The ascend power from Tears of the Kingdom. Not so much in my literal real life, but any time someone in a show/movie is being chased or is trapped somewhere or even just stuck in an awkward situation I expect them to just fly through the ceiling and leave all their pursuers with question marks over their heads.
For LGBTQ+ specifically, Todd from Bojack Horseman. He’s asexual, and he just kind of…is asexual. It’s a major plot line of character development as he figures himself out, but the asexuality isn’t a gimmick or hook. We care about Todd and this matters a lot to him, so we care about it too. It happens to be him exploring his (a)sexuality, but it could have been anything.
Abed Nadir in Community is one of the best examples IMO of doing diversity in tv right. He is autistic, and that fact is central not just to his character but to making the whole show work. Being autistic creates jokes, it’s never the joke itself. (He’s also not precious or off-limits. Abed IS the butt of some jokes, but not his autism.) He is arguably the audience surrogate despite (because of?) so much of his “deal” being how he doesn’t relate to people like everyone else. In general no one feels sorry for him (and when someone does they look like the asshole by the end of the episode). He has a lot of classic, stereotypical ASD traits, but they are treated like personality traits. He’s a shining example of why identity-first language feels important for a lot of people: he is a complex and fleshed-out whole person as he is. If you took away his autism he’d be flat and boring and unrelatable, a completely different character.
Abed and Todd both kind of just exist very authentically in their worlds. No one (character or writer) is asking you to feel a particular way about them, just to appreciate them for who they are like any other character. If we care about the world and the character, we’ll care about what matters to them.
I’m a developmental psychologist, and the biggest thing is people just not knowing what “psychologist” means.
The tl;dr here is:
Most psychologists aren’t therapists. Most therapists aren’t psychologists. If you’re looking for quality mental health care, don’t revere the “doctor.”
A “psychologist” refers to someone with a PhD in psychology (or someone who does psychological research within an interdisciplinary field, like education or human development). Critically, a psychologist is a researcher (and often an educator at the college+ level). Psychology is a massive field, and the most common subfields are cognitive, developmental, social, clinical, and neurobio.
A “clinical psychologist” is a research psychologist is the particular subfield of clinical psychology. Along with research, clinical psychologists usually learn clinical psychotherapy practices and then may (or may not) choose to incorporate offering therapy into their career. A similar path is the “PsyD” (doctor of psychology) which also falls under the “psychologist” heading. Like a clinical psych PhD, a PsyD has had advanced training in research and practice, but the balance of the degree leans much more toward practice. People who opt for a PsyD rather than PhD usually plan to pursue a fully clinical career, but are qualified to do research as well.
A “therapist” is someone who is trained and licensed to provide clinical psychotherapy. Most therapists in the US have a master’s degree in social work (or a few others, like counseling psychology), specialized clinical training in one or more areas or treatments, and additional state licensure requirements. Clinical and counseling psychologists (with PhDs) can act as therapists if they get and maintain licenses, but this is a small fraction of therapists. PsyDs make up another chunk, but the majority do not have a terminal PhD/PsyD.
As a psychologist, I don’t say this because I think my PhD makes me better than someone with an MSW — the reverse! I hear people get advice to not see a therapist if they are “just” a social worker without a PhD. Meanwhile people come up to my dumbass self and think I am qualified to act as a therapist or like I know anything about clinical or abnormal psychology. Like, wanna know how 2-year-olds and 12-year-olds use nonverbal signals like shrugs to facilitate conversational interaction differently from each other and from adults? No? Then I am not the person you’re looking for. Go talk to that extremely knowledgeable and well-trained person with an MA.
…Meanwhile a “psychiatrist” is a whole other thing. They have an MD and can prescribe medication. Very rarely they may also offer psychotherapy, but that’s hard to make happen in the US a healthcare system.
It’s more of a persistent thing than a series of examples, but a moment that comes to mind is earlier this year teaching a kind of broad social sciences class. I was trying to make a point about something or other and the psychology of capitalism and asked who had ever consciously chosen to stop studying or working to go to sleep or watch tv or otherwise be unproductive. Everybody raised their hands. Ok now who has felt guilty about doing that? No one. Not a single hand. I was astounded.
And in my millennial mind my first thought is of course “wtf are these kids doing at this elite college if they don’t hate themselves properly?” Second thought is “oh cool, these kids don’t hate themselves.”
But following up on what they thought that meant as far as the material we were talking about, it became a conversation about evolving pressures. For me, the concept of “self-care” in college was really the same as “laziness,” which is obviously not great. For them, “self-care” is as much a responsibility as homework, but not necessarily in a good way. There’s a social responsibility to be a certain kind of anti-capitalist while still succeeding in a capitalist system. I had a student say she felt more guilty about breaking her streak on her mindfulness app than getting a bad grade because she didn’t work hard enough.
But at the same time, they truly HAVE to get excellent grades. I might think grade inflation is a huge problem and that they should consider an A- to be a good grade, but the reality is that A- might be the reason they don’t get into law or med school. It’s not like that A- means they don’t deserve or can’t succeed on med school, but it might mean they’ll never get the chance. Do I stand on principle and grade like grades are supposed to mean something, or do I give them what they need to have the future they want?
What about using AI ethically and constructively? I was told I wasn’t going to have a calculator in my pocket by idiots. I’m not going to do that to a new generation. What does it feel like to have to pack extracurriculars to get a post-bac internship even more than they did to get into college? What does it mean to come of age in the era of BLM, COVID, and Trump instead of 9/11, don’t ask don’t tell, and the Great Recession?
It’s just not the same experience. I can’t be. That’s not a problem, but it’s a challenge.
Ironically, understanding the lived experiences of college students.
I’m a professor now, graduated from college in 2010. I actually work at the same school I went to, and I often still feel completely out of touch with what my students actually need and how they approach their education. I have to put real work into connecting with students to meet them where they’re at and create classes they will get something out of. Fortunately I really love that aspect of my job. Most professors don’t give a shit and just assume college is the same now as it was 10-20 years ago.
One of the biggest cliche revisionist histories I know of is “Jack of all trades, master of none; often much better than master of one.” It’s an interesting one because it’s been retconned twice.
You’ll hear people respond to first line by saying “um actually the second line of the poem totally changes the meaning.” Yes, it did change the meaning when it was added in the 21st century, 400-500 years later.
Then you’ll hear people one step closer to accuracy who correct “Jack of all trades” by reminding the speaker that it’s not a compliment because it ends with “master of none.” Except the master of none bit wasn’t used until the 18th century, and the second revision with the couplet may actually closer in meaning to the original!
The original, simple phrase “jack of all trades” was first used in that form in the 16th century, possibly as a reference to Shakespeare, and definitely as a phrase that was intentionally ambiguous about whether it should be interpreted as a compliment or insult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades?wprov=sfti1#Origins
deleted by creator
Local news anchor once ended a segment saying something was “a phallus” instead of a “fallacy. Understandably but hilarious.
In linguistics and psychology “nonce” words are fake words invented for a specific purpose (like to use as stimuli in an experiment). They have no meaning but should sound like plausible words for the language phonetically. In English some commonly used ones are “blicket” and “wug.” Ironically “wug” is so commonly used there’s actually a formalized “wug test” for morphological development.
I actually used to use this wrong, thinking “nonce” was a variation on “nonsense,” but it’s actually from the same origin as the cryptographic nonce: it’s a one-time-use word. So while they are often nonsensical (like basically all of the Jabberwocky poem) they can also be perfectly sensible and comprehensible, just with a one-time specific context of use.
(Also I’ve never heard nonce used as an insult of any kind. Is it a British thing?)
Lol from the footnotes:
Next in the Public Health series on the Organic Household: Targeting bathroom congestion — innovative uses for the kitchen sink.
This article was not reviewed by the authors’ wives before publication.
Jokes aside, I’d rather make my bed. Washing sheets regularly can handle sweat and dead skin problems just fine, and mites are going to be there no matter what. I’m more concerned with keeping out larger bugs like house centipedes and stopping my cat from tracking litter on my pillowcase.
That’s a bit different though. We don’t (generally) use “n-word” in place of the slur the way someone might type f!#k or say “frick” in place of “fuck.” We use it to talk about the term. So when someone is censoring themselves with replacement it can feel pointless, since the sentiment is the same: we both know what word you want to use to express yourself, just use it. When you use a censored alternative to a slur, you’re not just swapping one thing in for another leaving your meaning unchanged. You’re communicating an intention to avoid what you know to be a symbol of hate in a context that has no hateful intent.
I have a linguistics joke, but it wouldn’t translate.
I have a psychology joke, but you wouldn’t Likert.
I think the older generation got used to the stereotype that if people were posting with emojis, they would naturally be making more immature posts (being younger).
That’s interesting because I would have suggested the opposite. I learned to associate emojis with older internet users (boomers and up). I always understood Reddit’s anti-emoji thing to be a kind of anti-boomer gatekeeping. It had a kind of “take your Minions memes and go back to Facebook, grandma” kind of vibe.
Reddit definitely does/did hate emoji though. I think it was even part of a written down “reddiquette” at some point.
If it aired today I suspect most people would also find it underwhelming. The thing with Arrested Development is that it was truly unique and ahead of its time, enough that it couldn’t make it through three seasons on network tv. There was just nothing else like it, and audiences didn’t quite know what to do with it. People who loved it made a big deal about it because it could be (and turned out to be) the direction comedy was heading if only people would give it a chance.
Please tell me “pliers” is the term for “tweezers” outside the US.
As others have said, there’s never going to be a clear cut line between the two. I think it’s more useful to take a functional perspective. Something isn’t problematic because it’s a cult; it’s a cult because it’s problematic. I like Hassan’s BITE model of authoritarian control here. We look for social systems that are purposefully organized to enforce different kinds of control over individuals within the system - Behavioral, Information, Thought, and Information control in the BITE model. We see where systems rely on mechanisms of control to the clear detriment of those within the system.
You mention in another comment the idea that many “cults” are going to be relatively more accepting of you than many “cultures.” That’s undoubtedly true. But the distinction is in what happens next. The border around a cult system is only permeable in one direction. You may be accepted with open arms, but that acceptance is a tool to get you into a place where you can’t leave because you won’t (or feel like you won’t) ever be accepted again outside the cult.
The control mechanisms also create an all-in system. I’m not generally a fan of religion TBH, but you can decide how much you want the culture of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or whatever to affect your life day to day and in what ways. If you’re in a Christian cult though, like the IFB or IBLP (the one the Duggars are in), the system decides your level of involvement. Scientology is a great example of this because it looks like there is a wide range of involvement level. You see a lot of celebrities who don’t seems crazy, who talk about how wholesome it is, who say they’ve never seen any of the abuses people talk about. It’s not that these celebrities are opting for a chiller version of Scientology, it’s that Scientology opted them into a less obviously, outwardly repressive day-to-day for the benefit of the system.
All this to come back to my first point - this is a functional distinction, not a formal/semantic one. Is some social system manipulating its members in an organized and harmful way? Then let’s call it a cult so we can talk about that concept more easily. THEN the question of is this or that group a cult based on whether it functionally presents as one.
I read The Fountainhead in a high school English class and then got super into Ayn Rand and read Atlas Shrugged and some of her other stuff on my own. What actually happened was that I was a child in the Florida Public School System and so 1) didn’t understand what capitalism was, 2) couldn’t recognize terrible writing, and 3) was enjoying how proud my dad was for once.
Now I’m in my 30s and I can’t bring myself to throw away books at all, but also refuse to give them away and put them back out into the world for other dumbasses and/or impressionable children to find. They live on a bookshelf in my back room strategically positioned so that even if someone did go into that room they’d have to dig through a bunch of French textbooks and ancient American Girl books to find them.
If anyone would like some garbage propaganda advocating for a society of psychopaths written in the style of your drunk uncle’s auto-transcribed voice memos, hit me up.
The way you’re describing it sounds like a step past the standard “super taster” experience. Especially if you already know you’re prone to hypersensation in taste (or tactile), you might look into learning more about ARFID, an avoidant-restrictive type eating/feeding disorder. Many kids who don’t grow out of being picky eaters (or even get worse) aren’t as much “picky” as they are literally unable to swallow or keep down most food. There’s been more education about it (especially in adults) recently, leading to a lot of adults having a “holy shit I’m not the only person in the world like this?!” moment. There’s a decent community on Reddit if you’re curious about others’ experiences (though being Reddit there’s also some wildly uncalled for aggressive armchair diagnoses, groupthink, and misinformation, soooo grain of salt).
Mystery solved.
One tricky thing here is that existing literature is really examining the potential effects of trigger warnings in and of themselves, devoid of context or non-immediate decision making. Does seeing a literal trigger warning make someone feel less anxious? Almost certainly not, why on earth would it?
In studies that find no or slight negative effect, the outcomes are immediate measures. How do you feel right now? If it assesses decision making, it’s whether you do or do not immediately consume the content.
But for trauma survivors the potential to be triggered is always in flux, always dependent on everything else going on in your life, often set off by things that seem unrelated or irrational. Trigger warnings give someone a choice in that exact moment for what to do based on what they believe they can* manage. Yes, it may promote avoidance, but avoidance can increase feelings of agency that allow for reduced avoidance behavior in the future.
As an example from the great college campus syllabus trigger warning kerfuffle: I assign chapters from Durkheim’s Suicide in some seminars, as well as complementary readings with less obvious titles. My students get a warning about this ahead of time, but they don’t get to just skip that part of the class. Some things students have done: scheduled extra therapy sessions during those weeks, read in small groups in the library instead of isolated in dorm rooms, missed a class meeting and made up for it with office hours and a short additional assignment (so they didn’t out themselves to their peers with a panic attack in class). It’s about agency and self-assessment.
A screen with a suicide hotline number isn’t going to magically make someone ok with seeing suicide represented, but it offers an action the person can take to regain agency.
*Or just want to manage. Sometimes you’re just living your life and not super in the mood for exposure therapy, and if you can get your brain somewhere else for a while that’s a very good thing.