Below is a selected excerpt that particularly stuck out to me:
Dr. Orion Taraban, Psy.D. wrote: In the 1990s, some well-meaning psychiatrists from the West came to Hong Kong on a mission. They had seen how dangerous and terrible anorexia could be, and they wanted to spread awareness of this issue so that it might be proactively prevented or at least treated appropriately.
And what these folks would say is something like: "Anorexia is a rare but dangerous condition. It generally affects young people, especially young, educated, upper-class women. Perhaps you've heard about it because celebrity X recently confessed that she struggled with it in her past. In any case, this isn't something to be judged; it's something to be understood and cared for, and we're here to offer you the tools to do just that."
Sounds reasonable enough, right?
And well-meaning newspapers and media outlets did their part to spread the campaign of awareness far and wide. What a good deed. Now, what do you think happened? According to a newspaper at the time, anorexia, which was previously non-existent in Hong Kong, saw a 2,500% increase in the exact population the psychiatrists indicated in just a few short years. Incredible. Like, who could have predicted that would happen?
Now, sometimes people respond to this by saying, "Okay, well, maybe the awareness campaigns did their job, Orion, and they brought a previously unrecognized problem to light by making screening and diagnosis more accurate." And there may be some truth to that perspective. I'm sure that happens from time to time. However, that can't possibly be the case here. By definition, anorexics must be more than 15 percent below the minimally normal weight for their height and age, and that's just not something that could have been hidden on that level. Like, "Oh, this is anorexia? I just thought my daughter was starving. Thank you for educating me on its proper name." That almost certainly didn't happen.
On the other hand, what almost certainly did happen is that you had a group of respected authorities, doctors in white coats with all the paraphernalia of scientific technology, talking directly to adolescents, saying that there is a rare (read: special) condition that tends to inflict young women of status and privilege, like celebrities. Whether you are aware of it or not, part of what these psychiatrists were doing was educating young girls in how they can signal their membership in certain classes of society. Using all their power and authority, these doctors indelibly associated a certain communication strategy with a certain segment of the population: young, female, high-status, in the symptom pool. They did this unconsciously and unintentionally, but they did so nonetheless.
And while most of the girls who subsequently suffered from anorexia communicated their distress unconsciously and unintentionally, their suffering was real regardless.
This is the first way we have to be careful about the symptom pool.
The second way has to do with secondary gain. Secondary gain is the positive side of suffering, or the benefits that accrue to one's status as a victim. In this example, the doctors were adamant that these girls not be judged or criticized; rather, they should be given special care, taken out of school if necessary, and healed with understanding therapies. These girls needed attention and consideration and should be praised for their courage and dedication in overcoming this dreadful disease. Again, I'm not saying that these girls in Hong Kong consciously thought to themselves, "Okay, I'm gonna starve myself so people will pay attention to me and see me as a courageous, high-status victim." None of this is conscious. That's the amazing thing about the symptom pool. All of this occurs unconsciously, both at the population level and the individual level.
What do you think?
Images demonstrating self-fulfilling prophecies and the Pygmalion effect:
In conclusion, remember: If you want, you can easily increase the prevalence of dangerous mental health diseases like anorexia by 2,500%.
Just run an "awareness campaign".
But, more seriously, friends, please make sure to stop self-diagnosing, and NEVER diagnose your romantic partner, close friend, or family member, and NEVER diagnose anyone unless you are a doctor and they are your formal patient.
And please don't support or engage with any kind of "mental health awareness" campaigns. Even by just liking a post or commenting on it, you are increasing engagement and helping spread it, which will kill people, especially young impressionable children who are most susceptible to the Nocebo effect, self-fulfilling prophecies, and the Pygmalion effect.
Even just giving a view to a video or meme increases its engagement stats and reinforces it to the algorithm, causing more people to see, and causing to further memetically reproduce and be deemed fit in the unavoidable game of memetic evolution and survival of the fittest. You help determine what is fittest and what survives, thrives, spreads, and reproduces. Just viewing a viewing a post, let alone liking or commenting, is enough to help spread it and beat the competition.
To do your part, you might even need to completely get off addictive dangerous services like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram with their dangerous for-profit algorithms designed to be addictive, divisive, and overly sensationalist rather than helpful, truthful, and nuanced. To do your part, you may need to put your extremely valuable time and attention into other websites with less addictive algorithms and less addictive content organization methods.
Whether it's casinos or social media algorithms: If they were healthy, they wouldn't need to be purposely made to be addictive. You are probably better off spending money to pull a lever on a slot machine at the casino than to be on an app like TikTok for the same amount of time, but either way you'll get that addictive dopamine rush as your brain turns to mush and the inertia of your addiction increases leaving you more inert and trapped than ever.
Careful where you choose to go and where you choose to spend your very valuable and very limited time.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
