I think it's troubling for many people to think about how fragile one's sense of self can be. We like to believe that we are not so easily impacted. I'm currently of the opinion that psychology has created multiple diagnoses to describe how a person is impacted by their environment but only one really acknowledges that environmental impact: PTSD. But even PTSD is an inadequate diagnosis and doesn't do a great job of capturing all the ways that trauma can ripple through our lives.
I think we in the mental health field have done an especially poor job of conceptualizing how the internet impacts people in their daily lives. We treat it as air -- something we all breathe but don't need to talk about most of the time.
Through the internet, we are exposed to the psyches of millions of other people on a daily basis but the interaction is completely different from a real-life one. It's hard to find a real-life analogy that captures the strangeness of social media: you walk into a room full of confessional booths and listen at the doors of each to people talking before deciding you want to climb in and respond to the disembodied voice. But that doesn't even fully capture it because there's no voice a lot of the time.
And so we're basically reading people's thoughts much of the time without any context of who they are or whether we'd like to know them in real life. Many times, we integrate their thoughts with our own without much thought or question. We consume and internalize other people's thoughts with almost no filter. And a lot of this is happening when we're so young that we haven't even had a chance to develop our own thoughts based off our own experiences.
People who are vulnerable and searching for answers
Perhaps a more relevant analysis of online social contagion or persuasion or suggestibility might better use the analogy of pharmaceutical company marketing, which convinces physicians, other health care providers, and especially the public, that they can be "helped" and that they should self-diagnose. Look at the Sackler family marketing of oxycontin, filled with lies and persuasion, to physicians and to their patients: look no further, oxy will relieve all of your problems. Closer to the online marketing of trans identities, no?
The use of "satanic witch craze" and "MPD" to erase the suffering of survivors of childhood torture is very different from the online promotion of "you're trans and you don't know it" Many liberal writers about dissociative disorders such as Ian Hacking, seem to have no clue what dissociation looks like in real life. It's a mistake to use this line of analysis if you don't understand how the denial of dissociation by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was used to dismiss and lie about sexual abuse of children. My point is that there are other ways to argue against online programming of kids instead of bringing up the historical "it's just a witch hunt, those kids made it up" when they talked about tunnels under the McMartin day care center. Which were actually discovered years later.
I guess I wouldn't put it that way. I don't have any doubts real abusers have sheltered under the banner of false memories (and I have read about the FMSF). But it's also clear that these movements built around recovered memories went much further than recognizing child sex abuse and that innocent people also got accused and hurt, including some patients who developed beliefs that they were abused that didn't have a foundation in reality, which I think is very similar to people now coming to believe they're trans.
I'm not sure where you are hearing about multiple personalities (a pop psych term) or clinical approaches that encourage dissociation. But ethical therapists don't encourage or promote dissociation or other maladaptive symptoms. I'm talking about what happens when children are tortured, when the abuse of children is culturally denied, and when therapists work with people who have dissociated their abuse. Often that abuse is so severe most people deny that it *could* even exist in reality. My point being: dissociative disorders are usually not a consequence of social contagion, unlike the sex self-ID phenomenon.
I don't think dissociation is a social contagion. But I think the interpretations we layer over dissociation -- DID/MPD, I used the old term MPD because that's what Hacking was writing about -- are susceptible to such influence.
So I think the parallel is
- dissociation is similar to distress over sexed body/sex role (both experiences preexist exposure to ideas about how to interpret these experiences and both can be indicators of trauma)
- permutations of MPD/DID/recovered memory/Satanic Panic is similar to explosion in trans identification
The online influence on sex-self-ID, and the suggestibility of many people, is important. But you and others are in error when you make this phenomenon equivalent to what happened around organized sexual abuse/torture of children and dissociative disorders in the 1980s. Dissociation results from severe abuse, which is almost always sexualized. When torture survivors dissociate, we understand what caused that. But denial kicks in on so many levels when it comes to the highly organized sexual abuse of children. Few are willing to believe what has been shown, again and again, to exist. Recently, see Epstein, Sandusky at Penn State, and countless other cases. Dissociative disorders no doubt were touted by some unethical and/or ignorant therapists. But most of us who work with patients with dissociative disorders have struggled to understand our clients and to work with them to heal from abuse that most people - and certainly young children - can't even get their heads around. Kids create mental ways of surviving the abuse and continuing to live with people who essentially are torturing them (according to legal defs of torture). Do you think I'm just another woo woo therapist who "believes" dissociative disorders? Please look at the research. Especially check out The Witch-Hunt Narrative: politics, psychology, and the sexual abuse of children by Ross Cheit, 2014 where he analyzes all of the supposed "satanic craze" cases including McMartin, the most famous. Or read Harvey L. Schwartz Dialogues with Forgotten Voices: relational perspectives on child abuse trauma and treatment of dissociative disorders, 2000. Please reconsider this whole line of analysis which involves dismissing the testimony of people who were subjected to sexual torture as children. Thank you, Melissa Farley
I'm skeptical of the concept of multiple personalities and clinical approaches that tend to encourage dissociation rather than resolve it, and also skeptical of recovered-memory therapy techniques, not skeptical of dissociation or the existence of sexual abuse and trauma in childhood.
I think it's troubling for many people to think about how fragile one's sense of self can be. We like to believe that we are not so easily impacted. I'm currently of the opinion that psychology has created multiple diagnoses to describe how a person is impacted by their environment but only one really acknowledges that environmental impact: PTSD. But even PTSD is an inadequate diagnosis and doesn't do a great job of capturing all the ways that trauma can ripple through our lives.
I think we in the mental health field have done an especially poor job of conceptualizing how the internet impacts people in their daily lives. We treat it as air -- something we all breathe but don't need to talk about most of the time.
Through the internet, we are exposed to the psyches of millions of other people on a daily basis but the interaction is completely different from a real-life one. It's hard to find a real-life analogy that captures the strangeness of social media: you walk into a room full of confessional booths and listen at the doors of each to people talking before deciding you want to climb in and respond to the disembodied voice. But that doesn't even fully capture it because there's no voice a lot of the time.
And so we're basically reading people's thoughts much of the time without any context of who they are or whether we'd like to know them in real life. Many times, we integrate their thoughts with our own without much thought or question. We consume and internalize other people's thoughts with almost no filter. And a lot of this is happening when we're so young that we haven't even had a chance to develop our own thoughts based off our own experiences.
People who are vulnerable and searching for answers
Okay I was about to link to Carl Elliott’s classic article “A New Way to be Mad”, but I see you’re already on to Ian Hacking, so nvm. 🙂
Perhaps a more relevant analysis of online social contagion or persuasion or suggestibility might better use the analogy of pharmaceutical company marketing, which convinces physicians, other health care providers, and especially the public, that they can be "helped" and that they should self-diagnose. Look at the Sackler family marketing of oxycontin, filled with lies and persuasion, to physicians and to their patients: look no further, oxy will relieve all of your problems. Closer to the online marketing of trans identities, no?
The use of "satanic witch craze" and "MPD" to erase the suffering of survivors of childhood torture is very different from the online promotion of "you're trans and you don't know it" Many liberal writers about dissociative disorders such as Ian Hacking, seem to have no clue what dissociation looks like in real life. It's a mistake to use this line of analysis if you don't understand how the denial of dissociation by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was used to dismiss and lie about sexual abuse of children. My point is that there are other ways to argue against online programming of kids instead of bringing up the historical "it's just a witch hunt, those kids made it up" when they talked about tunnels under the McMartin day care center. Which were actually discovered years later.
I guess I wouldn't put it that way. I don't have any doubts real abusers have sheltered under the banner of false memories (and I have read about the FMSF). But it's also clear that these movements built around recovered memories went much further than recognizing child sex abuse and that innocent people also got accused and hurt, including some patients who developed beliefs that they were abused that didn't have a foundation in reality, which I think is very similar to people now coming to believe they're trans.
I'm not sure where you are hearing about multiple personalities (a pop psych term) or clinical approaches that encourage dissociation. But ethical therapists don't encourage or promote dissociation or other maladaptive symptoms. I'm talking about what happens when children are tortured, when the abuse of children is culturally denied, and when therapists work with people who have dissociated their abuse. Often that abuse is so severe most people deny that it *could* even exist in reality. My point being: dissociative disorders are usually not a consequence of social contagion, unlike the sex self-ID phenomenon.
I don't think dissociation is a social contagion. But I think the interpretations we layer over dissociation -- DID/MPD, I used the old term MPD because that's what Hacking was writing about -- are susceptible to such influence.
So I think the parallel is
- dissociation is similar to distress over sexed body/sex role (both experiences preexist exposure to ideas about how to interpret these experiences and both can be indicators of trauma)
- permutations of MPD/DID/recovered memory/Satanic Panic is similar to explosion in trans identification
The online influence on sex-self-ID, and the suggestibility of many people, is important. But you and others are in error when you make this phenomenon equivalent to what happened around organized sexual abuse/torture of children and dissociative disorders in the 1980s. Dissociation results from severe abuse, which is almost always sexualized. When torture survivors dissociate, we understand what caused that. But denial kicks in on so many levels when it comes to the highly organized sexual abuse of children. Few are willing to believe what has been shown, again and again, to exist. Recently, see Epstein, Sandusky at Penn State, and countless other cases. Dissociative disorders no doubt were touted by some unethical and/or ignorant therapists. But most of us who work with patients with dissociative disorders have struggled to understand our clients and to work with them to heal from abuse that most people - and certainly young children - can't even get their heads around. Kids create mental ways of surviving the abuse and continuing to live with people who essentially are torturing them (according to legal defs of torture). Do you think I'm just another woo woo therapist who "believes" dissociative disorders? Please look at the research. Especially check out The Witch-Hunt Narrative: politics, psychology, and the sexual abuse of children by Ross Cheit, 2014 where he analyzes all of the supposed "satanic craze" cases including McMartin, the most famous. Or read Harvey L. Schwartz Dialogues with Forgotten Voices: relational perspectives on child abuse trauma and treatment of dissociative disorders, 2000. Please reconsider this whole line of analysis which involves dismissing the testimony of people who were subjected to sexual torture as children. Thank you, Melissa Farley
I'm skeptical of the concept of multiple personalities and clinical approaches that tend to encourage dissociation rather than resolve it, and also skeptical of recovered-memory therapy techniques, not skeptical of dissociation or the existence of sexual abuse and trauma in childhood.