Why Most Psychiatric Disorders Make Perfect Sense

One day, your dad gets home after work, all tired. You feel sad, you cry, you panic, and a bomb in the household explodes.

Another day, your dad gets home after work, all tired. You feel sad, but you pretend you don't, to cheer him up. And it works. Nice!

This is how a psychiatric disorder starts. You have now taught yourself to neglect your own emotional needs and prioritize the needs of others.

Besides that, you are too small to understand that the reason pretending you weren't scared worked is not necessarily the reason it worked. There could be a thousand different reasons he went from tired to happy the second time.

Over time, you may develop an eating disorder. Or a God complex, since you believe you have that much power over the emotional states of others.

Logically, you didn't make a mistake in your reasoning. You were little, and your world was small. You just extrapolated that mistake over 10–20 years. Now, it becomes harder to fix the underlying issue, which is neglecting your own emotional needs. You already feel that you have a victim mentality, making it even worse.

But you kind of are the victim of the people around you not explaining these things to you.

Stop identifying with psychiatric diseases — there is nothing wrong with you

Let me tell you a little secret about knowledge.

Knowledge has a front stage and a backstage.

On the front stage, there are Nobel Prizes, fame, attention, and the scientists you have heard of.

Backstage are all the pros. The pros mostly don't interfere with modern science, since, well – it's not very impressive, to say the least.

The problem is that sometimes things happen that are so out of hand that the pros have to step in.

We have a lot of problems in the world, but since this one involves kids and curiosity, we are getting annoyed.

Let me explain to you what an observational mistake is.

Specifically, when diagnosing people with ADHD, ADD, autism, and other psychiatric diseases. We will one day look back at this period as a time when we didn't have hygiene, for instance. That's the level of psychiatry today.

I'll just pick something random from the DSM. Let me take a common characteristic of ADHD, which is inattention.

Attention is an imaginary construct.

Reality has infinite depth: narrowing it down to ‘sustaining attention’ is not possible. It exists in multiple dimensions at the same time.

For instance:

You and I agree to focus on something for 5 minutes. Let's say we're reading a PDF.

So we have point A in time (we start reading) → and point B in time (when the 5 minutes end).

Situation A

Let's say I have the diagnosis ADD, and you don't. So you sit there for 5 minutes, reading the document. I am dreaming away after 10 seconds. I have to refocus, I'm twirling my hair, I'm getting annoyed.

Situation B

Let's say I have the diagnosis ADHD, and you don't. You sit there reading for 5 minutes straight, uninterrupted. I spin my chair after 3 seconds. Within 5 minutes, I'm gone, doing something else.

Situation C

I have autism, and coincidentally, the PDF is about something I find interesting. You don't have autism. We both sit there for 5 minutes, reading the PDF.

In all these situations, who was distracted?

A doctor could argue: in situations A and B, the person with ADD or ADHD was distracted because they were doing something different. In all situations, the people without the diagnosis were focused for 5 minutes.

Now, we flip the perspective.

We are going to add a dimension, and we are going to call that real life.

In the 5 minutes we move from point A to point B in time, a lot of other things have happened, too.

First, every single thing, every molecule in the world, has changed. Literally everything in the world around us changed during those 5 minutes. So we can already argue that the one without the diagnosis was the one who was distracted from what happened in the real world. You were so busy reading a PDF that you missed everything happening around you for 5 minutes.

The kid with ADD can argue: ‘I wasn't dreaming away. I was thinking about something related to what I read.’

For example, when the PDF is about snow, the kid could think about ‘snow-snowballs-winter-reindeer-animals-zoo-we went to the zoo with our aunt’ and start a related thought about family that looks unrelated but is actually related. So that is not a distraction.

The kid with ADHD could say: ‘This is not fair. I have more energy than you, and I have to agree to your terms of what focusing is. Also, I simply don't care about what's in the PDF. If I have to focus on it, I'm simply lying to myself.’

The kid with autism says: ‘I know we were both reading for 5 minutes, but you have missed every single important detail in this PDF. I was really focusing, and you were indeed reading it, but not at the same depth I was.’

So the problem is not that being inattentive and having characteristics of ADHD, ADD, and autism don't exist. The problem is the depth at which you look at them.

And exactly this is the problem with science. It's almost a lazy way of looking at reality, superficial. It's the same as not understanding that everybody has ADD, ADHD, autism, and OCD. The only thing that differs is the intensity and duration for which you experience them per day.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, I'm right.

What changed in the observable universe? Nothing.

But it still changed everything, because your perspective changed.

Now, you dreaming away is forming a new connection, observing the outside world, something normal.

My dad used to work hard. So every time he came home, he was basically annoyed and tired. As a child, what you teach yourself is to adjust.

You think, “I see that if I do A, my dad is happy. And if I do B, he is not happy.”

You connect things that have nothing to do with each other. Because you don’t know all the other things he went through that day.

That being said, I am so sick and tired of people like my dad who couldn’t balance working with family life. I really thought it was normal to live with a guy who basically was tired 24/7 because of his work at a phone company. I think we had a few minutes of communication every week. The irony.

“We have to be quiet because Dad worked so hard today.” He could have also worked less hard. Or sat in his car for 30 minutes before walking into the house.

I honestly think that a lot of psychiatric diseases come from kids who learn to neglect their own emotions from a very young age. You don’t realize that they are readjusting. From their perspective, they do something logical: they connect the cause and effect of how you respond when you walk in with how they behave. Not realizing that it’s a relationship with more depth than that.

Also, I would like to point out that it wasn’t only the hard work: the man did nothing else but watch American action movies on the couch every night. For hours straight, that was our family activity. I thought that was normal back then. Zero effort. Just laid back, watching external entertainment from another continent. Zero learning. Zero emotional effort. Zero conversation.

I know so many of these stories, especially in the Western world (mostly girls). I think especially women who have a very good emotional radar are easy to get screwed over by these kinds of behaviours. I know a girl who 100 percent developed an eating disorder because of this. Her dad was also working all the time, sleeping in hotels. They had a nice house, the mom was great, but it’s still a mistake. It’s as simple as that.

So, is it my dad’s fault? He was also taught the wrong things by his parents. Also, he grew up in a television era, just like what we have with social media now. But still.