Those raw numbers look staggeringly high to me. 60% clinical anxiety? 20-40% clinical PTSD? 30-50% ADHD? Really? I'd expect these sorts of things to top out at more like... 10% maybe.
It's really, really hard to look at these numbers and not conclude that our society is just way too quick to pathologize everyday experiences. By which I mean, to treat them as ontologically separate "illnesses", rather than as sometimes harder parts of everyday life.
I promise to still keep an open mind about all of this, I really do. But hot damn.
I hope this stupid trend of people needing diagnoses for their regular old personality ends soon. By the time this generation ages into middle age, we're all going to be bankrupt from paying for everyone's "diagnoses" and the "medication" to treat their personalities. These numbers are a joke.
Or maybe the pharmaceutical/mental health industries could do us all a favor and come up with a new mental illness/diagnoses for being annoying. If we could attach a fancy term to that, and come up with a pill to solve the problem of annoying people, we might actually be improving the world! As opposed to whatever train wreck these results show.
> schizophrenics remain overrepresented among transgender people today - maybe 5-10x expected rate [1] - and a few papers suggest they were more overrepresented in the past when transgender was less common...Schizophrenics’ brains don’t use categories/guesses/narratives in normal ways, and they end up in kind of random places, whereas everyone else mostly ends up where their culture guides them
Also:
> I think you could probably have a culture where 99% of people were transgender, where it was generally accepted that everyone transitioned on their 18th birthday, and where only a few people (disproportionately schizophrenic) would object or see anything wrong with this.
Interesting that both autism and schizophrenia are overrepresented in the trans crowd, given the hypothesis that these sit at opposite ends of some information-processing spectrum.
-Boys (13%) are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls (6%).
-About 1 in 44 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) according to estimates from CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network.
-ASD is more than 4 times more common among boys than among girls.
Would been neat to see the established rates on your graphs too. Like you noted, heavy social media users probably but interesting stuff regardless.
I am trying to articulate something that I know can be relevant to this post but I am not sure how good I can be writing it. Nevertheless, the difference that your data is showing (if I understand your data well) regarding the cis and non-cis gender's relationship with mental illness can be entirely expected if we look into some theory. And this might not have that strong a link with mental illness itself per say but with normalisation and society. Since Freud we know that mental illness is not something that we can just ask people about because people lie to themselves about it and do this consistently (don't get me wrong I am not against the survey just that such a survey somehow has to assimilate this information). It is therefore expected that as we move away from the normal in the gender category we can have a lot more people simply recognising that we have issues, an honesty that being closer to the normal doesn't afford us. I am being careful here, I am not saying that normal people are better or noncis people are more ill because of exclusion. I am rather providing a certain privileged position to that exclusion from which a dimension of truth about oneself can become visible.
Do you think you have a major self-selection bias.....
of people who are more likely to self-report a non-cis identity, the more likely they are to self report (and identify with) any diagnosable mental condition as more than mild?
in for a penny; in for a pound.
validated as non-cis and you now know you may feel just as good by finding community with the undiagnosed autism and anxiety experience.
Second confounding question: Are cis women more likely to mask their mental struggles?
I guess the obvious question is, then: Does transitioning in any way help people deal with autism/ADHD/schizophrenia/borderline personality and so on? Is it erasier to be male-looking and autistic than female-looking and autistic?
Could you consider, you know, NOT referring to trans men and other non-binary people as "females"? Because that is extremely disrespectful and inaccurate.
Those raw numbers look staggeringly high to me. 60% clinical anxiety? 20-40% clinical PTSD? 30-50% ADHD? Really? I'd expect these sorts of things to top out at more like... 10% maybe.
It's really, really hard to look at these numbers and not conclude that our society is just way too quick to pathologize everyday experiences. By which I mean, to treat them as ontologically separate "illnesses", rather than as sometimes harder parts of everyday life.
I promise to still keep an open mind about all of this, I really do. But hot damn.
I hope this stupid trend of people needing diagnoses for their regular old personality ends soon. By the time this generation ages into middle age, we're all going to be bankrupt from paying for everyone's "diagnoses" and the "medication" to treat their personalities. These numbers are a joke.
Or maybe the pharmaceutical/mental health industries could do us all a favor and come up with a new mental illness/diagnoses for being annoying. If we could attach a fancy term to that, and come up with a pill to solve the problem of annoying people, we might actually be improving the world! As opposed to whatever train wreck these results show.
Related article from Scott Alexander: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness
> schizophrenics remain overrepresented among transgender people today - maybe 5-10x expected rate [1] - and a few papers suggest they were more overrepresented in the past when transgender was less common...Schizophrenics’ brains don’t use categories/guesses/narratives in normal ways, and they end up in kind of random places, whereas everyone else mostly ends up where their culture guides them
Also:
> I think you could probably have a culture where 99% of people were transgender, where it was generally accepted that everyone transitioned on their 18th birthday, and where only a few people (disproportionately schizophrenic) would object or see anything wrong with this.
Interesting that both autism and schizophrenia are overrepresented in the trans crowd, given the hypothesis that these sit at opposite ends of some information-processing spectrum.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274821/
How do the non-cis numbers compare with male patterns?
Self-diagnosed, self-reported, on tik-tok?
To me it's completely meaningless
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html
-Boys (13%) are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls (6%).
-About 1 in 44 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) according to estimates from CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network.
-ASD is more than 4 times more common among boys than among girls.
Would been neat to see the established rates on your graphs too. Like you noted, heavy social media users probably but interesting stuff regardless.
I am trying to articulate something that I know can be relevant to this post but I am not sure how good I can be writing it. Nevertheless, the difference that your data is showing (if I understand your data well) regarding the cis and non-cis gender's relationship with mental illness can be entirely expected if we look into some theory. And this might not have that strong a link with mental illness itself per say but with normalisation and society. Since Freud we know that mental illness is not something that we can just ask people about because people lie to themselves about it and do this consistently (don't get me wrong I am not against the survey just that such a survey somehow has to assimilate this information). It is therefore expected that as we move away from the normal in the gender category we can have a lot more people simply recognising that we have issues, an honesty that being closer to the normal doesn't afford us. I am being careful here, I am not saying that normal people are better or noncis people are more ill because of exclusion. I am rather providing a certain privileged position to that exclusion from which a dimension of truth about oneself can become visible.
"Why are the percentages so high! There is no way that 40% of women have ADHD!"
Yeah but 40% of women who participate in mental health surveys might.
Do you think you have a major self-selection bias.....
of people who are more likely to self-report a non-cis identity, the more likely they are to self report (and identify with) any diagnosable mental condition as more than mild?
in for a penny; in for a pound.
validated as non-cis and you now know you may feel just as good by finding community with the undiagnosed autism and anxiety experience.
Second confounding question: Are cis women more likely to mask their mental struggles?
Very interesting. But is this surprising?
Female ADHD is up twice, is one of them supposed to be autism?
I guess the obvious question is, then: Does transitioning in any way help people deal with autism/ADHD/schizophrenia/borderline personality and so on? Is it erasier to be male-looking and autistic than female-looking and autistic?
Could you consider, you know, NOT referring to trans men and other non-binary people as "females"? Because that is extremely disrespectful and inaccurate.