#yo momma so fake she's social construct

[clusterduck28]

hi! i promise i don’t mean to come across as rude, i’m just genuinely curious as to what you meant on that last mental health post where you said “Mental disorders are, in fact, social constructs. Just like gender and a bunch of other stuff, who knew...!”

are you saying that mental disorders are a made up thing by society? and if so, what do you make of ADHD, Bipolar Mania, and schizophrenia? i personally have the first two and my symptoms aren’t made up because i accepted societies ideas of Mania, there is an actual chemical imbalance in my brain.

if you’re talking about about actually putting names to illnesses, then i can definitely see where you’re coming from. medicine is evolving every day and obviously there will be advancements and changes to certain diagnoses, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way when you compare mental disorders to gender - which is definitely made up by society - because it implies that you mean that mental disorders are just something made up by a group of people and not something that is real and affects around 970 Million people (a rough estimate from the world health organization from 2022)

again, i really don’t mean to be rude so i hope it doesn’t come across that way!

I don't think this came off as rude anon, don't worry about it :3 I'll expand on this real quick

So, basically, yes the symptoms are real, the chemical imbalances in the brain are also real and measurable, as well as like physiological brain abnormalities, ect. The names, definitions and categories we use to describe them are, however, socially constructed.

An interesting example I just came up with to illustrate this would be to think about prehistoric cave people who had nearly identical brain structures to our own but have yet to organize themselves into complex social systems like we have in modern times. Imagine yourself being born in pre-historic times with the exact same brain structure and chemistry you have right now, you would experience the exact same set of symptoms but you wouldn't know to think of them as 'ADHD' or 'Bipolar mania', etc. because these concepts simply don't exist yet. To summerized, the types of experiences that society now considers to be mental disorders have been present in human populations as long as our species existed but their names and categorization are a relatively recent invention.

Now bringing this back to gender, which is a social construction that affects over 7.75 billion people around the world (rough estimate I just googled lol) Again, thinking about prehistoric cave people, they actually didn't have the concept of gender for a good long while. They, of course still exhibited the same broad range of primary and secondary sex characteristics all mammies do but the social roles of 'man' and 'woman' had to be socially constructed at some point during the evolution of human social order. My understanding is that those roles were necessary for early division of labor, as some configurations of the human body are better suited for certain kinds of labor than others and constructing those categories along the lines of sex characteristics was the most efficient way of doing it. In other words, gender used to be kind like a job - a thing that you are because of the things that you do (A plumber is a plumber because he does plumbing, a man is a man because he does man tasks)

So the same way the genders were socially constructed to meet society's need to organize labor more efficiently, the various categories of mental disorders were constructed to meet society's need to take the individuals who experience various kinds of mental distress and better integrate them into the social order.

I feel like many people treat the term 'social construct' as some sort of value judgement, as it it's synonymous with 'fake' but it's really a value-neutral term that is used to describe stuff that doesn't exist outside the context of human society. Every single social construction was invented at a certain stage of social evolution for a reason, it solved some kind of problem and served some kind of purpose for the particular subset of people at a particular time who invented and shaped it. But the main purpose of identifying various social phenomena as socially constructed is to help think of society as something evolving and malleable, as something that is made up of various elements that can be either kept the same, reformed or retired entirely in some cases. In other words, every social construct serves a purpose but it doesn't mean it serves it prefectly and without creating more problems in the process.

TL;DR genders and mental disorders - malleable socially constructed categories. Human sexual dimorphism and individual experiences of mentally ill people - measurable and real.