The idea of people pretending to be depressed/disturbed because they think it makes them cool has always really fascinated me insofaras... y'know... actually having the anxiety is not fun at all. It is about the least cool thing about my life other than the fact that I will probably die some day.
Something that, of course, I am very anxious about.
Granted, we all try to find the good sides of even our worst problems in an attempt to claim them and control them but mental issues, even relatively mild non-psychotic ones, pretty damn well much suck.
I pass the teenagers in Hot Topic, y'know, and I wonder... do they really get what they're aping? Do they understand how awful it is to deal with what they're posing as?
This can't be because I'm Getting Old because I thought these things the same when I was a supremely-messed-up thirteen-year-old as I do now as a mostly-messed-up twenty-eight-year-old.
All of Ben Folds' best work is about this line of thinking.
Tangentally, man, Ben Folds was a lot better when only a little of his music was about how much he loves his wife and how incredibly awesome and precious his children are, wasn't he?
I'm old by the standards of this board and my sure-to-be unpopular opinion is that Americans are overdiagnosed and worse, over self-diagnosed. (and worse yet, often, self medicated). It's a result of a lot of factors, not the least of which are:
1) The need to have a reason for everything. Some things really do just happen.
2) The need to define 'normal' relatively narrowly and then find a term to describe everything outside of the arbitrary definition, and find a cause. And then fix it. (While simultaneously saying how great diversity is!)
3) Allowing pharmaceutical companies to aggressively market drugs, and by association, diagnoses to the public.
4) Allowing and exposing our kids to a media culture that stresses physical perfection, and presents/defines wellness too narrowly and with too much emphasis on mental and physical health. There's a lot more to wellness than that.
There are other factors too, but we'll fight about some of those. Personally, I've gone through times in my life when I was depressed and other times when I wasn't. There have been bad times and good times. I've learned about myself and how I treat other people and I've changed in some ways. At the end of the day, at the end of my life, whatever my personal idiosyncrasies are called mean nothing - there is, mainly, what I did about it (or what help I got) and how I came to become a better person because of or in spite of them.
I just hope that people don't get too hung up on their moods or those things that make them a little different from everyone else. Most of the time, you aren't different than them, it's just that you present differently. That's the diversity again. Like John Allison's T-shirt says "It is OK to be you".
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Topic: 29 August 2007 - Kid Rock is our Sinatra (Read 3109 times)