I was diagnosed with spd a few years ago. I shared the diagnosis with a few friends, one of whom is a therapist, and they honestly thought it was a misdiagnosis because I don't always have a flat affect, can show happiness, etc. But honestly I loved being diagnosed because I could really identify with what I read about the disorder.
What is described here is something I also struggle with - the obligation to explain my worldview to others. Sometimes there is no way around it, because the more you withdraw to avoid voicing your opinion, the more guilt you can feel for somehow being sneaky or dishonest. I also don't know if sharing the 'why' would really help. What I see as matter-of-fact can make others extremely sad. Either way, it's interesting to think about. Thanks for sharing.
My friend feels like the symptoms (clinical and social) fit her to a T, has felt depersonalized for most of her adult life, and often feels the need to explain and rationalize her experience to perplexed onlookers. My friend also passes somewhat well in society but feels like she has ‘generalized impostor syndrome’ ie towards people in general, not just in the workplace.
In my experience, finding a good therapist depends on establishing a good rapport in a short period of time. To help the odds, I find looking at therapists' profiles[0] for what one finds important helps.
LGBTQ+? Religious? Strongly religious? Polyamorous? An athlete? Willing/unwilling to take medications? Drug use? Etc.
Anything you do not want to be a part of your therapy is something to check profiles for.
If you are a part of a group, talk to local members of that group on-line or in person. They likely will have inside information on what therapists are considered friendly.
I'd also read up on the different types/styles of therapists/therapy. You may find you're fine with any of them. You may find some of them horrifying. This info is likely to be on their profile.
Edited to add:
Go in with an idea of what you want out of therapy. If you're not sure, you can talk to the therapist about what's possible. Do you want coping strategies / a change in behavior / someone to talk to / someone to help determine why you're depressed / etc?
If it isn't working with a therapist, you can pick a different one. It may be worth talking to the current one about what's not working for you, but you always have the right to see someone else.
[0] Searching the web for the therapist's name and location is a good place to start. If you have insurance, insurance profiles may also provide information.
>Go in with an idea of what you want out of therapy.
My friend struggles with this. She feels mostly comfortable with being odd and feels like she is successful. It’s easy enough to avoid (or mask up with) people who don’t or won’t understand. At the worst, there is an awkward interaction that can be cut short. Sometimes she has bad spells but bounces back OK.
Perhaps therapy isn’t for her after all. There are worse off people in this world who would benefit more.
Honestly just chose one at random and ended up building trust with them because they were professional and academic. I kept going back because it was interesting to me to talk about my experience and have them weigh in with what the DSM says, what academics are saying, etc.
SWIM is often used in online discussions on sensitive topics to avoid self-identifying as a member of a stigmatized or criminalized group: Someone Who Isn’t Me.
However, I have a friend called SWIM, who is the referent in my posts. I’ll update the posts to refer to the friend explicitly.
> What is described here is something I also struggle with - the obligation to explain my worldview to others. [...] What I see as matter-of-fact can make others extremely sad.
Hopefully I'm not making the struggle worse by asking this -- but can you explain what you mean? That is, what is it about your worldview that causes others to feel extremely sad?
A personal example: if the conversation ever turns to children, or why we don't have any, the real answer is that we (my wife and I) strongly believe that any children we might have had would have a (much) worse experience growing up than we did. They would almost certainly not be able to dream about affording housing, they will be dealing with fallout from the ubiquity of PFAS/PFOS/pthalates/microplastics/..., probably getting dragged into war(s), dealing with a polarised society and lack of civil discourse, they will have every move they make from birth tracked by companies that will be telling them what to buy and when, their ability to hold a political opinion that is their own will be severely compromised by social media and advertisers, they will be dealing with the fallout of climate change/ increased atmospheric pollutants, the list goes on. It seems that on so many measures the world is getting objectively worse, and much harder to navigate. So I censor myself when taking to friends, particularly friends with kids, because it's not fair on them to cause them to start worrying like I do.
I mean, if you're focused on reading all the terrible things going on in the world all the time, you aren't actually living in reality. You're living in a reality created by journalists whose job is to get you to click on their articles - usually by reporting the most depressing or terrifying news with a strongly negative bias.
I wanted to say that I admire you and your wife's selflessness. Many people _know_ these things, but avert their gaze because they want kids, or don't want to rock the boat too much by not having any.
> or don't want to rock the boat too much by not having any.
Why is "not having children" rocking the boat. Intuitively, I would rather argue that (for example because of reasons outlined by the GP) having children means rocking the boat.
I have a similar experience. It is the emotional detachment from otherwise emotionally salient things that catches people off guard. Sometimes it is interpreted as "dark humor" or "deep cynicism" when the person offering the insight means it only in a realist/stoic sense.
Writing or 'stabbing the page with ink' is great and thaws out the ice in your soul, which we all have from time to time. It's ironic and meta that this is a blogpost expressing various feelings, on a matter related to unexpressed emotions. This is why I blog. I feel vulnerable doing so, but my thoughts are not so bottled up. Then I can say: 'I've expressed that already', albeit through a poor channel of a blog, but it's still out there. If it helped at least one person, I've done my job.
My problem with this is that my thoughts are too jumbled and non linear. I can start writing and my mind will jump to something else tangentially relevant and then do that several more times before I realize and struggle to recall where I originally was
This reminds me of writing „morning pages“. I first heard about it when stumbling upon „The Artists Way“ by Julia Cameron. To get rid of your mental baggage, you should write three pages every morning, she claims. The book is mainly about finding your (lost) inner creativity. But i have generally found that this routine helps to clear blockages in the mind and to become clearer.
I’m bipolar I’ve spent several lifetimes(1) studying humanity.
For many neurotyoical people I’ve interacted with, non-neurotyoical people are an outside context problem.
As an asexual person, sexuality is an outside context problem that goes in both directions.
Human brains are pattern matching machines. When we interact with other people, we have a mental model for how they think (or should think). That model is built from our internal experience.
Without shared internal experience or enough data to imagine it, there will not be true understanding of another’s internal experience.
As a result, while I am fortunate to often be accepted for who I am, many people do not understand. Fortunately, I’ve found complete understanding is not required if the other people simply takes what you say at face value.
The problem comes in when other people decide they don’t trust you and apply their belief of how you should think instead.
Edit 1. For some fun context. :)
When I say several lifetimes, I do mean this quite literally. Mania lets one live at a greatly accelerated rate. Mood swings frequently bring extremes of emotion that are experienced only rarely by the average person. It often gives me a deep understanding of how people work. It’s also a curse I’d be very happy trade for ignorance.
>Mania lets one live at a greatly accelerated rate...It often gives me a deep understanding of how people work
My friend experienced this for the first time recently and can relate, although she does not think it helped her understand people better.
However, the burst of confidence, creative (and sexual) energy did lead her to more prosocial behaviours but in retrospect she was as awkward as ever, without the usual stabilizers of self-consciousness and social anxiety. My friend did some silly things, has regrets and may have overwhelmed people, but she does not think it was necessarily pathological.
My friend got really scared of herself when she realized what she was doing. She felt like she was experiencing the energy of a stimulant high for a few weeks, despite being sober.
My friend is not sure if it was worth it, nor did she prefer it to being depressed, because of that fear of herself.
The mood swings in general give me insight into internal state. Mania does not.
Mania gave me the energy to do a lot of things I would never have done or experienced without. The variety of lived experience means I know what many people’s jobs are and the general strategies used to do them.
The combination makes understanding people easier.
But mania isn’t worth it. It is a terrible monster I never want to see again. One episode broken me so completely I lost all self-identity.
Mania is often accompanied by quite a few negative aspects:
- Irrational, grandiose ideas (i.e., delusions)
- Increased susceptibility to believe ideas (e.g., more likely to fall for a spam marketing scheme)
- Hallucinations
- Impulsive and/or risky behaviors
- Easily distracted
- Difficulty sustaining attention
I imagine the parent commenter more likely experiences hypomania associated with bipolar II disorder rather than the mania associated with bipolar I disorder. The former is much less likely to exhibit the listed negative symptoms and general disinhibition tends to be lesser as well.
I’m pretty firmly diagnosed Type 1. My psychiatrist said I’m “high functioning”.
I’ve had many manic episodes lasting 9 months, with a least two psychotic breaks. The latest lasting 4 months. Still managed to work in an office as a developer throughout it.
> Human brains are pattern matching machines. When we interact with other people, we have a mental model for how they think (or should think). That model is built from our internal experience.
Without shared internal experience or enough data to imagine it, there will not be true understanding of another’s internal experience.
As a result, while I am fortunate to often be accepted for who I am, many people do not understand. Fortunately, I’ve found complete understanding is not required if the other people simply takes what you say at face value.
Doesn't taking people at face value usually result in these misunderstandings in the first place? Many people use language as a signifier of their emotional states rather than as a tool to express objective assessments of reality.
I agree that psychologists too readily dismiss people who are weird as having a disorder.
Any non-nomrmal behaviour, taken to an extreme, can cause a disorder in the sense that that person can't function (e.g. to keep herself fed and employed). This means unless we literally are the most average person, we all have the starts of a disorder. It does not mean we have a disorder because it's the magnitude that makes it a disorder.
Genuine question: in this case, what is in fact the disorder? Reading through the description of Schizoid, they like to be alone, they don't meet people's emotional expectations -- these don't sound like disorders.
Behaviors become disorders when they severely affect your ability to function. “In society” is often added.
The “in society” is a sticking point for many people because a great many diagnoses are only disorders due to modern society or cultures.
Some disorders are largely independent of culture. Severe executive function problems are on par with more visible disabilities. Even if having vision from God are acceptable, a bipolar person will be clearly marked as ”not normal” in any culture.
"Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. [...] [T]hus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’."
It's been described as "the personality disorder that lacks a personality". It's a deficit disorder, because the person lacks certain traits that you'd expect to see in a "normal" person.
It meets the requirements for a disorder, since it's a deviation from social norms and can interfere with a person's life to various degrees. SzPD doesn't get a lot of attention, so the diagnosis itself isn't desperately well developed. It's more of a baffling psychological curiosity to many. Something they don't quite know how to deal with.
I'm talking about a clinical definition of a "personality disorder".
> A personality disorder is a way of thinking, feeling and behaving that deviates from the expectations of the culture, causes distress or problems functioning, and lasts over time.[1]
What I personally think wasn't stated and is not relevant to my point.
>Personality is the way of thinking, feeling and behaving that makes a person different from other people.
So tell me how SPD lacks a personality. A person without a personality would be indistinguishable from other people.
If you read the definition of SPD, it doesn't quite satisfy the definition of disorder, nothing there implies distress or problems. Deviations are expected alright, because people are different. Seems to not care? It's not an expectation of the culture that you're entitled to be relevant everywhere, you're relevant only where you earned it, and care about praise is deeply personal.
Disorders aren't intended to dismiss, they diagnose based on a standard criteria and can provide a toolset for care (if desired).
And unfortunately in the US, a diagnosis is often required to continue seeking therapy (due to insurance requirements).
Schizoid personality disorder disorder is a set of criteria that can probably be described as "extreme introversion" — it's a disorder in the sense that this isn't the norm in society. What someone decides to do with that information is up to them; some choose to do nothing and that's ok.
No, Schizoaffective disorder is when someone displays the symptoms of schizophrenia and also the symptoms of a mood disorder (bipolar, depression). You're likely thinking of schizoid personality disorder, which is characterized by solitary behavior and lack of attachments.
communication becomes impossible in extreme cases - there are too many prior assumptions in a typical conversation between humans for it to occur without the ability to orient in a shared reference frame.
The author should have defined the term "schizoid" since it colloquially refers to Schizophrenia rather than Schizoid Personality Disorder. The former involves hallucinations and is also a pejorative used to imply that someone is "crazy". The latter is an extreme form of introversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder
DSM-5 criteria:
- Neither desires nor enjoys close relationships, including being part of a family.
- Almost always chooses solitary activities.
- Has little, if any, interest in having sexual experiences with another person.
- Takes pleasure in few, if any, activities.
- Lacks close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives.
- Appears indifferent to the praise or criticism of others.
- Shows emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affectivity.
The author did not need to define schizoid because:
1. It is their blog, and they probably assume their audience is educated in what schizoid means or is capable of looking it up.
2. Schizoid does not colloquially refer to schizophrenia, and schizophrenia is not a pejorative for "crazy," these are both real and distinct (but related) disorders that do not require anyone talking about them to dichotomize them from what you might assume people misconstrue their false definitions as.
Also, it's not an "extreme form of introversion" - it's much more than that, and putting it that way minimizes the serious nature of the disorder.
You're incorrect on point 2. In many communities, schizoid/schizo does refer in a derogatory/shorthand manner to schizophrenia and many more people are familiar with schizophrenia than schizoid disorder, so that is more likely to be the immediate assumption.
> 2. Schizoid does not colloquially refer to schizophrenia
It often does colloquially refer to schizophrenia, I've heard people use the word this way for as long as I can remember. General purpose English dictionaries document this colloquial meaning, I checked several to be sure:
Schizophrenia also has disaffected response and reduced emotional affect, btw. Folks who have schizophrenia sometimes considers this more debilitating than hallucinations, because they don't respond to antipsychotics.
The dilemma with these sorts of discussions always seems to come back to where the line is drawn between the personality and the disorder. Clearly there are some pathologies whose features manifest in ways that are dangerous (..to one's self and/or others) but it's not clear to me which of the criteria above rise from being facets of ordinary personalities and become truly pathological.
This seems to also coincide with other literature that describes those with SPD as being among the least likely to seek treatment.
The sexuality part is interesting to me, because gross biomechanics aside, it's one intense merging with someone else emotions. I'd be very happy to find places or people to discuss the neuropsy or neurobiology of this.
These are different things. They may share some overlapping symptoms, perhaps even some similar brain changes, but the internal phenomenology of them are quite different. They are not exclusive, but nor are they the same thing.
No, they're just different words and different times. Schizoids have a false mask they use to interact with others. If we could have, we would have medicated them back then so that they're always presenting with the false mask instead of their "wrong" asocial presentation. That's what ADHD is. We didn't suddenly stop having schizoids and start having a bunch of ADHD people.
No, they are different things. I am honestly quite confused as to how you could think that they were the same thing. They both exist as a constellation of separate diagnostic criteria, for example, and the internal phenomenology of both is different. You can have one, but not the other, or you could have both.
I mean, do you think ADHD is new? Did it just not exist before 1990 or whenever it was made up? Do you think any medical condition before then covers what ADHD is/was?
Lance Armstrong when he is biking and Lance Armstrong when he is recovering are not the same either. But Lance can take drugs to get more of the biking time and less of the recovering time. This is how SPD and ADHD work. ADHD is just a medicated false mask that a schizoid person can maintain for longer periods of time than usual, without episodes of hermitude to recharge. They're doping.
Failure to maintain the mask looks like a breakdown in attention/focus. People do long, focused work because of the expectations of others. Schizoids don't experience that, but instead basically run on obsession. They stop working when that fizzles out. On pills, though, they can work forever.
The 'scientific' people serve the people making the pills and nobody else. They rename everything every few years to sell more pills. If you want a proper take on SPD, look up Millon and his subtypes. Most of the "knowledge" of conditions in the zeitgeist comes from prescription drug commercials.
I think you're being overly cynical. Of course over time as science advances we will recognize more subtle distinctions between things which we used to perceive as the same. That's how science works. Just because two separate things are similar and sometimes found together doesn't mean they are identical.
Whether something is a "disorder" or not is somewhat subjective and opinionated, for sure. But as someone diagnosed with ADHD, I often find that the expectations of modern society can be debilitating. Whether the disorder lies in me or in an unaccommodating society is an interesting question, but it is a separate one.
Please email me and take my personality test! Please. Y'all are like Bigfoot. You drop a wonderful comment like this and then disappear into the ether.
SPD has the worst outcomes of anything in the DSM. Only someone with SPD could possibly ever see it as the non-broken state, or as not a disorder. You're exactly the type of person I'm talking about. Do you see your vocabulary? Please contact me! I'm a philosopher working on a new model and could really use your point of data.
Millon's subtypes of schizoid don't at all resemble ADHD. Millon's subtypes are:
* aloof
* lethargic
* barren (intellectually)
* flat
* complacent or lifeless
None of these reflect ADHD, which is a dysregulation disorder resulting in the inability to form socially expected task-reward feedback loops. This means forgetting to do small chores once they leave one's sight even under the strong desire to do those chores, having strong emotional responses, needing higher levels of stimulation, and strong sense of impulse. None of ADHD has anything to do with whether or not one is displaying apathy or lack of interest in engagement broadly.
SPD is not a disorder of obsession. You might be thinking of the related-but-very-different Schizotypal, whose strange beliefs, sensory disruptions, and emotional impropriety I can see as potentially looking like ADHD.
You said it: Socially expected. They're failing to complete the loop because they're schizoid and social rewards aren't inherently motivating.
How do ADHD people act when their attention breaks? It's in the same ways Millon described. If you look at a schizoid person you can say that's the person and they have a masked state. Or you can see them as an ADHD person that has a checked-out state. But you're describing the same condition and the same person.
The ADHD approach is to medicate the patient so they can maintain the masked state for more of their waking hours. And avoid that terrible checked-out state! Except that's their real, schizoid personality. It's just less socially acceptable than the mask.
I didn't say it was a disorder of obsession. That's just their only tool for doing focused work if they don't have pills. If anything they struggle with maintaining obsessions. I'm familiar with schizotypal PD too and not accidentally talking about something else.
No, I don't think you understand ADHD. ADHD people do not behave in the way you describe when their attention "breaks". Their attention doesn't "break". Their attention is simply not regulated and so they will fail to perform tasks, which is not the same as having uninterest in those tasks which characterizes schizoid personality disorder. What you're describing as a checked out state is actually a reaction to frustration and distress that the ADHD person experiences as a result of being unable to regulate their attention long enough to perform tasks they want to do, which is not schizoid personality disorder characterized by not having a desire to form relationships and integrate with society. They're essentially completely unrelated conditions.
This also doesn't explain sensitivity to rejection or impulsive behavior typical of ADHD.
Again, ADHD is the mask state, it's not SPD. It appears opposite of SPD in order to mask it.
The frustration and distress are both there in SPD too.
Schizoids are indifferent to praise or criticism. Do you see how that's the opposite of sensitivity to rejection? Do you see how the schizoid's listlessness is the opposite of ADHD's impulsiveness? The mask is a compensatory state, like the narcissist's super-confident persona.
I'm rusty but ADHD was HKD (hyperkinetic disorder) in the olden times and had a much, much tighter criteria pre DSM-5? Think incident rates in Europe is approx. <2% under ICD-10 vs >10% in America due to DSM.
The major diff. iirc was no comorbidity in the case of HKD.
If you were depressed or anxious you couldn't also have ADHD whereas in America we can just top up amphetamines with benzos and treat them both.
I don't think that your assertion makes sense in its own context. What you are saying is that "SPD" exists, and "ADHD" is just a modern rebranding of it. But why do you decide that "SPD" is the spot at which scientists got it right? Were they free from the corruption that you imply?
I agree with a general skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry. I disagree that all of neurology and pharmacology have been completely subsumed by that industry. It is not entirely free of it either, but there is more nuance here than you seem to be allowing.
I suppose that's one way to do it. I don't think that it makes any sense, but you're entitled to it. I do believe, however, that you are disregarding tens of thousands of principled researchers who have spent their life on this, and substituting outdated knowledge for it.
SPD shares more similarities to Narcissitic Personality Disorder than it does with ADHD -- not in terms of effect and imposition on other people, but rather in the lived experience of self and other, self and world. I don't think SPD (or NPD) are something you can medicate.
They're also kinda opposites. The cure for NPD is isolation and the cure for SPD is being around people (agreed-- neither are in pill form yet). They both have immutable internal status, but the narcissist's is very low while the schizoid's is very high.
The best example IMO of a cured narcissist is Larry Lawton, who faced a long period of isolation in prison. He's on Youtube.
If we're going that route, I think it's more likely we'll see clinical outcomes with therupeutic use of psilosybin or MDMA.
I don't think it is so much that the brain needs to be tweaked, but that experiencing self, other, and world in a different ways can transform those in a way that does not require ongoing medication.
It kind of does, even if mistakenly. People use "schizo" as a derogatory way to refer to schizophrenic and "schizoid" isn't a commonly used term; I have seen people use it this way.
Make a mental model of which people can understand which things. Understand what topics they are even interested in. Understand how disinterested person reacts and know when to stop, and understand how an interested person react and know when you can share. Ask people if they are interested in what you're saying. Check their attention. Check their understanding. Understand which people simply don't have the mental capacity to understand difficult topics and just avoid discussing it with them. Understand which people are judging topics emotionally and avoid trying to reason with them logically because it's pointless. Don't try to drop everything all at once, understanding is gradual. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
You might have great mental models of the "world" but lack in mental models of other people. Some rational people have really undeveloped emotional reasoning, because they don't use it for themselves, but still use their own emotional reasoning for understanding other people. You can rationally understand other people even if they are irrational themselves.
>> this boundary will always exist, regardless of the amount of therapy, or effort, that is placed upon it. despite the psychological community, or family or friends or partners that could attempt to help.
That boundary can be significantly moved or even torn down. Psychologists often don't really understand how to help, so they either ignore it or do other things that may or may not work (or may be harmful). IMHO more writings are needed from those who have made significant improvement in this condition, the clinicians understanding is either too abstract or not correct (SPD is not same as AvPD for example).
I have placed myself in therapy dozens of times up until now. Ultimately nothing has ever worked out up to now. There was always something that prevented further introspection, like the author describes. I am not sure that it is surmountable. Past therapists have told me that my relationship with them was not viable.
At some point I only went to therapy on someone else's insistence. At some other point I realized that I was only ever in therapy because I was terrified of those other people's eyes on me, insisting that I go or I can't reasonably integrate with their company based on becoming a person changed to their expectations. When I realized that, I lost interest entirely. I also reported my experiences with therapy to the other party, and predictably, they shunned me.
So there were two conclusions I could make: that maybe therapy isn't ever going to be as effective with me than with an average person, and that if someone's acceptance of me depends on my acceptance of therapy, then they are a lost cause.
At the same time, I can understand such a response. There are probably hundreds of comments on this site directed towards depressed engineers and others where the advice essentially amounts to "go to therapy." What would those people say if your response was "no, it doesn't work?" But the fact is, it doesn't work. At the same time, common sense surrounding therapy is too strong a force to be reckoned with on an average advice thread, and the culture is not going to overturn it. So your only option is to stay quiet, and be left alone.
This I think is one example of the "boundary" that the author describes, in trying to address that boundary with action.
In my own experience, therapy works (and I’m not an easy case either). It’s more like not all therapists work, and the depth of your issues may be too big to even comprehend in a couple of years. I can’t tell for my hardest issues, but relatively small ones like a bunch of situational anxieties I successfully fixed. (The great finding was that once I eliminated the first algorithm, I realized that they are not situational, but remarkably generic. Lots of thoughts like “hmm, this is the same pattern, let’s give zero fucks and get new experience in return”.)
It’s still a well full of mud nonetheless, but hey I’ve been filling it for 35 years. I score around 6/7 on the above definition, also failed a socialization test.
I hit the wall a few times too. Questions not responding, nothing in my head to answer them. This wall is hard, hard on a level of debugging a binary without any debug info. I decided to relax a little and just accept and explore “theories” of my therapist and my own (e.g. just make an extreme statement about me and accept and therapy it, as if it was true). Also, some ideas don’t work because you may be trapped between an objective situation and your core character. While unsolvable, it e.g. gave me ~1.5x raise and benefits as a result. Nice. Also, when in a complete dead end, I just went on a session anyway and “started a new thread”. Most of them merged eventually in surprising ways and gave more clarity on previous ones.
I wish you to find what works for you eventually, if you are willing to continue.
For me it's more the nature of the therapeutic relationship that gives me pause. I already don't find social experiences rewarding in any sense. My explorations with several therapists in trying to change or manage this failed, from what I think was the flawed hypothesis that I could be made to care about something that I didn't want to care about. And in fact, the nature of social experiences extends to the socialization necessary when interacting with a therapist. I don't know if most therapists are capable of addressing that issue.
This in fact seems to be a common issue with those who are diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder - that they are unable to develop a strong enough relationship with a therapist to see results, possibly because of a lack of social or related interest.
I can only hope that I don't permanently lose interest in working for money as well, for in that case I could be materially damaged for life.
And depression for me comes back when I'm reminded by others that they think I am depressed and need help. It is what well-meaning people and medical professionals cannot resist bringing up now that the subject of depression is less taboo than in the past. And yet, for me it's every little implication by the outside world that I could be in more trouble than I think I am that causes me the most anguish. As a result, I would prefer not to bring up depression if it's not so blatantly obvious that it can't not be discussed. They even could be right in reading my state of mind, but that same issue could also explain why therapy hasn't been successful for me.
Also, when I think about psychotherapy, I tend to remember this passage from Thinking Fast and Slow, a book that dozens of HN users have recommended, that resonated with me in precisely the wrong way:
"You will from time to time meet a patient who shares a disturbing tale of multiple mistakes in his previous treatment. He has been seen by several clinicians, and all failed him. The patient can lucidly describe how his therapists misunderstood him, but he has quickly perceived that you are different. You share the same feeling, are convinced that you understand him, and will able to help. [...] Do not even think of taking on this patient! Throw him out of the office! He is most likely a psychopath and you will not be able to help him."
Many years later I learned that the teacher had warned us against psychopathic charm, and the leading authority in the study of psychopathy confirmed that the teacher’s advice was sound.
I know that I was already biased when I reached this passage, but it single-handedly turned me off of the idea of pop-psych. This was exactly what I had done to the past few therapists I had seen, and I wasn't trying to be disagreeable or charming or anything. I had simply stated what was my own reality: that I felt that my previous therapists didn't understand me. The fact that Kahneman's idea of a well-trained psychotherapist is someone who ought to kick me out of their office instilled a lot of self-doubt about trying therapy again that I don't think I'll be able to explore with another party for a long time. Or, at the very least, that I should do my own research instead of taking the words of popular authors at face value.
the flawed hypothesis that I could be made to care about something that I didn't want to care about
Been there too, had to actively push back. I don't want to be more socialized, better accepted or something. I want to not experience negative emotions while in society. Therapists probably try to resolve this issue in the most default way. I managed to convince mine that it's not what I want, but we are still exploring.
I agree with a sibling commenter - what you feel is the starting point. You don't have to learn/need to care about that something. Your goal is to stop worrying involuntarily when it's nearby. (Sorry if this is obvious or doesn't apply, I'm sharing because some of this wasn't obvious to me for some time.) Also, I can't really say that I'm interested in relationship with a therapist. Barring professional respect, I don't care about him personally, what I do care about are our sessions, the structure of these issues and his professional stance. This is what allows me to open some private doors before him. Not that "buddies" feeling. I wouldn't otherwise trust a similar person that much.
> This was exactly what I had done to the past few therapists I had seen, and I wasn't trying to be disagreeable or charming or anything. I had simply stated what was my own reality: that I felt that my previous therapists didn't understand me.
I have not read that book, but that doesn't seem to be what Kahneman is talking about? He is talking about people who say "all these therapists have failed me, but YOU are different," like they are trying to charm the therapist. I think the red flag here is people who are turning the session into praise for the therapist, whereas the normal reaction when the session is going well would be to keep the focus on yourself so you can finally get some progress.
Also note that you can only say "all previous therapists misunderstood me except you" to one therapist. Anyone after that would effectively be the second. Granted, it's demoralizing, but it IS progress :)
I'll just say this. You've described situations where what people say (you seem depressed or whatever) cause you to feel something. When you feel things - particularly things you'd rather not feel - that is an entry point to progress. Go ahead and feel it. Reflect on why it's there. If other people make you uncomfortable, ask why you feel uncomfortable. Remember, it's not them.
You don't need to overturn whole culture. See Ash experiments: conformism has a funny feature - it works only if there's no disagreement. One disagreement can be enough to instill doubt in assumptions.
Source: I’m decades old, somewhere between SzPD and AvPD. Still officially undiagnosed and not treated for it, despite of years of psychiatrical treatment… I just get antidepressants and anti-generalized-fear drugs (dunno what is proper name) and I’m left alone (literally).
No, you can have SzPD and also a life partner. It can be as easy as getting married due to societal pressure, going with the flow of a relationship can often be significantly easier than fighting off questions about being a permanent single person. Relationships don't have to be lovely, loving things of deep attachment. They can also be points of stability, pooling resources, and taking advantage of societal carve-outs.
Must be a wonderful experience for the other person! Being someone’s point of stability for “societal carve-outs” instead of having your love and affection reciprocated.
I mean, the other person might also just need a point of stability and can otherwise get much of their social enrichment elsewhere. Your partner can just be a person you get along with that you live with like a good buddy that you might have sex with (if you enjoy sex). Your partner doesn't have to be your spiritual guru, your therapist, your life coach, your obsession, your reason to live, etc.
It's not like Schizoid people go around sneakily pretending to love people only to turn off once the relationship is secured. Like any healthy relationship, open communication is expected. A schizoid person can simply say, "hey, I can't have a Hallmark Movie marriage" and their partner can just accept that. Maybe the partner is schizoid too. Maybe the relationship is an open one. Maybe the capacity to meet a schizoid person where they are is, in fact, the deep emotional validation that they share with each other that is the bedrock to the partnership (the schizoid person is finally accepted and can let down their guard a little, the partner gets an insight into their schizoid lover that no one else ever sees and revels in the intimacy and beauty of it). There are an infinite number of ways to have two adults enter an emotionally healthy relationship even if one of them is neurodivergent.
I don't necessarily believe it would be impossible to reciprocate, but that there would be an atypical representation of love and needs disparate to what culture has inculcated (which itself leads to many misapprehensions).
Depending on the literature chosen, SzPDs can have "lively internal states" and be "exquisitely sensitive" it's just a question of expressing such things.
Context, I’m bipolar, not SzPD, so may not fully understand.
Relationships don’t need to be based on love. You could seek out someone who is looking for someone to share responsibilities with. Imagine them as a coworker or roommate.
If the relationship works well, you might want to formalize it to get the societal benefits marriage can provide.
Most people can’t imagine this working out because they don’t want or function well in that kind of relationship.
This was interesting. The writing is hard to follow, but I understand perfectly well what it's trying to say. Sounds like the type of ramble I'd go on inside my own mind when I was younger.
I'm still annoyed by the absolute nonsense in which we live in, and I'm thoroughly baffled to see that most people just go with it—or worse, see it as logical—but I'm trying now to be at peace with said nonsense. I figure it's the best I can do, since we're unable to find a compromise.
Strikingly absent from the piece, and in my experience from similar memoirs generally, is an explicit attempt at constructing general or specific theories of mind. Much may be relieved by turning one's conceptual skill to the task of modeling another's experience. This is best done with empathy's aid, which is most difficult to find when fixated on one's own emotions. ("Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.")
I'd never heard about this type of disorder until I did one of those "what personality disorder do you have" and it told me I had this. After reading up on it I reckon the diagnosis, despite coming from an internet quiz, was pretty accurate. It seems virtually invisible compared to the "fashionable" disorders we hear so much about online, that have vocal advocates and even clout-chasing tiktok'ers. When I read about treatment, I got the impression that it's considered to be untreatable and neither doctors/sufferers not are that bothered. But I wonder if that, and its "invisibility", isn't to some extent due to the nature of the problem.
Personally I would think so. Some people don't want to be bothered, but if they aren't bothered then they don't become statistics. It's interesting to think that no matter what TikTok advocacy movements appear, there could be a subset of individuals for whom the advocacy would never reach, and it's supposed to be that way. Hardly anyone thinks of the invisible, mainly what is passed in front of their eyes.
If letting their conditions be heard for the purpose of having them fit in only serves to exacerbate the problem, given that the problem is the perception of needing to conform to have any chance of acceptance from the outside, then I can imagine an advocacy movement for such a demographic wouldn't be able to sustain itself.
It has been shown that the perception of preferential choices like those of sexual orientation can be changed if the cultural timing is right. Behavioral advocacy stemming from immutable brain structure could be harder, if not infeasible in some cases, especially if you'd be advocating for people who wouldn't want to interact with you after putting in all that work advocating for them.
For some reason I felt that the author was a girl by the writing. And then I checked her other post and it turned out I was right. I wonder what tipped me off.
Could be the lack of ego. Capitalization is often removed by people who don't want to project a self and instead talk from a point of humility. Inverse of all-caps which is seen as "shouting" and forcing your view on another.
I think part of the difficulty is that there is an assumed notion of an objective reality when it comes to motivations, relationships, and anything else relating to internal experiences. Neurotypical people will find significant overlap with other neurotypical people's internal experiences and therefore assume that's objective fact, and are only exposed to radically different internal experiences in the context of "Crazy", "Psychopath", etc. In fact, as a fellow non-neurotypical person, I see different neurotypical people differ in internal experiences from other neurotypical people all the time (see: introverts vs extroverts, love languages, other pop psychology) but they're just not categorized the same for seemingly arbitrary cultural norm reasons, aka popularity.
Like, I don't know a single person that actually suits some magical mean. The term can only possibly represent some abstract, non-existent, unidimensional person. And you can't extract hypothetical expectation sets from the public reliably because they're in constant flux.
Maybe social and private dysfunctions, with some degree of overlap, but there's a pretty wide band, which appears to be ever-growing in which a huge variety of internal morphologies can operate.
I do think though, that we all too closely observe psychology - itself an instrument with two cutting edges. On one half, you offer support and vindication to some extent, and on the other stigma and hopelessness. If we excised our newfound habit of wanton prognostication - what we're left with is "they're a peculiar sort" and I wonder if that's not - at least in less extreme cases - preferable as it forces us to assess from the ground up the individual rather than some categorical definition which to me reads as something much more just. An end unto themselves.
I think neurotypical accurately describes people who don't have neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, Schizophrenia, or Autism. There are distinct brain architectures involved here; autistics generally have statistically significant reduced brain activity in response to the human face compared to neurotypical people. This is a bit like arguing that because some people learn to read slower than others, or learn to read by sounding out the words vs memorizing consonants, that dyslexia shouldn't be differentiated from non-dyslexic people.
Of course you can be varied and neurotypical. There are neurotypical people who focus well and some who struggle with that a bit more. There are some people who struggle to read facial expressions and others that can accurately guess nuances. But that doesn't mean that they're not neurotypical, and that their internal experiences aren't more widely represented and reflected in the cultural norm.
I'm leaning more towards the fact that umbrella terms like "neurotypical" are setting forward something that doesn't exist, and that everyone has some aberrant wiring. I just find that a lot of this tends to boil down to people scree-ing at one another, coming up with broad generalizations, boxing themselves and others...
It should be "normal" to be different - 'cause that's the reality, even if you're in the tails.
And to be fair, I did add a caveat where... "Clinically" severe cases probably do need some formalities. It just seems like, reading through the DSM, knowing clinical therapists, and having my own deal of insight on these matters that we're (society) actually pathologizing functional people. That we're giving people language and identities to fixate on or to affix onto others and we do it in a way that is inconsistent even at the clinical level.
I think of "neurotypical" as an idealized version of what society expects a person's thinking to be. In a similar way to society defining gender roles. Not only does it not apply to any single person (but rather, people will conform more or less to that neurotypical construct), but it will vary based on country, social class, etc... Being neurodivergent means that you significantly diverge from said ideal, leading to all kinds of problems.
I would give more of the benefit to NTs; they simply don't have to develop the skill of explaining their own inner workings to the level of neurodivergent people at a complex level. Often times they can speak in a generality and assume the vast majority of their nuance will be captured by their audience, which is a strategy often validated by other neurotypical people.
There are plenty of neurotypical people talking about their thinking patterns in the form of pop psychology, horoscopes, MBTI, meditation, YouTube/TikTok cultural commentators, etc. It's just not viewed that way because it's viewed as "normal". But earnestly I don't see a difference between a neurotypical person saying their love language is acts of service and an ADHD person telling me that when they talk at length about their special interest with me it's a sign of psychological safety.
> Neurotypical people will find significant overlap with other neurotypical people's internal experiences and therefore assume that's objective fact
Wouldn't it be funny if the whole world ran on this phenomenon? And even funnier: if there were large organizations whose duty was to coordinate and normalize people's perceptions of what is going on?
> That's how society works. People have adjusted their self to fit in, they expect the same from everybody else.
This makes it seem like a personal failing of the person who is experiencing this disconnect, like the author. Neuroscience shows that this is not the case, and that those with schizoid personality disorders have true physiological and neurological differences.
I hope that you didn't intend to make this into some sort of judgment on the person for failing to "adjust themselves to fit in," because that is a huge part of the judgment that this author is feeling and trying to describe.
With a withdrawn self, how can there be a personal failing? My point is that people don't attack her specifically, it's just the way society is. Criticism works for society because people with a self choose which criticism they accept and which they ignore.
People cannot imagine her withdrawn self and thus cannot adjust their criticism and she cannot imagine a self or bring back her self for now and thus doesn't understand most people.
>which is: they cannot hear me, and i cannot hear them. and funnily enough i’m trying to hear them and i’m trying to listen but no one’s trying to listen to me, so why should i keep trying?
Question remains: How can a withdrawn self be brought back?
> Neuroscience shows that this is not the case, and that those with schizoid personality disorders have true physiological and neurological differences.
Sure, but you assume that the physiological and neurological differences exist in themselves when you could also say that are causal, due to the abuse/neglect. The effects on ones mind from negative life experiences would have to have a physical manifestation in the brain in order to create the patterns of disordered behavior of course. If they are caused by negative life experiences, then they could also be reversible.
This is true, as a broad statement at least. I can claim no expertise in the area, so I can't comment on the potential to reverse any such changes.
It is also possible that they are not caused by negative life experiences, and are somehow inherent in the organization of a particular person's brain.
Of course. But I think it's quite common to claim that one's problems in life are incontrovertible when they are not. You stated it as a fact when we really don't know
harsh but true. society, family, culture, work, a baseball game etc. Each of these social structures comes with a whole host of expectations and rules that make that structure work. we routinely sacrifice our internal desires to meet these expectations. generally because we accept that we are all better off when we sacrifice a little for the good of the whole.
I think the really interesting thing is that these things can all work when people have vastly different motivations for participating. for an example with baseball, Joe may like the thrill of a well oiled team making a double play while frank lives to score and hit the ball. both Frank and Joe hate getting up to practice. we don't all need to have the same motivations to make the team work, the only thing that is needed is for the participants to understand the team is necessary to get what they want out of it.
What is described here is something I also struggle with - the obligation to explain my worldview to others. Sometimes there is no way around it, because the more you withdraw to avoid voicing your opinion, the more guilt you can feel for somehow being sneaky or dishonest. I also don't know if sharing the 'why' would really help. What I see as matter-of-fact can make others extremely sad. Either way, it's interesting to think about. Thanks for sharing.