i wonder about the psychological role of diagnosis
i've heard this pattern before. diagnosis gives you…absolution?
you're still the SAME EXACT person; but now there's a label in the DSM for the kind of person you are, so you no longer hate yourself
a curious phenomenon
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oh! maybe it's that ppl have erroneous expectations of free will!
"why do i keep doing this bad thing? given people have perfect unobstructed free will, the only remaining explanation is that i'm Fundamentally Bad"
the diagnosis corrects this illusion
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Replying to @mechanical_monk
i have wondered about this for a while but my thoughts about it never quite come together. there is a kind of need to become acceptable or legible to one's self and others, a way to avoid blame or to at least have a better story about one's self than "i am fundamentally bad"
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I think some of this way of understanding that might open up for some people post dx is also related to the bandwidth relieving power of a good story, like instead of it being a mystery why all this shit was so hard, there is an underlying pattern which connects it all. Tidy.
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This isn’t a criticism of that, nor am I using story entirely negatively here. I think this effect has real therapeutic potential, but also can cause some issues, like with the identity politic stuff in very online public autism havers
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> you're still the SAME EXACT person; but now there's...
now there’s new information in the system and new pathways/connection for old information to flow down. information efficiency is a wonky analogy but I do think it reflects something about how minds make experience/stories
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right. when you start telling a new story about yourself you're not the same person anymore