Self-diagnosis: The real diagnosis is stupidity.

                So we live in an age where you can walk into a GP surgery (Or your countries equivalent doctors/ER/Shaman tent and the unofficial motto is “don’t confuse your google search with my medical degree.” Yet the sad reality is I’m seeing more and more people assume because they read the whole Wikipedia page on a mental illness they have the ability to diagnose themselves with something.

                The reality is; simply by reading something you become susceptible to the idea it applies to you, it’s something used very commonly in “Psychics” and other charlatans that through cold calling and careful use of this phenomenon are able to convince you that they can read your mind/future/dead grannies will. One of the reasons some people get their proverbial knickers in a twist over the lack of representation of [dynamic] in [media] is because the need to identify with the things you interact with is a strong compulsion of our brains as it is one of the ways we learn about the world around us emotionally through empathy with others we see, obviously that empathy is easier to see in people like us (if you have the emotional maturity of a 10 year old). We don’t just enter the world able to interpret and manage our emotional state. Part of our development as we grow up, from an infant all the way to our mid-twenties is learning not only how our own emotions fit into our life, but how we react to them and how we view them in others. Autistics have a hard time with this because they often can’t understand why others don’t share their emotions, and cannot understand that others emotions are different from their own.

                So why do people self-diagnose?

                A lot of reasons, the easiest one to observe is the need to form a unique identity, a drive very common in teenagers and early twenty-somethings. It’s a very intense formative stage of a person’s individual personality development, and it’s not uncommon to see people trying different collectivist groups and ideologies on for size, sometimes it’s a clique (Goth, Jock etc..) other times it can be a political ideology (Anarchism, Communism, Feminism etc..) and of course the proverbial “sexual experiments in college” people have as they explore the dynamics of sexuality that they feel best represents their own internal identity.  Now that mental health is being talked about more, it’s only natural that an individual look within themselves and wonder “Am I normal, is this me?” and then try on a few mental illnesses for size. While I understand, and occasionally sympathise with this little voyage of self-discovery, it can be teeth grindingly frustrating to watch some middle-class university student acting like a total fucking shit-melon and then compounding this behaviour by screaming abuse at people reacting to them because they aren’t recognising they are autistic, and can’t help it.

                Pro tip: 99% of autistic people once they reach their late teens have very good self-control, because they’ve spent a lifetime learning to cope with the world as it is for them, only autistic children generally have meltdowns in public, and only those on the SEVERE end of the autism spectrum (Ie: non-verbal, semi-catatonic etc..) would be so heedless of social norms as to start screaming at people in the middle of a college campus. Also, they wouldn’t have the self-control required to make it to university. Just because an autistic has difficulty recognising social norms and emotions in others, doesn’t mean they don’t understand the consequences of acting like a hooting turd-sprinkler in public, and so adjust their behaviour accordingly.

                The more sympathetic reason people self-diagnose is when they have severe anxiety about medical professionals, or just the outside in general. These people tend to be older, it’s no longer really about an identity, it’s more about finding a label for their suffering. While I have more sympathy for these people I generally still get frustrated by this as the well-known “first step” is recognising you have a problem, but: there are other steps people! The indulging of an urge to sit in their respective lairs and bemoan society/god/fate/genetics/vaccines/Donald Trump for their plight is a strong one, after all, if it’s somebody else’s fault, it’s not your responsibility to fix it, right?
                Pro Tip: The only way to fix your brain is working hard yourself to want to fix your brain, no amount of meds or therapy will help you if you don’t make the effort, yeah it sucks, and yeah it’s unfair, but I don’t recall you signing anything after leaving your mother’s birth canal/c-section/test tube saying “Your life will always be fair.” By all means accept help from others, that’s always great! But don’t forget it’s a team effort and you have to be part of that team.

                Of course this is a pretty broad topic, and I’ve only scratched the proverbial surface of this very huge and very crusty turd. People using mental illness as an excuse to act like a tool, or to be “trendy”, or to accessorise their personality is something that makes me implement a radical form of therapy called “Ram sharp things into your face until you stop being a narcissistic little butt-weasel therapy.” (It’s still in the development stage). Because it trivialises very real, very damaging, and very brutal afflictions that destroy lives, the sort of lives I see every day.

Multi-tasking: Why it makes you a terrible human being (or not).

                I’m going to annoy a lot of people and avoid the whole topic of sex and multi-tasking, suffice to say everyone is capable of doing it to greater and lesser degrees and there is evidence to suggest that it’s influenced by your genetics (like almost everything in human behaviour).

                Our ability to do stuff is determined by what psychologist call your “cognitive load” essentially you only have a certain amount of cognitive function and you don’t want to blow your load all on one thing, you can split your attention between two or more tasks to varying degrees of success. The level of success depends on the familiarity you have with your tasks, for example people who type often can do so with very little cognitive load, as their unconscious mind and muscle memory handle a lot of the heavy lifting, leaving the conscious mind under less of a load.

                So what effect does a high cognitive load have? Well, most people become more irritable, easily distracted, and tend to make mistakes in what they are doing more often.  “Patting the head and rubbing the tummy” demonstrates the problem of relying on unconscious habits while at the same time employing the conscious mind to alter then. However for people who spend a lot of time around kids and do it a lot, they will have developed that “skill” to such a point where it’s unthinking, so they can pat their heads, rub their tummy’s and deliver a short presentation on the film career of Nick Cage at the same time while suffering very few side effects.

                Does it affect your ability to reason? Yes, it does. Being under a high cognitive load means you’re more dependent on your unconscious mind and long term memories for a lot of your executive level thinking. You’ll be quicker to jump to conclusions, more reliant on stereotypes and generally more inclined to take the “short route” cognitively speaking rather than stop and consider a problem or situation at length. You'll also be quicker to anger and frustration then you otherwise would be. Interestingly (but unrelatedly) this effect has been demonstrated to be compounded by hunger.

                As for productivity, it can arguably be very productive, especially if it’s tasks that the individual is very familiar with, people who do long repetitive jobs may often switch between them with very little obvious signs of fatigue or increase in cognitive load, simply because most of the tasks are done without serious conscious thought. That explains that “I am dead inside” look you often get form people in the public service industry, they’re on autopilot, seemingly doing a complex multitude of tasks without engaging more brainpower then it takes to consider what sandwich they will have after work. The flipside to this is when people accept too much of a cognitive load, which I have referred to earlier, the results being VERY unproductive.

                So essentially? Multi-tasking, and its effects are very much dependant on what you’re doing as to the effects it will have on you. It’s not a “skill” in the sense you can develop it, rather it’s an ability you can employ to varying degrees of success based on your level of ability with the tasks at hand.