The Girls Are Not Alright
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Alternate title: How to Understand Girls These Days
What the author, a psychiatrist, is seeing:
Patients used to dread being told that there was something, as they saw it, wrong with them. Now these young women were announcing their diagnoses —[ADHD, OCD, anxiety, depression] — almost before telling me their names.
… The patients of this new wave were talking in therapy-speak, and their therapy hadn’t even started.What the author thinks is going on and what to do about it:
It starts with accepting that diagnosis words may function differently for these young women from the way they do for others. They are not necessarily claims to cold, scientific truths, yoked to specific evidence-based treatments. Instead, research increasingly reveals, these words are often a coping mechanism, an effort to find some accepted narrative in which to situate one’s very personal pain. …
One girl told me she had assigned herself a diagnosis of depression, which she later acknowledged she thought would make me care about her. Another girl was stuck on an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, mostly because it made her feel less alone by connecting her to a vocal and vibrant online community.
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In some cases, my patients’ self-diagnoses were spot on. In many others, however, the psychiatric label seemed more like a compromise between uncomfortable feelings and the desire for social acceptance. …If you’re sick of hearing every classmate, roommate or ex described as “toxic,” look past the cliché and consider the harm it’s meant to describe. Whatever works, gently offer that less literal meaning back to her — not to challenge her words but to understand them. Not to see if she really has a particular diagnosis but to see what’s going on beneath it.
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