Self-Diagnosis by Tiktok

w/ help from the "horoscope effect"🔮

patreon: Mental Health Self-Diagnosis?

This week on Patreon, reporter and writer Emily Baron Cadloff give me the backstage tour of her recent piece for The Walrus, Viral Symptoms: The Rise of Mental Health Diagnosis Videos on TikTok. We talk self-diagnosis TikTok, cognitive bias (aka “the horoscope effect”) and finding the line between destigmatizing mental health and overpathologizing—or as one 👀 headline put it ‘Munchausen by Internet’.

It also resonates with a number of unladylike themes like medical gaslighting, self-advocacy, media literacy and all 34 minutes of ADHD All Grown Up, an episode I still think about all the time!

As always, THANK YOU, THANK YOU to this week’s newest Unladylike Patreon supporters, Elizabeth and Kaya!! 💖💖

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need to know:

• Lia Thomas would do it all again. (ESPN) After becoming the first known trans athlete to win an NCAA Division 1 championship earlier this year, the just-graduated University of Pennsylvania swimmer became the prime target of the movement to ban trans athletes from girls’ and women’s sports (and the center of this recent NYT feature that gives an awful lot of weight to the whole “you just can’t argue with ‘biology’!” anti-trans stance and left me v curious about its editing process). Lia’s swimming career is over, and she’s now heading to law school to start her new career of fighting for transgender rights and equality.

• A post-Roe military. (WaPo, TW: rape) Allison Gill makes an excellent/horrifying point that in a US military already rife with sexual assault and unintended pregnancy rate higher than civilians, service members assigned to bases in trigger ban states “could essentially be forced by the government to carry their pregnancy to term and give birth to their rapist’s baby.” Meanwhile, the Army says it’s working on a plan “ensure” abortion access to soldiers, and tbd other branches.

• Canada is ramping up gun restriction because the US. (NYT) In Canada—which has ~10X fewer civilian-owned guns per capita than the US—the government is likely to greenlight legislation to ban handgun sales and assault weapons possession a la New Zealand in 2019. Prime Minister Trudeau told the press: "We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and gets more difficult to counter."

  

  Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) voicing support for the 1994 assault weapon ban, which lapsed in 2004 under a Republican-controlled US Congress.

• The first EU country to decriminalize sex work. (Thompson Reuters Foundation) As of today, buying and selling sex in Belgium is no longer against the law. Decriminalization and legalization are two different things, but the upshot is that decriminalizing theoretically extends the same labor rights and protections to sex workers as everyone else on the clock.

• Ever heard Fanny? (NYT) Love, loved learning about Fanny, the first all-women rock band to release a major-label album (Fanny, 1970). Started by Filipina-American sisters June (on guitar) and Jean (on bass) Millington, the band had an impressive, if predictably sexist, four-album run but faded into obscurity . . . until—get this—a chance sighting at the 2017 Women’s March.

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til next week . . . It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns.

Molly Jong-Fast @MollyJongFast

It’s the guns

washingtonpost.comU.S. marks Memorial Day weekend with at least 12 mass shootingsSince the Uvalde, Tex., elementary school shooting, there were at least 15 other shootings that had at least four victims.