symptoms can be found in the High Conflict Personality Disorder category known as Axis II in DSMV, including Anti-Social PD, Histrionic PD, Paranoid PD, Narcissistic PD, and Borderline PD.

Alternatively, you might reason that these are the everyday behaviors of the modern Social Justice Warrior (SJW).

Of course, not every SJW has a personality condition, but sufferers from High Conflict disorders are often drawn to extreme beliefs and behaviors under the illusion that they are acting politically.

How many times have I said this is not a politics, but a pathology masquerading as politics to reassure itself?

And how many times have I told you to click on my obvious rickrolls so I can have some enjoyment in my workday?

NOT ENOUGH TIMES, I guess.

A 2016 UK survey found that, since 1990, rates of depression and anxiety among the young have increased by 70%, while the American Counseling Association has reported a “rising tide of personality disorders among millennials.”

That such disorders appear to be an acute problem with this generation may be an unintended outcome of the unprecedented experiment conducted in the 1990s and 2000s by progressive parents.

In 2014, a survey of 100,000 college students at 53 U.S. campuses by the American College Health Association found that 84% of U.S. students feel unable to cope, while more than half experience overwhelming anxiety.

I can only recommend reading the Lukianoff/Haidt article on perverse behavioral conditioning.

Therapeutic behavioral conditioning trains people how to de-trigger themselves from triggers that cause panic, anxiety, depression, or bad behavior (drinking, etc.) That sort of behavioral conditioning teaches people to be mindful of their triggers, to understand that the trigger is just a tic with no real world purpose, and to train themselves to associate the trigger not with an adverse behavioral pattern (being in crowd triggers claustrophobia-like panic) but to train the trigger to lead to some other more benign consequence (being in crowd triggers recitation of the Ode to Joy).

The idea is that your brain has miswired itself to connect an input (too many people close to me) to an undesirable psycho-somatic reaction (heart racing, extreme anxiety), and that it takes a determined attempt to reprogram the brain and untangle those wires so that the triggering input leads first to a benign output and, ultimately, no particular output at all.

This works. Allen Carr's How to Quit Smoking the Easy Way taught me how to re-wire the trigger (the anxiety/stress one feels when one's 45 minute nicotine clock runs down to 0) into a different behavioral pattern (go outside, gulp in some fresh air, pace around a little bit like I used to do when smoking). It also taught me that the stress of not smoking was irrational, and that it would be helpful to view the addiction as a malignant parasite inside of me trying to manipulate my brain into keeping it fed while it ruined my body.

Works.

Anyway, Lukianoff suffered from some kind of triggered anxiety (I forget which), and underwent cognitive behavioral therapy, and cured himself of it

He realized that the process could be reversed. As brains with bad triggers could be un-triggered to be healthy, so too could completely healthy brains be deliberately taught to be triggered by harmless things and bring about various mental ailments, panic, anxiety, irrational emotional outbursts, a compulsion to violence, tantrums, etc.

And he brought this theory to a social psychologist named Haidt and asked him "Is this possible?" And Haidt said, "Damn it, not only is that possible, I think you've hit upon a very real malapplication of psychological techniques -- we're psychologically training an entire swath of the population to be crazy."

Okay, he didn't really say that. But that's kind of the gist.

Definitely read it.

There's no great mystery to what's going on. People who train themselves to be cool and clear of mind will find themselves becoming more cool and clear of mind.

People who train themselves to go to pieces over every damn thing will find themselves getting better and better at going to pieces over every damn thing.

When you valorize a mental disorder and turn it into a virtue to be cultivated, guess what you're gonna get? More mental disorders.

I don't want anybody to try to prove it, but if you're insane enough to try to prove it, pick a common trigger, like driving over a bridge. Every time you drive over the bridge, make yourself hyperventilate and imagine a terrible car crash. Also focus on all the things currently causing you genuine anxiety so that you will associate the bridge with your actual anxiety reactions.

Attempt to instill in yourself a sense of fear (you can actually do this -- you know what fear feels like in your body and brain, you just need to simulate it a bit). You can raise your pulse and blood pressure by hyperventilating and tensing up.

Do this 40 or 50 times and you won't have to pretend to have a phobia about driving over bridges anymore. You'll have actually created in your brain a direct trigger from the stimulus (the bridge) to the reaction (hyperventilating, anxiety, panic), and none of that will be a simulation any longer. It will now be real, and you now you will have to spend six months or a year (or more) trying to cure yourself of it.

I urge you to not actually attempt that experiment on yourself and just accept that this is how most anxieties get made. This video explains the basics: your brain is smart, just as smart as you are, and it's also lazy. Kind of like you are. It wants to use the least higher cognitive ability possible for any kind of task, because cognition bandwidth is premium bandwidth and it wants to keep that clear for important stuff. (And because it's lazy -- it doesn't want to burn energy unnecessarily.) So anytime it spots actions that are usually taken together, like putting one foot in front of the other, shifting the wait forward, then putting the other foot forward -- you know, walking -- it automates that process so that the higher cognition parts of the brain don't have to tediously go through each step with direct conscious control.

So if your brain keeps noticing that every time you drive over a bridge you start (deliberately) hyperventilating and tensing and thinking about horrible car accidents, it's going to say "Hey, I can save a bunch of processor power here if I just make an automatic neural linkage between input 'bridge' and output 'irrational panic attack.' If I make it all unconscious and completely automated, that frees me up for important things, like daydreaming about Kate Upton's magnificent rack."

And it thinks it's going to be doing you a favor with that, and often automation of basic routines is a huge favor (no one really wants to think about each step while walking), but when it does it with a bad habit or a hysterical reaction, it's deploying a useful process towards a counter-productive end.

Social Justice Warriors begin by feigning outrage and emotional upset because they've been instructed that this makes them "educated" and "enlightened" (and it's easier to cry like a baby than, say, cultivate a basic understanding of a subject or an appreciation of an art).

But at some point, this stops being feigned. They've now taught themselves to take the input "something about Trump" and produce the output "hysterical crying fit and panic attack" for real.

And you could even de-program of this over six months or a year of effort... but doing that would require effort, which they've been taught doesn't make you a good person and probably just shows your #Privilege, and doing that would require they actually want to quit the bad behavior -- which, of course, they don't.

And there's really no way around the fact that you have to want to quit an unhealthy behavior to actually quit it. You gotta admit you have a problem before you can fix it, and, as I'm sure they'll be the first to tell you, they're already perfect in every conceivable way.

And Here You Go: A gym has banned mainstream media news from playing on any of its tvs due to fears about the emotional safety of its members.

A YMCA in Scranton, Pa. has banned mainstream media television channels from playing in the facility due to concern for the physical and emotional safety of its members.

The Greater Scranton YMCA's board of directors sent a letter to its members regarding the facility's new politics-free zone policy.

Mainstream media channels such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are now banned from the facility due to "raised concerns about the safety, both physically and emotionally" of the members.

"Members said the ban came after some political discussions in the locker room turned contentious," the New York Post reported on Monday.

To be honest, I don't think I want to see news when I'm out in public myself. The country is too divided. I don't want to see MSNBC, and I trust the snowflakes don't want a full face of Tucker Carlson either.

But still, I gotta think the people having problems here are the people who have been told by their Media and Academic Mind-Lords that freaking out over trivial things makes you a smart person who may one day join the Media and Academic Mind-Lord class.

posted by Ace at 12:54 PM

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