Victimhood Culture and Medical Opportunists

Exploring The General Ill Health of America's Youth

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

In this post, I’ll just point you towards a longish article from this past week’s saved bits that I found to be helpful reading and wanted to share. (I’ve been hung up this week on long reads dense with threads I can’t help follow a bit.)

The Pathologization Pandemic: Why Youth Mental Illness is Surging (subscribe from the link to receive Gurwinder’s newsletter. Links within quotes below are from that newsletter article, not my own.)

The power of suggestion and social media hysteria and attention-seeking play into the astounding figure bolded in the following paragraph from the article.

The tendency for people to misdiagnose their despair as a medical disorder can be observed far beyond the long Covid phenomenon. Consider the surge in reports of gender dysphoria. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of adolescents referred to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) for gender dysphoria increased by over 2000%. If the surge were simply due to decreasing stigma around being trans, we’d expect proportionate numbers of both sexes and all ages to come out as trans, but the surge has been driven almost exclusively by young people and natal females.

Those numbers seem to be accurate.

But this surge in victimization is way broader than just in reported gender issues. Symptoms like those of long covid also seem to be affected by this disturbed blame-seeking for real or imagined symptoms—what the author calls “cyberchondria.”

And it’s not just reports of gender dysphoria that have multiplied among young people. Increases have occurred for major depressive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various eating disorders. It seems young people and their doctors are increasingly viewing personal issues as medical disorders — we are facing a “pathologization pandemic.”

It was interesting to learn and instructive to note that the political understandings of said victims made a difference, with “liberal” sufferers blaming the system—the environment.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their troubles are not their own fault, but the product of various problems beyond their control. These problems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly they are medical. A common example is “trauma,” a psychiatric term that’s become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused even clinicians fear it’s lost its meaning.

Lastly, in explaining how this tangled web of willing, enabled or manufactured illnesses among the young have come about, imagine: the upstanding American medical system is playing the game.

But as disturbing as all this is, victimhood culture is not the only force behind the pathologization pandemic. It’s been abetted by a medical industry that has its own incentives for exaggerating the prevalence of mental disorders.

…if you’re simply sad then medical companies can’t monetize you, but if your distress is reclassified as, say, gender dysphoria, those companies can sell you puberty blockers or surgical procedures.

It is urgently important that we understand the ways we (and especially our young people) are being molded by forces so ubiquitous we don’t even notice, until somebody says “hey, something smells rotten.”