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Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

Ask HN: Is witch hunting on social media becoming normal entertainment?

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Ask HN: Is witch hunting on social media becoming normal entertainment?

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4 months ago

2 replies

Some people get into it. This guy writes intelligently about it when he's between his manic and depressed phases:

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/

I appreciate that he faces up to being bipolar rather than being fashionably autistic or pill-seeking ADHD.

4 months ago

1 reply

>fashionably autistic or pill-seeking ADHD.

I have a hard time reading that charitably. Are mental illnesses going to start being 'in-season'/'faux-pas' ?

4 months ago

Adhd will always be in season because it is a license to pill. Had Lezengreber won over Claridge we would have #SurelySchizotypal instead of #ActuallyAustistic but schizotypy will never graduate from 'more research is needed'. Schizophrenia might have been fashionable from 1940-1980 but it is hard to idealize after Reagan set them free. Anyway this is what Freddie writes about, he explains it much better than me because he's sick

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/sick-people-are-sick

To quote:

   ... she has apparently recently received a vanity diagnosis of 
   “ADHD and PTSD.” (This is a whole thing among more affluent 
    patients with bipolar disorder, recently; I will just say again 
    that there is no such thing as an ex-bipolar person.)

See also his take on Kanye West here:

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/things-that-are-hard

The "neurodivergence movement" has captured a lot of people who are fleeing the stigma of severe mental illness note least the reality that at least 5% of people are on the schizophrenia spectrum and undiagnosed.

As for why I feel this way I got what was a very good psychiatric eval for a child 45 or so years ago. Today I can mark up the first paragraph with a highlighter and practically all of it is diagnostic of my condition but it was a pure headscratcher back then. I think it still is today and "ADHD" and "Autism" are fashionable differential diagnoses that obscure schizotaxia.

It doesn't help that there is so much emotional attachment to the construct of autism that a paper like this

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/07/09/major-autism-study...

that I read as saying "34%-90% of autistic people aren't actually autistic" stay firmly in the autism-affirming camp.

https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/10/theres-no-autism-epidemi...

4 months ago

The main thing I'm seeing on front pages the last 2 weeks is sport spectator witch hunting because its televised.

4 months ago

It's been normalized already for, idk, a decade or two?

Humans gonna human.

4 months ago

Becoming? It's been that ever since social media was invented, if not before. Entire YouTube channels exist that do nothing but report on random internet drama and whoever the 'main character' is today.

Of course, you could say that's just a niche thing, and that the communities and creators dedicated to this aren't in the mainstream. But it feels like some of them are big enough that they do have at least some level of following among the general public as well, and almost anyone on social media in general sees this sort of drama on a regular basis.