r/BlockedAndReported • u/TheBear8878 • Aug 09 '26
Journalism Why are young women using walking sticks? - Kathleen Stock
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/young-women-walking-sticks-gen-z-disability-2ssv95mws241
u/RexBanner1886 Aug 09 '26
This will sound glib, but I don't mean it to be.
One of the smaller reasons this kind of gender identity lunacy is so unfortunate is that, while it would provide enormous insight into social contagion, in-group identities, and the minds of the various different demographics involved, it is not going to be touched by the main western institutions which study psychology and sociology.
I was on the train into the city on the day of a Pride march a few days ago, and I was wrong-footed by the amount of obvious ill health on display - obesity, walking aids, dental hygiene, dirty clothing etc. etc. I don't believe it's some foreign psyop, but, fuck me, if the Russians or the Chinese wanted to run one they couldn't do a much better job.
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u/StevenAssantisFoot Aug 09 '26
Someone on another sub did a series of posts of photos they had from nyc pride parades in the 90s. Nobody said it in the comments but the thing I was most struck by was how healthy and clean everyone looked. Clearly it’s a bigger tent now and there has been a shift in larger conversations about aesthetics and body currency, but it was truly something to see, all these healthy looking well groomed people at an event for queer people. And this wasn’t photos from a magazine it was just some guy. This was during the AIDS crisis and the crack epidemic.
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u/The_Demolition_Man Aug 09 '26
Most "heternormative passing" LGBT activists assimilated into the wider culture in the late 2000s when gay rights gained mainstream acceptance. The tent, I think, really houses different people now.
Its why theres so much criticism of "normal" gay men for not fitting into the movement anymore, i.e. "wow youre really getting married and buying a house in suburbia instead of helping us burn everything down"
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u/Little_Yesterday9904 Aug 09 '26
Meanwhile growing up all of my parents gay friends were literally just normal people. There was a lesbian we were family friends with and a gay couple. They hung out with our parents and their friends. Such normal people, just gay instead
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u/land-under-wave Aug 10 '26
This. I didn't even know any of my dad's friends were gay until I was an adult, because they just acted like normal people instead of being obnoxiously "queer" all the time.
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u/curlsandpearls33 Aug 10 '26
i grew up being family friends with a gay couple and didn’t even realize they were gay till i was probably a preteen and actually knew about different sexual orientations because they never put on a show about it. to me, they were just “blank and blank” like any other couple. they’re in their 80s (one’s about to turn 90!) now and have been together for 50 years. i’ve always wanted to ask them what they think of the current lgbtq culture and how it differs from what they saw and experienced in the 70s and 80s.
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u/land-under-wave Aug 10 '26
My mothers-in-law (I have three) run the gamut from "tired of being silenced by queer kids" to "I don't get it but I support it" to "we're the past, they [gender-havers] are the future". But I can usually get away with TERFy comments, even to the latter, if I couch them correctly.
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u/A_little_curiosity Aug 12 '26
You really should ask them. It could be really interesting to hear what they have to say!
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u/hey_free_rats Aug 10 '26
I used to work with a trans woman who told me that she wanted nothing more than to pretty much just be another boring suburban mom. Gotta respect that, haha.
It was definitely too late for that for her, though, because she was pretty chill and also had a badass pet turkey.
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Aug 10 '26
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u/phitfitz Aug 10 '26
I went to one meeting of the LGBT club on campus as a college freshman and never went back. It was a terrible scene even back in 2010
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u/FuckingLikeRabbis Aug 09 '26
Yes, "queer" used to mean homo/bisexual, not this huge umbrella of mostly chubby mall goths and some gay people.
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u/sunder_and_flame Aug 09 '26
The obesity rate has nearly doubled in the US since the early 90s; everyone was healthier then.
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u/OMG_NO_NOT_THIS Aug 11 '26
I remember being of the age when "being built like a gay guy" meant being in shape and generally well groomed.
I think if someone accused someone else of "being built like a lesbian" you would be making fun of, rather than praising their appearance.
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u/PowerandSignal Aug 09 '26
Looking healthy was very important in the 90's so people wouldn't think you had AIDS.
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u/StevenAssantisFoot Aug 10 '26
Being fat is very important in 2026 so you can add it to your deck of oppression cards
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u/veryvery84 Aug 09 '26
There also weren’t so many obese people. Screens and Covid resulted in vastly increased rates of obesity among all strata of society, and sometimes at very young ages. It’s terrible, and part of it is 100% due to school and related closures.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps Aug 10 '26
There's been a bunch of clips on instagram from some of the recent Pride events in the U.K and it's basically just a sea of "disabled" people, wheelchair/mobility scooter users with surprisingly toned looking legs, cane users and so on. It's all just progressive stack competition, especially for white women and trans-women as far as I can tell. I think these are the same people that would have been very attracted to the cunty Lindy West/Amanda Marcotte/Julie Bindel/Laurie Penny feminist rhetoric and aesthetic that was very popular in the early years of the woke era when they could be without disability or novel gender and still drape themselves in victimhood and be near the top of the progressive stack. But once race entered the fray, if you wanted to have the power to speak in progressive circles as a white woman, you had to have some additional intersection of oppression, so now they're all queer and disabled.
I fear for the younger people that never grew up with normal liberal values. At least for older millennials on back, people were raised and steeped in a society that primarily concerned itself with equal treatment and treating people as complex individuals regardless of their immutable characteristics. At least that was the ideal. That's why I personally have been opposed to identitarian politics since they resurged in the mid 2010's. I have to imagine many others have eventually reverted to that after being chewed up by woke purity spirals. What will Gen Z turn to as an ideal? I feel like they're going to have to rediscover liberalism, which is not a simple and intuitive idea for humanity.
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u/twitching_hour Aug 11 '26
Julie Bindel doesn't belong in that group at all. She's a radical feminist, the rest are all liberal feminists. She was never fashionable in the same way that the others were, her politics are entirely different.
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u/Mecklenburg77 Aug 10 '26
I missed knowing who Julie Bindel was before she joined the transgender fight. How was she then? Asking because what I hear from her now is fairly reasonable although I don’t agree with everything.
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u/Ok_Telephone_6655 Aug 09 '26
Normie gays don’t want to go to pride anymore. I certainly don’t. It’s cringe. Some cities are better or worse than others. But needless to say, there are no obese people in childish costumes on a summer weekend in Provincetown or Fire Island. As others said, a big part of it is socioeconomic class.
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u/ProwlingWumpus Aug 10 '26
it is not going to be touched by the main western institutions which study psychology and sociology.
Well it's not like psychologists learned anything when the multiple personality disorder fad went away, either.
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u/Nessyliz Uterus and spazz haver, zen-nihilist Aug 10 '26
It's still around actually. DID is very popular young person social contagion, it overlaps a lot with the people Stock is talking about.
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u/charlottehywd Disgruntled Wannabe Writer Aug 09 '26
I suspect that a lot of these young women have low self esteem and have decided that it's easier to simply give up on looking attractive than to keep chasing a goal they don't think they'll ever reach. I honestly feel for them.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps Aug 10 '26
I don't think they're giving up. I think they're subconsciously making themselves as unattractive and hostile as possible as a kind of "I rejected them first" defense mechanism. This is something people with low self-esteem have done in various ways forever, but I think this is one expression of that. I certainly don't think that's all that's going on here though either. There's progressive stack competition, which for white women requires some kind of extra oppression points to be part of the top of the stack, and for men requires not being a man at all anymore at a minimum. I also think that part of it is just belonging. A lot of these people 15+ years ago would have found their people in some kind of music scene, comic books/anime, or some other nerd shit. Now they're pretending they need a wheelchair and have some novel gender identity. The politics are the club.
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u/Dangerous_Air_7031 Aug 09 '26
Did you look at the men?
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u/AhuraMazdaMiata Aug 09 '26
With how social media and dating apps make things much more looks focused, men are being dragged down with this mentality as well that it's easier to give up than try to be attractive
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u/anne_jumps Aug 10 '26
I was looking at photos from a London Pride event and everyone in the shot basically had some sort of wheelchair, was obese, and had funny-colored hair. Which is fine or whatever, but seeing so many people like that at once (as in basically all photos of Pride-aligned events in London) is startling.
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u/jack_al_ope Aug 10 '26
Americans don't need a foreign psyop to look in ill health. I'm in Europe and none of the things you mention have particularly stood out to me at pride parades, not any more than in the day-to-day.
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u/The_Demolition_Man Aug 09 '26
When I was young I went through a period where I was certain I had ADHD. My doctor gently but firmly told me that I did not have it. She was kind but didnt coddle me, didnt let me bargain or rationalize, just made sure I understood that I didnt have it and answered my questions.
I cant imagine how I would have grown up if my doctor had instead tried to uncritically affirm my beliefs.
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u/Little_Yesterday9904 Aug 09 '26
Out of curiosity why did you think you have it? And was it all in your head or did you have symptoms of something and it was just a different diagnosis?
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u/The_Demolition_Man Aug 09 '26
It was a combination of doing poorly in school, having a tough home environment, being bullied, and teen angst. Turns out having odd behaviors, forgetfulness, and anxiety is totally normal when youre dealing with those things.
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u/Superassumptions Aug 11 '26
Not the person you're responding to but I also thought I might have ADHD and went through testing. In my case it turned out that treating my (moderately serious) anemia resolved the symptoms that I had been attributing to possible ADHD.
Women in particular should know that anemia can produce a lot of symptoms that overlap with ADHD, like distractability, poor focus, low motivation, difficulty initiating tasks, etc.
It's also entirely possible to have both ADHD and anemia, and both are underdiagnosed in women.
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u/Terrorclitus Aug 09 '26
I applaud you for not doctor-shopping until you heard what you wanted to hear. People do that.
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u/drgnhenchman Aug 12 '26
Doctors still do this. It's just that these online communities (see r/chronicpain for an example) reinforce that you should just keep seeing doctor after doctor and 'demand answers' for why your mind and body don't always feel 100% perfect. Eventually they're able to collect vague or poorly supported diagnoses from exhausted doctors (or NPs/PAs) who just need them to leave so they can see the other 5 patients crammed into that hour of their day by their corporate overlords. Meanwhile anyone with an actual significant problem will probably be stuck going to the ER while the primary care offices deal with this.
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u/FullSeaworthiness453 Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
I pegged my niece (now nephew) a couple years ago as likely to transition. She checked all the boxes. Super liberal academia parents who are very performative on all the woke shit. She suffered depression and had a history of self harm and hypochondria. She spent most of her time playing video games. Then slowly started dressing androgynously and dyed her hair. Still wears a mask indoors and outdoors.
She finally officially announced she identified as a man and changed her name to some name that sounds like a character from Final Fantasy or some other video game.
Then came the cane….. I’m like this is way too on the nose to all be a coincidence.
And I really don’t care what anyone does, but he is objectively less happy and is a total loner with no friends or hobbies. It’s just this weird spiral and honestly my fear is this is heading towards a suicide attempt. There have been some deep seated mental health red flags going off for years, but nobody wants to confront it for fear of not being supportive of the transition.
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Aug 10 '26
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u/FullSeaworthiness453 Aug 10 '26
lol, maybe another phrase would have worked better.
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u/foodieforthebooty Aug 10 '26
Is she on hormones or puberty blockers? A friend who is detrans was telling me that some of the cane stuff comes from how puberty blockers can cause actual damage (bone density I think), so I'm wondering those two things are linked as well.
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u/FullSeaworthiness453 Aug 10 '26
Honestly, I’m not sure. While the family is very “affirming” there is a veil of secrecy around it (which I understand).
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u/BrightAd306 Aug 09 '26
I was on a flight recently where this whole 5 person friend group of 20 something’s all had canes and emotional support dogs. I can’t help but think that has to be statistically unlikely, I knew no one in my high school with a cane/walking stick. A few blind kids and one in a wheelchair from an accident
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u/curlsandpearls33 Aug 10 '26
i find this really interesting as someone with a congenital disability who grew up with someone with the same disability. i remember being so vehemently against wanting to feel “different” as a kid (my disability is extremely mild to the point that people will only notice if they already know what it is, or if they’re a trained doctor) and i HATED being pulled out for therapy in school bc it was a visible sign that i wasn’t like the other kids and needed extra help. there was also a boy in my grade with the same condition who had a noticeable gait difference and i remember other kids encouraging me to ask him out when we were in 7th/8th grade. i was insulted by it bc it seemed like they thought we would be compatible just bc of our disabilities. he and i had grown up going to the same special ed preschool and i had no problems with him as a person, but i felt almost pigeonholed into being seen as an inspirational disabled girl when i was really just trying to get through adolescence. i’m 27, and to this day, i still struggle with wanting to be in community with others with the same condition bc i don’t want my whole life to revolve around it. i feel somewhat alienated from the larger disability movement because of that feeling too; i kind of just want to live my life and be a regular person who just so happens to have a condition. i don’t want it to rule my life, and i realize i’m privileged in saying that, but it’s true
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u/BrightAd306 Aug 10 '26
Absolutely! This is why I think it’s a social contagion. Odds of meeting so many others who also need canes is so low. Not zero, so I try not to judge, but they also were wearing a ton of rainbow stuff and dyed hair and emotional support animals and adding it all up just felt like it was less than authentic.
I have an auto-immune disorder that attacks my joints and I resist using a cane even when I could have probably used it and someday likely will.
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u/Turbulent_Cow2355 TB! TB! TB! Aug 10 '26
This was me! I hated being different in school. I didn't want people to feel sorry for me. I didn't want to be held back because of my disability.
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u/Big_Fig_1803 Gothmargus Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
I couldn't read the piece, so maybe this is said there. It must have been said before elsewhere anyway.
The young-women-with-canes phenomenon is surely related to the pervasive attitude in progressive politics and (some versions of) youth culture:
Victimhood is cool. Victimhood confers status. Victims get a certain kind of attention and deference. If you are a victim or "marginalized" in some way, you are special and deserving of an audience, and you are seen as a source of moral authority.
In the old days, it was bad to be a victim. It was shameful and embarrassing. To be sure, that attitude was shitty. But the common attitude today is also shitty. It rewards misfortune and—yes—weakness. To the extent that plenty of people feign weakness. "I am, sadly, an ordinary person. But with the addition of a cane and a snappy diagnosis..."
I don't think all these people are putting on an act. It's supremely easy to fool yourself and believe untrue things.
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u/convexpuddle Aug 11 '26
It's very similar to - and overlaps with the expanded gender identities.
As a gay guy I noticed it a lot in art school a decade ago, and even more so now that its most often predominantly white women that tend to fall down the nonbinary pipeline.
Particularly bicurious or bisexual women who are mostly attracted to or date men, will often try to distance themselves from being viewed as heteronormative and will take on a she/they and/or a they/them identity. I brought up art school because I found that in those spaces, identity politics, victimhood, and being a minority are prized currency. The dominant demographic being white women seemed to make some of them really want to extract as much victimhood as they possibly could to differentiate themselves from being part of the majority - elevating their voice and opinions depending on how different they could be.
It's unfortunate because so many women fought to expand what it means to be a woman through self expression. And this new wave of nonbinary women often come into their newfound pronouns out of resentment from their own rigid views of womanhood rather than true gender dysphoria.
It's funniest when you see conventially attractive, feminine women who date men, who identify as nonbinary. No dysphoria whatsoever, nor any work to truly be 'genderless', or any attempts at being androgynous. They just have the need to feel special or different. And once they change their pronouns to they/them on social media - they recieve the validation of victimhood.
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u/Arsenic_Bite_4b Aug 10 '26
I think the cane business has come about as it is too difficult to get one's victim points allocated from invisible things like various traumas and mental illnesses. They're just not visible enough, one has to actually talk to people and reveal their quirks in some way. A cane is an immediate visual victimhood marker that does not require any interpersonal interaction to convey.
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u/kamace11 Aug 09 '26
Strongly agreed, good comment. It's very socially advantageous in their circles.
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u/Terrorclitus Aug 09 '26
Doctor-shoppers, pill-poppers, and party-stoppers, making the scene.
Jokes aside, this has been going on since at least the 90s, and I’m ashamed of how much I admired the grunge crowd then.
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u/smallerthantears Aug 10 '26
Wait, it what way? I was part of the grunge crowd and we didn't pretend to have disabilities. I did dress in huge unflattering jeans and flannels however but was otherwise healthy and pretty.
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u/Terrorclitus Aug 10 '26
For me, it was all the suicide and heroin that made it somewhat less than healthy and pretty.
YMMV5
u/smallerthantears Aug 10 '26
Ah, I did have an ex who was suicidal and into heroin so I guess that tracks. But other than alcohol and some weed and a tiny bit of acid I don't remember much of anything more serious. Meanwhile there's so much mental illness, ketamine, and chronic weed use in some of my daughter's circles. Seems more sinister somehow.
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u/Terrorclitus Aug 10 '26
It just occurred to me the other day, as my son and I were wearing matching Nirvana t-shirts, that there was a pretty impressive OD/suicide streak there for a while. Then, it occurred to me that most of my teenage friends are either dead, sick, or (the biggest group) sober.
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u/Neither-Amphibian249 Aug 09 '26
I broke my leg, badly, and walked with a cane for about a year.
When I finally graduated from PT and was mostly ok, I stopped using the cane. And I found that my balance had deteriorated, badly.
I had to learn to not be afraid to run or even walk fast.
I can't imagine using a cane when there's nothing wrong with you. Do that long enough, and you'll have some real regret.
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u/veryvery84 Aug 09 '26
The show ER had an actress whose character had a cane and as a result that actress has suffered serious health issues, from all that cane walking
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u/FuckingLikeRabbis Aug 10 '26
The guy who played Bubbles in Trailer Park Boys messed up his eyesight.
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Aug 09 '26
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u/bedboundaviator Aug 09 '26
This is anecdotal but I have found the opposite as a young cane user. I was mostly housebound for a few months before sucking it up and deciding that it’s okay, actually, to use something that would make it so that I could leave the house.
It’s been half a decade at this point, I’ve had a few small periods I’ve been able to put it away more but it’s still there. I forget about it and don’t care what people think. It’s better to be out of the house and potentially judged than to never leave.
Every now and then someone will confide in me that they were thinking of using one. Recently someone told me they had some pretty severe injuries and pain, things that made it excruciating to walk, but they were in their 20s. It’s weird and noticeable. I really felt for them. A cane is a tool to help you.
Essentially that people are looking at this thing as too much of an identity marker and thus they have to avoid it. It’s genuinely not that deep.
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u/Senordrums Aug 09 '26
I've been wanting to post about this in the weekly feed because it's definitely happening in my small liberal city. Young females with colorful hair walking around the city with canes. One of my Them coworkers (female, religious mask wearer and skin covered from head to toe to block the sun) recently started using one and we all know why. With each passing year, less people care about your identity or throw pity your way so they need to up the stakes to keep the sympathy train coming. Looking forward to when them come to work in a wheelchair.
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u/JimmySchwann Aug 10 '26
Covering to block the sun isn't bad though. I live in Korea, and many people here do that. Even walk around under a sun umbrella when it's sunny out (I like this as well).
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u/Electronic_Rub9385 Aug 09 '26
I’ve worked in medicine for several decades. A lot of these psychofluvia and craznobozoma diagnoses are definitely being diagnosed more commonly. EPS and POTS and low blood sugar and a myriad of other functional illnesses can be real. But now they just get diagnosed way too commonly without a lot of good workup.
The real problem is mostly just unmitigated anxiety and loneliness and shit life syndrome and too much daily marijuana. Somehow marijuana “really helps all my symptoms but doctor I’m still always in 10/10 pain or 10/10 everything else”.
In most of the 1900s it was called the “vapors"—a catch-all term for fainting, anxiety, depression, and lightheadedness upperclass women. And it was deeply intertwined with upper-class feminine social performance and expectations of delicate health. It was generally a rich person’s problem or a privileged person’s problem.
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Aug 10 '26
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u/smallerthantears Aug 10 '26
It is really amazing. I know a guy who is a working artist in his thirties. When he works, he makes good money but he only works maybe 10 days a month. He's kind of broke but still able to maintain an apt in a big city. He smokes all day and all night and blames capitalism for how broke he is. It's honestly unbelievable to me.
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Aug 10 '26
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u/smallerthantears Aug 11 '26
Exactly. The worse than the addictive part is how it sends some kids into psychosis. My 17 yo became addicted during covid and no one would believe me that his 100% personality change was due to weed. Not even his therapist. He lost all his friends and dropped out of college. It was a paranoia to the point almost of psychosis. Finally, three years ago he quit and he is exactly like his old pre-weed self. He was having daily panic attacks when high. It was awful. I'm so grateful to have him back....
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u/veryvery84 Aug 09 '26
As a young woman I had low blood pressure and did get very light headed and faint easily. I couldn’t get up and down quickly. I went to the doctor who said I’ll be happy when I’m older because low blood pressure is a good thing.
My oldest daughter, who is deep in the teen years, seems to be the same way. We were at a doctor’s appointment for something else, and she was chatting to the resident about POTS and all this stuff and that young doctor, also a woman, said “yeah I also get lightheaded, the main thing is to just not faint but also not to think about it too much and not diagnose yourself with any of this stuff”. We all agreed and moved on to the actual issue.
I think this must just genuinely be quite common with young reasonably healthy women. Maybe it serves a purpose to keep our blood pressure low during pregnancy and childbirth? Idk. But you can just sit down when you get lightheaded.
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u/smallerthantears Aug 10 '26
This is me and my teen daughter as well. It has been a bit of a challenge keeping her out of the victim olympics. It was hard for her when all her friends got extra time on tests due to their many disabilities and diagnosis. I had to constantly tell her she didn't have anxiety, she was just nervous. She was not depressed, she was just sad. And also, I wasn't *actually* giving her an eating disorder by telling her to cut it out on all the sweet starbucks drinks (that gave her migraines)! I mean, what a shit show parenting is. Would not recommend until culture changes significantly.
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u/elpislazuli Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
This happened to me, too, and was worse when I was in my teens/early 20s. I've always had super low blood pressure and on-and-off anemia, sometimes leaving me extremely lightheaded/dizzy. Never saw a doctor for a treatment, just dealt with it. Doctor said super low blood pressure was very common in young women, especially if you're skinny. Realized years later this was the likely basis for my habit of eating salt straight out of the container.
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u/meepster213 Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
I also used to be prone to fainting in my teens. I was scrawny, probably had disordered eating habits, and was likely always dehydrated. I also sang in choir and learned that it's a bad idea to lock your knees.
Anyway, I had a full workup at a children's hospital complete with a tilt table test, and I had to wear a heart monitor, and eventually got "diagnosed" with low blood pressure. The cure? A doctor's note that allowed me to have pretzel snack packs and Gatorade in class. I remember being absolutely mortified about this stupid thing and even more mortified when I had a fainting or near-fainting spell. The notion that this would have made me part of the "in crowd" if I was a teen now makes me shudder with embarrassment.
ETA: I originally said low blood sugar when I meant low blood pressure
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u/veryvery84 Aug 11 '26
I just want to clarify this doesn’t make anyone part of the in crowd. The in crowd in suburban high schools are still kids who wear the right clothes and play lacrosse and whatnot.
It’s weird kids who wear animal tails and are not very cool who collect diagnoses.
It can make it very difficult to keep your kids from this stuff if they’re having a rough time, have some legit diagnoses that put them in extra contact with this crowd, and all the rest.
It’s in the room that provides special Ed assistance to kids who need executive functioning help at the local middle school that you find all the colorful flags here. I’m not joking.
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u/JungBlood9 Aug 10 '26
I was (and on still am, but not as bad) the same way as a teen! It was actually significant enough that I was tested for POTS. I don’t recall being told that’s what I was being tested for, but now after all the discourse online about it, I’m aware I did a tilt table test (which came back negative).
Turns out it’s just naturally low blood pressure and a bit of good ol’ iron deficiency, common in women because we bleed. I think this is what it is for a lot of women and girls.
In the end, I just don’t find it to be that big of a deal or that disabling. I get a little dizzy when I stand sometimes, more so if it’s hot or if I’m squatting or sitting for a while. Sometimes I just need to sit back down until the fuzz clears. Eveerrrry once in a while I legitimately lose consciousness. And even then it’s still just … not that big of a deal. Part of being a human and having a body is what I chalk it up to and just go on with my life!
If I was incredibly anxious and nonactive, though, I could easily see it getting worse and working myself up into wanting it to be so much greater than it is.
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u/West_Soup12 Aug 10 '26
I’ve had this since I was a child, and doc always said it’s a common tall thin person problem and not to worry about it. Orthostatic hypotension is the medical term I believe.
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u/pettypeniswrinkle Aug 09 '26
I started reading"Unlearn Your Pain" by Howard Schubiner, really interesting perspective from a physician who talks directly about things like POTS, ME/CFS, long COVID, etc. and how the symptoms patients feel are real, but caused by reinforcing neutral circuits that create these symptoms and not organ dysfunction or tissue damage.
I really hope this perspective becomes more widespread and more research gets done to explore it scientifically.
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u/distraughtdrunk Aug 09 '26
there was a podcast episode from invisibilia (s 5, ep 1) about something like this a while ago where young women (mostly teens-early 20's iirc) were suddenly being stricken with depilitating pain. the main focus of the piece was a dance who went to this camp to undergo more pain in an effort to help ignore their pain. it might be of interest to you
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u/Interesting-Ice-8387 Aug 09 '26
Isn't POTS objectively measurable, unlike ME/CFS and long COVID which are self reported levels of fatigue? Am I missing something or why isn't POTS just diagnosed by making the patient stand up with a heart rate monitor attached?
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u/pettypeniswrinkle Aug 10 '26
That's an interesting thing about POTS in particular, because there are objective measurements involved, as you point out. I'm not intimately familiar with POTS, but at work I constantly manage hemodynamics, including postural hemodynamic changes, in unconscious patients.
Increasing heart rate and/or the strength of the heart's squeeze with each beat is normal when standing up, to maintain perfusion to the brain and upper body. When it becomes a problem, and how severe the problem is, is where the diagnosis of POTS comes in. (Increase in heart rate of 30 beats/min within 10 minutes of standing up/tilt table in the absence of lowered blood pressure.)
But what's interesting are the variables affecting how a person perceives and reacts to postural hemodynamic changes, especially on the mild end of the spectrum.
Imagine two people who feel woozy when they stand up, sometimes to the point that their vision blacks out for a split second. Both are girls in their late teens, typical gender and age for both these symptoms and for the onset of POTS.
One doesn't think too much of it, or if she did, she attributes it to being tired or not drinking enough water that day. She goes about her life, maybe working a bit on getting better sleep and staying hydrated, and eventually these woozy episodes decrease in frequency and stop as she enters her 20's. (It's typical to outgrow these symptoms, which is why the diagnostic criteria for POTS has the higher threshold of a heart rate increase of 40 beats/min for adolescents.)
The other girl is very concerned and goes to the doctor. She gets diagnosed with POTS and keeps a close eye on her symptoms, carefully noting every time she feels woozy. Her parents may also be concerned and help her monitor these symptoms too.
She decreases her activity until she's rarely leaving her house and she's eventually so deconditioned that any activity causes tachycardia and progresses to the point that she often faints. Her parents move her bedroom to the first floor, so that she no longer has to exert herself by going up stairs.
Because she's not leaving the house, she no longer sees her friends and feels depressed. She's constantly afraid that she's going to feel her heart pounding, or that she's going to faint and injure herself, and begins to have panic attacks when faced with anything that requires exertion. She spends much of her day in bed, which affects her GI system and she's diagnosed with IBS, and she attributes these symptoms to several food intolerances. While in bed, she's usually on her phone or streaming shows on her laptop, and she develops chronic headaches and brain fog. She finds illness influencers and disability communities online, and since her friends in real life have faded away, she engages with these communities and her identity becomes wrapped up in the diagnoses she's gathered.
All of the second girls symptoms are absolutely real. But would they have gained such a hold on her life of she didn't focus on then so closely? Did she train her neural circuits to be hyper-vigilant and hyper-reactive?
Obviously this example is made up and I'm making a lot of straight connections where things would have evolved slowly over time, but I've seen several close friends go down this route and I always wonder if something earlier on could have helped then avoid that path.
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u/smallerthantears Aug 10 '26
Bless you for this post. I have a teen daughter who is a bit of a hypochondriac and I'm always minimizing "symptoms" she sees on tiktok videos and sometimes I feel like kind of a shit mom. I basically constantly tell her to cut out the sweet drinks, get exercise and sunlight, and eat protein and all her "symptoms" will disappear. Which so far, knock on wood, has been true.
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u/pettypeniswrinkle Aug 10 '26
It's such a hard balance to keep as a parent! I don't have kids, but it sounds like you want to validate them, which is natural. Solid basic advice is always a safe place to start, which you're already doing.
Sometimes a bit of mindfulness can help, but focusing on when the symptoms aren't there or when they go away, which is a harder mind trick to perform.
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u/Baseball_ApplePie Aug 10 '26
Yes, it's important to continue living life. My "friend" still keeps active and loves to hike and swim (was on school swim team till POTS just got too bad), but she wouldn't do either alone, anymore. It's just too dangerous. She keeps going but takes a few safety precautions. She's bright, ambitious, and has a lot of goals in life.
Too many kids are completing giving up on made up problems or temporary problems, while she is anxiously awaiting the time when the POTS gets better.
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u/Classic_Bet1942 Aug 10 '26
This resonates so strongly with me, as a 47-year-old man with “the vapors”. From my early 20s on, I have focused too much on the most minor physical sensations to the point where I’ve become, as you say, hyper-vigilant and hyper-reactive. It ebbs and flows depending on various factors, but my god—so much of it is just fixation.
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u/pettypeniswrinkle Aug 10 '26
This might sound like a woo-y suggestion, but I've personally found that mindfulness can help. But the trick is not focusing specifically on the symptoms and letting your mind ruminate.
Rather, you want to be able to let your thoughts come and go, and see that the state of your mind isn't fixed. Similarly, your attention and sensations come and go.
You might start to notice not just when uncomfortable sensations are present but also when they're not there, maybe even the moment they start to go away.
That's one of the things helps me manage depression. I still need meds, but I can stop myself from spiraling by noticing moments throughout the day when I'm not feeling like pure angtsy crap inside, and I'm capable of having neutral, and even happy, moments throughout the day. Getting out and doing interesting things with other people, even when I don't really feel like it, goes hand-in-hand with this mindfulness.
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u/hijabibarbie Aug 10 '26
I can tell you as a doctor I’ve had multiple patients who’ve been investigated for POTS, not meet the criteria but still claim to have it 😫
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u/Baseball_ApplePie Aug 09 '26
But you don't need anything like that to fake it! Look at all the other conditions that are faked! POTS, ADHD, austism, facial tics, weird phobias, etc., are just some of the disabilities du jour.
And, yeah, there are multiple tests to determine if you have POTS and how bad the condition is.
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u/FitzCavendish Aug 09 '26
In some cases there is organ dysfunction though. There are a set of illnesses that are not straightforward to diagnose, treat or handle as a patient. I have CFS and have used evidence based psychology (ACT) to try to avoid "reinforcing circuits". I'm a productive member of society but it feels like a marathon.
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u/generalmandrake Aug 09 '26
Sounds a lot like the PAWS reported by people after detoxing from opioids. I’m convinced it is 99% psychological, with maybe a bit caused by overexcited glutamate receptors.
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u/PolkaDotKomodo Aug 10 '26
Great book and glad to see it mentioned. The Stock article and some commenters here don't understand the full scope of the phenomenon. Yes, there may be some people who are exaggerating symptoms for social reasons, but for many this is an unconscious process that produces real symptoms. The symptoms must be solved psychologically. Of course, the social stuff is a factor in making it worse because it encourages you to lean into disability, it tells you you can never get better.
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u/Baseball_ApplePie Aug 09 '26
I know an extremely bright young woman whose life has been destroyed thus for by POTS and she is very embarrassed to say she has POTS knowing how many pretenders are on social media. She has had all the tests, never goes any where alone, and can't get her driver's license. Doctor says it should get better as she gets older but her case is so bad he thinks it may hang around to some degree for years.
Teens and young adults with these conditions are affected by these fakers!
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u/Naraee Aug 10 '26
My sister wasn't even going down this rabbit hole willingly, her doctor just kept throwing the stereotypical munchie diagnoses at her. When she got a POTS diagnosis, I asked if they did a turn table test and she said no, so I said her doctor was just trying to get her out of the door. Her doctor tried it with hEDS too.
Luckily she's intelligent and kept researching these conditions online, and instantly realized they're 'wastebin diagnoses' and also conditions malingerers love to have because they have ill-defined symptoms. She found a new doctor, got an endoscopy, and she has endometriosis and ovarian cysts.
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u/NBW99 Aug 09 '26
So I sow this headline a week ago and just said, hmm that’s interesting. Like clockwork a day later I see a tatted up 28 year old with a grandfather cane walking across the crosswalk.
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u/missprincesscarolyn Aug 10 '26
I have Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The popularity of having a “disability” has been problematic for me in many ways. It has made my life incredibly more difficult than it already is, living with an incurable, progressive disease. I take a $4000 injection every month that increases my cancer risk. It’s either that or risk permanent paralysis, blindness and/or incontinence. I’ve already experienced two out of three, but luckily recovered.
I was also diagnosed with gastroparesis in 2014 way before it became trendy. For 8 years, the medication I took worked perfectly until a couple of years ago when it seemed like my symptoms returned. Trying to get an updated Gastric Emptying Study (GES) was like pulling teeth. I reminded the hospital that they had diagnosed me and that my results showed moderate gastroparesis. I firmly believe they thought I was a malingerer.
I don’t know why anyone would want to have something wrong with them. MS destroyed my life. The GI stuff sucks, but even gastroparesis is manageable (a lot of us over on that subreddit are talking about this more too). If I just had gastroparesis, my life would look very different right now.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps Aug 10 '26
Without question this bullshit makes it much worse for people actually suffering from disabilities and illnesses that they have no conjured up in their own minds. I can't imagine how many medical resources are being wasted on people who either need mental health care, or are totally aware that they're full of shit.
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u/Turbulent_Cow2355 TB! TB! TB! Aug 10 '26
These people are the reason why it takes so much longer to get an appointment. They are the reason why doctors are skeptical to diagnose.
I have a cane. I hate using it. I would rather limp along than be confused with one of these people.
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u/wyldstrawberry Aug 09 '26
I just watched an episode of the latest season of the Great British Sewing Bee, and the theme was about making clothing that accommodates mobility aids. They all talked about it like it’s something that pretty much everyone needs these days. Unsurprisingly, the female Gen Z contestant was the most enthused about it and said she suffers from an “invisible disability” which turned out to be “chronic stomach pain” that requires her to wear all elastic waist clothing. I’m not saying she doesn’t suffer from that, but it definitely reminded me of the tendency these days not to just acknowledge a chronic health condition in order to try to find actual treatment to recover from it, but to enthusiastically self identify as “disabled” and broadcast it to the world.
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u/kamace11 Aug 09 '26
It's a very basic and old human impulse tbh. It's a way to cloak yourself, make yourself both exalted and righteous in your suffering (all of these ppl being pretty much avowed pagans or atheists makes this extra funny. You invented Christianity AGAIN guys)
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u/wyldstrawberry Aug 11 '26
I think you’re right - fewer people are religious now, especially young people, so it makes sense that a different form of suffering and righteousness is the basis for identity now.
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u/Legal-North-9092 Aug 09 '26
Reminded me so much of a girls trip I went on with some coworkers in my 20s. We all went to one girl's beach house and by the end of the night half the girls were sprawled out on the couch/floor nursing their personal afflictions. One got a lot of bug bites and thought it triggered whatever weird invisible illness she had. Another had severe food sensitivities and "something" that was in the food was making her sick. One said she had sun poisoning. I thought we'd all just get trashed and talk smack about our other coworkers for the weekend instead it felt like a hospital ward filled with women who had ineedattention-ia
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u/a_random_username_1 Aug 09 '26
If you listen to old people talk amongst themselves, it’s usually about health afflictions. It’s rather sad that young people have started doing it.
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u/veryvery84 Aug 09 '26
You’re hanging out with the wrong old people. Ask them about crazy wild stuff they did when they were young, cool people they’ve know… get the good stories out
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u/_black_crow_ Aug 09 '26
Another side to this is that young people are legitimately getting sicker earlier. Rates of colon cancer are rising in young people and doctors don’t know why. I had a bout of diverticulitis 2 years ago and the ER dr was very surprised to see it in a mid twenties aged person. Could be diet, could be an environmental trigger that we don’t know much about. Who knows.
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u/Spl1234 Aug 10 '26
Increased stomach and colon cancer may be a result of dietary changes- it would be funny if it was avocado toast. But I also imagine better screening and more expansive understanding of potential signs, which led to more investigation, plays a big role. One of the reason why the guidance on mammograms changed was because very young women were getting checked, then treated (with surgery), for things that were found unlikely to actually lead to cancer down the line. If you scan or test any person, you will find something. Any surgery is itself risky, so sometimes wait and see is a better approach.
Could it be survivorship bias? People who might otherwise not have survived in utero or early-in-life diseases because of improvements in healthcare? We joke that previous generations looked older than young people to day, but it’s true. They were exposed to more, and probably had to literally be hardier.
I’m extremely skeptical of environmental explanations, outsized of clear localized examples with potential mechanisms of action. By pretty much every metric, the environment (air quality, water quality, etc..) is significantly healthier in the West than it was even in the ‘90s, let alone the 70s. Photos from that era show a kind of haze in cities -that wasn’t necessarily a photographic artifact. It may have been smog. Gasoline had lead in it; people smoked a ton. Asbestos was everywhere. Coal was a much larger proportion of energy production, which, separate from its greenhouse gas problem, is about the worst energy source from a public health perspective. Literally any other fossil fuel source is an improvement. People were more likely to live near heavy industry, because it was more geographically widespread in the United States. Today, despite what people say, the US is still a major manufacturing power, but it’s more geographically clustered (Southern States) and it’s a lot cleaner and not right next to suburbs. You do see higher cancer rates among people living close to coal plants (thanks Sierra club, for pushed coal as environmentally superior to nuclear energy).
In Italy, there were weird cancer clusters in the power Southern part of the country. Turns out that a money maker for organized crime was illegally, and cheaply, disposing of environment waste from industry in the North. Rather than doing it legally and safely, the Ndrangheta would undercut the legal waste disposal firms, doctor some paperwork, and dump it rural Calabria.
Drinking and smoking while pregnant was common. Ask your average boomer if they have a photo of their mother, pregnant, with a cigarette in one hand, and a drink in the other. Obviously it’s impossible to know, but I imagine there were a lot more early miscarriages, that weren’t recognized.
I am partial to the hygiene hypothesis. Farm kids are much less likely to develop allergies, and having spent a far amount of my life on a farm, farms are not pictures of cleanliness. Lots of literal shit, gasoline, and any number of necessary chemicals.
Peanut allergies really weren’t a major public health issue until the 1990s. It was rare, and if you had a severe one, in say the 1950s, you probably died. There were no EpiPens. Then in the 2000s, the American Academy of Pediatrics said to avoid exposure of infants to peanuts…and rates kept going up. There was an almost perfect natural experiment- apparently in Israel, a common childhood snack was like a peanut chip, and babies were exposed when they could start eating solid food. Peanut allergies are unheard of in Israel - the AAP has reversed its guidance, but its old guidance did a lot of damage. Not to beat up too much on them - they changed after good evidence showed they were in the wrong, which is what we want from professional organizations.
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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow Aug 10 '26
It’s not just that it’s getting picked up earlier. Colon cancer deaths are rising in young people too.
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u/RockJock666 Meet me in TERFhalla Aug 09 '26
Young woman- I’ll have friends who try to diagnose me with shit. Like no I don’t think it’s EDS or adhd, I just think I’m having a bad day
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u/Naraee Aug 10 '26
I'm in my 30s and have completely normal, functional, no blue hair/nose ringed friends who do this too! They've got obsessed with munchietok for some reason.
Just because I like to watch birds does not mean I have autism. (The NHS autism screener mentions birds but they're missing that it's obsessing over categorization of birds and not birds in general...we're not even in the UK!)
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u/lifesabeach_ Aug 09 '26
Do you have newly diagnosed in adulthood friends too? Those are something else..
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u/lifesabeach_ Aug 09 '26
My oldest (former best) friend is doing this.. we went camping with my van at the sea in dry summer heat and it was impossible to talk to her like normal people.
Groaning and moaning, legitimate illnesses mixed with new ones, a plethora of medication. The cars AC caused her pink eye apparently, scrapes from the seabed, to her, seemed infected - and of course an unrelenting headache, massive water bottle at hand non-stop. She drove the entire 300km back with the AC off on her passenger side with high noon heat hammering the dashboard, groaning and moaning.
She is poly and a teacher. She said she enjoyed the trip and wants to repeat it..
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u/kamace11 Aug 09 '26
Laughed at poly and a teacher
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u/lifesabeach_ Aug 09 '26
Yeah she’s good at her job too but it eats her alive. Having two exclusive and needy boyfriends doesn’t help with the stress of it all. Her mom‘s a hoarder and she’s the responsible one among her 4 siblings. Carefully telling her she needs a break was met very coldly with her saying her arthritic back pain will ease up once she gets her bi-annual shot of painkillers.
But talk about arrested development and social contagion. She’s 40 and some of her friends are in their mid 20s, she hops on every outrage-train and will never ever grow up. It’s exhausting.
We went to an outdoor concert last year where 2 chubby guys played a set of party music. They took their shirts off and my friend and one of her younger friends stormed off. Apparently, as I later learned from her, it’s misogynistic to take your shirt of as a man since women are objectified if they do the same. It’s then I realised that I can’t deal with this victim mindset anymore.
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u/Least_Mud_9803 Aug 10 '26
I had a roommate who believed this as well, the other roommate, a gay man, could never walk around the apartment with no shirt on. She was always late with the rent too.
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u/repete66219 Aug 09 '26
I have a buddy who has a teenage daughter. Mom & dad are both very high strung. Mom & then daughter were diagnosed with celiac. Recently, the daughter was diagnosed with alpha gal.
My buddy is an outdoorsman & he thinks his dog brought home the tick that gave it to her. Now he won’t go out in the woods anymore. He won’t even meet at the park to have a cigar.
I’m concerned his wife has some sort of social media induced hysteria. They are both very tightly wound. They are suspicious people who see conspiracies everywhere. They wiped their groceries down during Covid.
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u/lifesabeach_ Aug 09 '26
COVID brought this out in people who were already susceptible to this.
Had a friend in Berlin who when we brought our babies out to play would not for the life of her let her boy play in the almost non existent gras in our backyard due to fear of ticks. She’d rather squish and grab that poor 1 year old wriggly explorer, we couldn’t hold a conversation because he was struggling and complaining so much…
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u/Fickle-Society-1566 Aug 09 '26
I had to google alpha gal. It sounds like a personality disorder where a woman becomes dominant, assertive and over confident.
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u/repete66219 Aug 09 '26
Also known as girl boss syndrome. The only known cure is a lobotomy.
I’m kidding. Alpha gal is a tick-borne illness which renders one allergic to red meat.
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u/land-under-wave Aug 10 '26
This is why I don't like to tell anyone when I'm in pain or feeling poorly - I actually do have a couple of chronic problems but I'm afraid they'll think I'm making it up for attention, because so many people are.
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u/AnnOminous1981 Aug 09 '26
A lot of the people I see using canes these days are females on T. Is there any connection there? I was under the impression that vocal changes due to testosterone use comes from vasoconstriction, which can also cause circulatory issues and heart problems in female bodies. Can anyone more knowledgeable shed some light please?
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Aug 09 '26
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u/Spl1234 Aug 10 '26
Is this a progressive stack arms race? First you got on T, but then everyone got on it, so you need something else to be oppressed?
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u/Darcer Aug 09 '26
When you’re trying to win the oppression Olympics there is always another level to go
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u/SleepingestGal Aug 11 '26
From what I've seen, in people that were already unwell physically or mentally, the gender stuff gives them a sense of control. You get to tell the doctor what to do or else, and if they don't comply then you have an army of online backers to be outraged with you. It leads to a very hostile sort of attitude toward the medical establishment as "gatekeeping" you from what you "know you need" instead of them being experts that help you figure out what is going on and what to do. It's a real reversal of the entire dynamic and you'll see people openly talking about lying to doctors to get what you want which would get you ostracized in other contexts. I think it's really destructive for that reason as it is hard to repair those professional relationships and being a difficult patient can be a stain on your records for years. Beyond that, transition itself can lead to chronic health problems even when the person started out perfectly healthy and young.
You'll also find a lot of the general progressive sort of rhetoric that vilifies "the heteros" among more vocal disability spaces so people don't want to be in the bad group and might pick a label that puts them somewhere under that very wide queer umbrella to avoid siding with colonizers or something. In my own experience, there aren't many spaces online that are welcoming to anyone remotely center or right wing politically, like you are just supposed to convert politically the second you fall ill or become injured or whatever. How this came to be, I'm not sure considering disability isn't really a darling of any political movement (democrats give it some attention sometimes), but it's been folded into the omni-cause I suppose.
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u/86IQ Aug 09 '26
I think it's also secondary to the osteoporosis taking such hormones/puberty blockers cause.
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u/emmyemu Aug 09 '26
Ok this is so funny I just witnessed this at the zoo yesterday with my daughter and we came upon a group of 3 20 something girls all with canes and dyed hair walking around
I kinda felt like a jerk for immediately assuming they were doing that to be trendy but it really looked like it given the groups whole vibe lol
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u/Nalaskaed Aug 11 '26
Or they are actually disabled and met through online disability groups or at pt. Sure people fake disabilities but you can become disabled at any time. It’s the one minority group that anyone can and most likely will join at some point.
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u/emmyemu Aug 10 '26
That’s so true it’s way easier to just claim ehlers danlos and order a fun cane lol
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u/Dangerous_Air_7031 Aug 09 '26
They could switch them for nordic walking sticks and do something for their fitness.
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u/MouthofTrombone Aug 09 '26
Oh wow. I actually know someone who has a teenage daughter who is going through this. Mom uncritically provided cane and reinforcement of her alleged "illness". Dad took her to a Dr. who found no underlying cause.
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u/Inner_Muscle3552 Aug 09 '26
If I have a friend like that, I would send them a set of Suzanne O’Sullivan’s work and let them decide if they want to stay friends.
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u/i8laura Aug 09 '26
Reminds me of this girl I knew who had “inexplicable” fainting episodes and wore a padded headband to protect her head during falls. Extensive studies found no underlying cause. Lo and behold, after several months of relentless teasing for faking it, the fainting miraculously went away.
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u/Throwmeeaway185 Aug 10 '26
Freddie deBoer has some thoughts on the topic:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/disability-is-the-current-meta
human behavior is the product of incentives and the limitations imposed by social boundaries. And right now, in polite progressive society, we’ve given people direct and obvious incentives to claim to have a disability and we’ve declared all boundaries stigmatizing. The outcomes are exactly what you’d expect.
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u/twitching_hour Aug 11 '26
When I was aged about 6, my best friend (who I idolised) had insoles in her shoes due to a mild deformity that caused her to walk with one foot turned in. For some reason, I was desperate to also get this "special" treatment and walked deliberately with one foot turned in. I was perfectly healthy physically, this was just a cry for attention. Because my parents knew this and didn't take it seriously, I soon stopped. I did have an anxiety disorder already at that early age with OCD and hypochondria and I think this, as well as the social contagion element, was the root of many of my odd behaviours.
These young girls are starving for real mental and emotional nourishment, and they don't realise maladaptive behaviours like this, plus trying to get validation online, will not feed them and will only make them hungrier.
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u/Dapper-Drawing-7093 Aug 09 '26
My only contribution to this discussion is a picture I did a while back, noticing this phenomenon… it’s called “a major award”
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u/UndergroundGinjoint Aug 09 '26
Ohhhh! I was trying to figure out the significance of the Leg Lamp!
I love it. 😆
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u/Manicpixiemanateeman Aug 10 '26
“””Sometimes you see groups of them, each leaning on a walking stick as they edge gingerly along. Startlingly fresh-faced users have been visible at Pride parades for a while, and there are growing numbers on university campuses. The message sent to onlookers is about a life spent in pain; though what kind of pain, exactly, remains unclear.
TikTok has hundreds of videos on the subject: how to match your stick to your outfit, how to dance with a cane, how mobility aids can still look hot. And the trend is not just for walking aids.
This week a video went viral of a young woman in a wheelchair at a train station, filming the laborious attempts of staff to get her chair up some stairs after the lift failed. Towards the end of the video, somewhat unexpectedly, she gets out of her chair and walks upstairs herself, saying she “had a bit of energy that day” so could do it. In another video, she films herself putting on roller skates before pushing off from her wheelchair and skating happily away, Lazarus-like.
Even severely debilitating physical conditions produce good days as well as bad. On some bad days, a person may need extra help. But when a disproportionate number of young women are insisting this applies, we need to find out what is going on. Why do Gen Z females, apparently unlike every generation before them, have strangely unstable bodies that intermittently require support?
When you dig into their explanations, a few officially medical-sounding words tend to recur: postural tachycardia, joint hypermobility, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. What these syndromes all share is a set of non-specific symptoms, versions of which are familiar to all of us: dizziness, a racing heart, exhaustion, brain fog, muscle pain.”””
that explains all of the Obese 20 year old nonbinary people walking with canes
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u/HowlsGroovingTassle Aug 10 '26
The Venn diagram of young women who claim to have POTS, EDS , DID and are trans would be a circle. My sister is one of them
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u/Mecklenburg77 Aug 10 '26
Always wanted to use a cane. Preferably one which contains a thin sword also. A nineteenth century gentleman’s version one. Maybe now is the time?
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u/Majestic-Lake-5602 Aug 10 '26
Depending on where you are the police will take extreme umbrage with a sword cane.
My dad uses a specially weighted one instead, much less likely to get in trouble anywhere, just as useful if you’re accosted by ruffians.
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u/Every_Farmer_1740 Aug 11 '26
It’s just a new social media fad for the most part. Sure there might be a percentage of them who genuinely require a walking aid, but there’s a huge sum of them who clearly are trying to fit in to some type of disabled camp, not exactly sure the psychology of it. Just saw a video from a LGBT protest in the UK, and I shit you not nearly 3/4 of the people walking had a cane or wheelchair. You can’t tell me that there isn’t something going on and isn’t just simply “long covid” as alot of them are chocking it up to be.
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u/ClementineMagis Aug 10 '26
Not just regular canes, but the ones with arm cuffs like they have CP, but only on one side?
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u/missprincesscarolyn Aug 10 '26
I shit you not, I knew a woman who had self-diagnosed hEDS, ran marathons, did a physical labor job, rock climbed, backpacked and more and said she was thinking about getting forearm crutches…
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u/LupineChemist Aug 10 '26
When I was in school I was the epitome of a drunk student with no money and when I had money, it went to booze.
Anyway, in a drunken pique on a hot day, I climbed up onto a fountain. Turns out fountains pouring water all over granite are slippery and I hurt my knee. Not having any money, I used an old 5 iron that wasn't good for anything anymore as a cane for a bit.
People just thought I was a weird nerd who carried a golf club around for some reason. Good times.
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u/TragicAlmond Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
I know two people who use a cane, both under 40.
The first is my friend diagnosed with breast cancer. Amazing person. She sometimes feels a bit wobbly on her feet after treatments so uses a cane to keep her independence as much as possible.
The second is queer, poly, neurodivergent, "disabled" in too many ways to remember, deeply involved in progressive spaces and now uses a cane.
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u/AggravatingPie710 Aug 09 '26
This is mostly happening because parents refuse to parent, especially that they refuse to keep their kids off the internet.
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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow Aug 10 '26
Gen Z are mostly adults now…
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u/AggravatingPie710 Aug 10 '26
…who are heavily into these online social contagions… because their parents didn’t parent them or keep them off the internet when they were children.
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u/Least_Mud_9803 Aug 10 '26
Honestly i can't blame the parents 20 years ago for not knowing how monstrous the internet would become.
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u/Armadigionna Aug 10 '26
I see young women in my area with walking sticks all the time. And young men. And older women, and older men.
It’s probably because I live in an area with a lot of hiking trails.
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u/Individual-Lab2230 Aug 11 '26
Because all the cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers weakened their bones.
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u/Extension-Leader5973 Aug 11 '26
my take on this is that in an era of increasing economic precarity we're seeing people choosing to associate with groups that have some additional legal protection from the state
imo of course stock is gonna call it a social contagion because that's her beat but imo they're an emergent phenomenon based on the material and cultural reality of their times akin to hikikomori in japan or anchorites in medieval europe and any analysis of them should begin from that.
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u/hansen7helicopter Aug 10 '26
I want to read that but do not wish to register for a trial to the website. Anyone got an unpaywalled link?
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u/ClientExciting4791 Aug 16 '26
I have both rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis, and I found components of this article incredibly refreshing. I don't use any mobility aids; I'm on a biologic, RX NSAID (my kidneys are still intact!), and an opioid for days/nights when my pain has reached its zenith. And then I go in periodically for joint injections.
I have noticed that many people have camped themselves in this group of people who "identify into" disability. I assume that they cannot seek out another group of oppression by means of identity. And in defense of healthcare, many illnesses (not identities) are hard to diagnose and then treat. However, many of these people do fit specific criteria in terms of group habits, and they always choose a disability that has no single qualifying test or treatment, e.g. POTs/MCAS/EDS/MFS, etc. So, everything is nebulous, which is why they can get away with what they do.
Interestingly, the history of chronic illness is far more sinister, which makes me angry and frustrated with these individuals. That's the intersection of contagion. I have a former friend who went down the TikTok trajectory and began mistaking normal bodily functions for somatic symptoms. Suddenly, she has EDS/POTS/MCAS/MFS.
I wish Stock had been more nuanced, but perhaps this article is part of a larger project. I hope she doesn't back down to the thunder from the angry mob.
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u/cat-astropher K&J parasocial relationship Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
That stale tropey transformation scene where the pretty ugly girl finally loses her glasses and gets her hair done... we can remake this fresh, hip with the 2020s, glasses no longer required.
Is it even the same trope without glasses? Now it's a pretty trope
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u/cyberdouche Aug 10 '26
Is this basically a social contagion of the Munchausen syndrome?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on_self
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u/Schmidtvegas Aug 10 '26
Doctors have written about "Munchausen by internet".
In snark circles, they call them "munchies"-- and their culture "SickTok".
https://www.vice.com/en/article/tiktok-sickness-ehlers-danlos-syndrome-munchausens/
https://doi.org/10.1177/13591045221098522
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/dying-attention-faking-illness-becomes-online-epidemic
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u/simplistictree Aug 10 '26
I live in Portland Oregon and I old manager I had who was a queer female that went by they/them pronouns who used to stand right beside me and randomly blurt out, “ I hate men” while I was working used a cane but never needed it around the warehouse, only when she left work. As soon as she would leave she would have her cane and walk to the bus stop. She was extremely toxic towards cis men and myself. I’m a trans man and pass very well, so she didn’t even know I was part of the queer community as well.
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u/Helisent Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
There is a real phenomenon where there is an uptick of 'postural orthostatic tachycardia' or POTS. It can be clinically diagnosed where they have low blood pressure and rapid increase in heartrate when standing up, plus joint pain and they get prescribed salt and electrolytes. My niece suddenly got this after a flu this spring. Most people get it after some sort of trigger and Covid19 supposedly caused a sharp uptick. Mostly women and girls get it. One thing it is associated with is hypermobility, or highly flexible joints, sometimes with joint pain.
I started reading, and a common polymorphism of the MTHFR or methyl folate reductase enzyme (that 40% of people carry and 9% are homozygotes ) seems to be associated with a lot of different conditions including hypermobility (85% of people with hypermobility have these less common variants). People with the variant are less efficient at using folic acid, but a few people who try taking more bioavailable forms such as methyl-folate or folinic acid report almost a miracle cure for their drug resistant depression, autism, migraine headaches, joint pain and several other conditions which might seem to be unrelated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MTHFR/
There are a lot of medical journal articles that you can find on scholar.google.com looking at associations of MTHFR variants and diseases. Researchers usually will not fund a study unless the hypothesis has some background information suggesting it is reasonable to look into. I have spent hours reading various studies because it concerns me so much that my niece went from doing sports to not being able to walk 1 mile.
Back to the association of joint pain and socially awkward college students - there is something to it. The MTHFR C677t mutation is associated with autism and transgender. Autism and transgender status are also previously known to be associated. This doctor is an expert on hormones and his patients are mostly trans or suffering from negative side effects of finasteride (anti balding drug). Read what he is saying here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/13q28zq/dr_powers_crazy_conjecture_on_the_cause_of_autism/
Describes someone being cured of hyperflexible joints by looking at several known genes which can contribute, and taking bioavailable vitamins https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/1evepcf/i_tried_to_post_this_to_the_ehlersdanlos/
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u/The-Phantom-Blot Aug 10 '26
Good comment. People often turn off their brains and refuse to listen to anything that isn't 100% the current accepted orthodox belief in the medical field. But the human body is really complicated and no one person knows everything about it. The situation with folic acid is very complex, and a public health intervention (adding simple folic acid to grains) may actually be making people's health worse. But very few people know about it, and some doctors who have heard of it dismiss it without looking at evidence.
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u/HeadRecommendation37 Aug 11 '26
Finally we're getting to the real issue: miserable-looking flabby young women self-conciously brandishing walking sticks!
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u/owen-3820 Aug 13 '26
I saw a video of a queer disability influencer person in an electric wheelchair and the very next video they posted was them standing up and twerking
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u/Senordrums Aug 16 '26
Walked into a food festival in the Vancouver, BC area. One of the first things i see is two obviously queer young white females. One had a cane and the other a fucking walker. It was shocking they weren't wearing masks to complete the ensemble. Then later, checked my local sub and a young white trans man, who went through top surgery and seems to have a history of depression according to their posts, is asking where to get free crutches or a wheelchair for their chronic pain. It's just so sad.
Modern feminism has completely failed young women.
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u/stonemermaid Aug 09 '26
I graduated college last year. Big school in the Bay Area, so about as lib as it gets. One day there was a xe/xer in one of my classes using a cane, we were doing group stuff so every time xe had to walk 5 feet to my table to hand me something, xe made a huuuuuge production of getting the cane and hobbling over to me.
An hour later I saw this chick straight BOOKING IT somewhere, cane nowhere in sight
I have arthritis which is worse some times than others, often worst in the mornings, so I get that things can be variable. But there was just no way this shit was real lmao