i imagine this time in ai is/was like the early days of the internet where anything was possible and regulation wasn't dampening innovation (limewire, etc)
this is the worst article to go viral i have ever seen
can't even get through it , full disclosure (also i have bpd and am in the field)
doesn't this shift the blame to the child for having that temperament? and also why are we highlighting daughters here when stigma is the reason women are diagnosed with personality disorders more often than men despite it being prevalent at similar rates in both..
also bpd is much more complex , don't be fooled. if you are a bad parent you are at risk no matter what gender your child is. you can't prevent trauma btw
As a cognitive psychologist, I'm not surprised that MLK's formative childhood memory was distorted, embellished, or even fabricated (though sincerely believed). As the authors of this op-ed observe, "We know from history and from human nature that origin stories are often shaped to serve other ends than a literal recounting of events." (I've seen this when fact-checking my own childhood memories.) It's consistent with Robert Trivers's theory of self-deception: We convince ourselves of congenial stories, the better to convince others. | The Problem With Martin Luther King Jr.’s Origin Story https://t.co/7NsT1SsITp
@CMalabyte@hannahspierMD eh it's genetic, brain structure, temperament, exposure to environmental factors and also extremely complex imo : i run archii whose whole thing is not categories but dimensions, and we fight folks who lump people together and we fight people who stigmatize mental health
your whole structure rests on one move that doesn't hold. you slide from describing borderline pathology in trait terms to claiming that description explains where it comes from and how to prevent it. those are different claims, and the second doesn't follow from the first. once you see that, most of the rest unravels.
description isn't etiology. the dimensional model you lean on, bpd as extreme high neuroticism, low agreeableness, low conscientiousness, is a real literature (roughly the dsm 5 alternative model and the ffm personality disorder work). but locating a phenotype in trait space says nothing about its causes or its treatment. "depression is extreme low positive affect" doesn't mean depression is caused by insufficient cheerfulness training. you treat a coordinate as a cause.
you concede the thing that sinks your own argument. "the real starting point is always temperament," and temperament is substantially heritable, both these traits and bpd itself run roughly 40%+ in twin studies. if the substrate is that genetic, culture and parenting are working on a constrained range, which makes "permissive culture created an epidemic" a very heavy claim. you want temperament to be foundational and the variance to be mostly cultural failure. pick one.
your central empirical claim is asserted, not shown. that cluster b is rising, and that feminism and permissiveness caused it. bpd prevalence trends are badly confounded by changes in diagnosis and help seeking, there's no clean evidence of rising true incidence, let alone a cultural cause. meanwhile the best replicated risk factor we actually have, childhood maltreatment, you wave off with "i suspect [cultural failure is] now more common." the entire causal engine is "i suspect."
it's engineered to be unfalsifiable. a child who reacts intensely to a limit "proves" the limit was right ("placed precisely where it was needed"), so no protest could ever signal a bad boundary. an independent kid is "fragile autonomy"; a clingy kid is properly attached, both confirm the thesis. girls who show no pathology have it anyway, just "packaged attractively." a frame where every possible observation confirms you isn't a theory.
the clinical science says the opposite of your binary. you frame validate the feeling versus hold the line as a choice, with the field guilty of choosing validation. the evidence based bpd treatments, dbt and mbt, are built on doing both at once; dbt's entire dialectic is acceptance and change. the "validate a feeling without endorsing the action" insight you present as heterodox is mainstream practice. and of all diagnoses to call under stigmatized, bpd is among the most stigmatized in psychiatry, including by clinicians toward their own patients, so your "we removed the brakes" premise is backwards for this exact condition.
the opening anecdote is a bait and switch. you state outright that your daughter's temperament is "far from the configuration that most concerns me," so by your own admission the scene is not an instance of the thing you're theorizing. an ordinary eight year old making a social bid during an overstimulating family holiday gets drafted as a microcosm of cluster b formation. and calling the bid "fake" claims privileged access to the child's interior, the precise "elevating subjective experience over behavior" sin you condemn, just run in your favor.
you braid several defensible things, consistency in parenting matters, dimensional trait models are real, incentives shape behavior, you can validate a feeling without endorsing the act, around a large unevidenced ideological story, so the true bits lend borrowed credibility to the claim that hasn't earned it. the tell is the ending: "restore paternal authority, bring back shame, feminism is pathogenic" is a values program, and the personality science you cite doesn't license it.