not the scorchingest take but it is one that I tend to stew on. oftentimes we are more willing to tolerate certain behaviours and accomodate certain needs when they are accompanied by a diagnosis. we might be less likely to label someone who is considered medically to have Depression as "lazy" compared to someone who is not considered to be Depressed. we might grant more leeway to someone considered to suffer from Anxiety when it comes to behaviour that might otherwise be considered anti-social.
but fundamentally these diagnoses are symptomatic. doctors aren't gazing into a patient's soul or testing their blood for BPD, they're observing patterns of behaviour and grouping those behaviours into a box that might be helpful when prescribing treatment. this means that the reason we might give license to someone to avoid social obligations is merely their tendency to avoid social obligations, but specifically once recognized by a medical professional.
what does this mean? well, it doesn't mean I think we should all be assholes and tell people with depression to walk it off. on the contrary, I think it means we shouldn't restrict our empathy based on artificial (but often useful) boxes of "depressed" or whatever. I think it means that what makes the most sense is just to try and support people who are struggling in whatever way you reasonably can. and maybe, just maybe, it means we don't have to try to categorize every human thought or act as either normal brained or not normal brained.
i think in a lot of ways this is an effect of the DSM and the broader psychiatric revolution that brought us tautological concepts like "depression is when your brain doesn't make the right chemicals" that, while useful to many people, have kind of restricted our conceptions of mental health significantly. these ideas are not timeless, they are not permanent, they emerged in a specific social context and they will change along with the scenery around them
I have related weird feelings about the way the concepts of neurodivergence and neurotypicality are used but those ideas are even more half-baked and I don't want to vomit them all over cohost and potentially annoy smarter people than me
