Do you think the mass-publication of conditions such as depression, ADHD, Anorexia, etc especially to kids...?

is making more kids/people depressed, more kids hyperactive, and more people anorexic and making more people cut?

I mean, seriously, think about it. If no one ever heard of anorexia or cutting, no one would starve themselves or ritually cut and then use it as a weapon against their family and society.
One or two people did this decades ago, then the stupid pinheads in academia made their career out of it, then there were mass-broadcast made-for-TV movies about it, and now it's plastered all over billboards and written into childrens books. I think now, it's a rite of passage to cut and starve yourself and be ADHD, and if you are neither of these things, you're considered a freak.

DO YOU AGREE OR NOT?!

i think ur going too far with your "I think now, it's a rite of passage to cut and starve yourself and be ADHD, and if you are neither of these things, you're considered a freak."...but I do think its a little overboard...how common these things are..and its not even just the conditions..I think there's an underlying factor to these things..maybe from broken up family units or something that has been destroyed from our modern lifestyles..

Nope, I sure don't agree. I had AD/HD well before it was accepted that little girls who were smart and well-behaved could possibly have a problem. My entire school career was a misery because I was not diagnosed with it until I was 34. The symptoms I experienced were not imagined, but verifiable, and occurred throughout my lifetime, as per the proper diagnostic standards. Perhaps you are not aware of this, but there is an actual, functional difference in the brain activity of persons with AD/HD and persons without it.

It is true that I was diagnosed after so much publicity, but it is not true that I developed those symptoms after the publicity.

always find it difficult to answer questions like this...particularly when it appears that the person asking the question has already made up their mind.

That being said, I do think that, to some degree we have created a victim society. It helps to explain the massive increase in civil litigation (people suing other people for reasonably petty things) as well as increases in certain diagnoses. People often feel more comfortable when they can point to a diagnosis and say, "It's not me, it's because I have X..." or..."It's not my fault that my child has Y disorder."

Take ADHD. It has become relatively common to see a diagnosis of ADHD, and the percentage of kids with that diagnosis has increased dramatically. In my personal humble opinion, that is partly due to the above mentioned victim mentality, partly due to a pharmaceutical industry creating solutions for problems (was Restless Leg Disorder THAT big of a problem before there was a drug treatment for it?), and partly due to the fact that kids have 1,000 times more options of things to do with their time than they did even 10 years ago, much less 20 or 30. I mean...who wants to be the kid who didn't Break the high score of Guitar Hero, watch that great new movie on HBO, surf the net for 6 hours, and win three games of HORSE in a row. (Oh, damn...I forgot to do my homework again....)

All of that being said though...the real problem is the fact that, even with the over-diagnosis, if you take all kids, plot their relative hyperactivity, you are going to have kids at the top of the bell curve, and those kids have genuine problems, which, thankfully there are solutions for, in the form of proper diagnosistcs, therapy, pharmacological options, and behavioral restructuring.

Anorexia has been around for much more than a few decades, and cutting has as well. Do kids hear of disorder ABC and realize "If I act like that, I'll get a little attention?" Yes. And that sort of behavior has also been around since the beginning of time. People like attention, and often don't care how they get it. Let's not confuse people with real problems with those that want to resemble people with real problems.