As a high schooler, there was a girl in my class who seemed to have it all: smart, gorgeous, popular, you name it. Then one day, she confided in me her deepest, darkest secret: at the age of 17, she had gone to a neighboring country to get liposuction on her thighs, because she was deeply distressed about not having the "thigh gap" demanded by beauty standards at the time. (This was also the first time I had heard of the existence of such a thing.) Now it's easy to dismiss this as shallow, but to her this was debilitating to the extent that she was willing to put up with the cost and pain of surgery to get it fixed.
It used to be that traumatised kids got slapped with a ADHD, autism and/or borderline diagnosis and it got called a day. These are "that's just how you are" style diagnoses. Since 2018 there is CPTSD which finally connects the symptoms to how you got treated as a child. The denial phase is over.
Lawmakers are a bit behind, as usual, but at this point the scale of the problems can't be denied anymore. Its too late for you and me, but I'm optimistic for future generations.
We're in the over-correcting phase, where every person alive is an abuse survivor of varying seriousness.
For what it's worth I'm not a cynical person against psychology, and I read both the DSM and the ICD front to back every time a revision comes out. But with every revision, especially for the DSM, I become more concerned that we're creeping towards the "everybody suffers from a multitude of disorders therefore nobody does" territory which will bring us right back to ignoring people who need help.
An odd way to frame it but probably true.
> which will bring us right back to ignoring people who need help
That does not follow - if the environmental sources are known, people (especially teachers and social workers) can look out for them and take measures to improve the outcome for the child. And this is what I'm seeing right now.
See it on a societal scale - for the same effort put into raising kids, you get more functional adults.
This is vaguely among experts (for autism and emotional instability): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11724683
This is not ruling out a causal link in the opposite direction, that autism increases vulnerability to traumata.
And while researching case reports on child abuse, i couldn't help to notice that many cases do - indeed - start with an autism diagnosis and only escalate later, example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11886450/
While its true that parents don't cause autism... they can surely cause the diagnosis. Extra bad because it delays appropriate treatment.
At some point I realized “adults” aren’t people who figured things out, they’re just people who got used to not knowing — which is both kind of freeing and a little unsettling.
Adult means grown up. Grown up does not mean perfect or without issues.