The link is about social contagion[1] type induction of mental illnesses like anorexia. I’m uncertain how true they are for stuff like anorexia, but think that they are much more unlikely to hold for cluster headaches:
I expect it’s harder to social-contagion into severe headache pain. Counter-evidence: I’ve heard some people say that chronic back pain can sometimes be fixed using some psychological techniques that cause you to then do some things that fix it or something? However I think there’s a scale difference here, along with suddenness without inciting incidents.
I can see how you end up becoming that way, have analogies to draw with my own experiences, see the wisdom that “a part of you wants to be depressed” encodes. But how would I cause a mindbogglingly painful headache that way?[2]
Cluster headaches aren’t in the zeitgeist. Sufferers[3] claim that most haven’t heard of them and assume they are talking about migraine-level pain. Where’s the news coverage of suicides due to cluster headaches? Besides LW and the EA forums, I’d only encountered it once as a kid on an askreddit thread or something.
The usual social contagion theory targets—anxiety, depression, anorexia, gender dysphoria, OCD, etc. are all highly salient to me (even before experiencing some of those myself—I think most can agree that these are discussed way more).
Evidence of effective simple drugs should be weak evidence against social contagion, I think. After all, they don’t solve the “real” problem, but are more likely to work if there’s some “closer to hardware” problem being treated. Not strong evidence because in the social contagion world, they could still nudge you away from what you spiralled into or serve as a prompt to stop (due to expecting that you should be fine now, or just generally shaking up your life).
I might be using the wrong word for the specific thing you are talking about. All my points are responses I thought up about the thing discussed in the ACX review of Crazy Like Us that you link to, but applied to cluster headaches.
Just wondering, have you seen any evidence of cluster headaches as memetic viruses?
Is there any particular reason to expect they would be memetic viruses?
The link is about social contagion[1] type induction of mental illnesses like anorexia. I’m uncertain how true they are for stuff like anorexia, but think that they are much more unlikely to hold for cluster headaches:
I expect it’s harder to social-contagion into severe headache pain. Counter-evidence: I’ve heard some people say that chronic back pain can sometimes be fixed using some psychological techniques that cause you to then do some things that fix it or something? However I think there’s a scale difference here, along with suddenness without inciting incidents.
I can see how you end up becoming that way, have analogies to draw with my own experiences, see the wisdom that “a part of you wants to be depressed” encodes. But how would I cause a mindbogglingly painful headache that way?[2]
Cluster headaches aren’t in the zeitgeist. Sufferers[3] claim that most haven’t heard of them and assume they are talking about migraine-level pain. Where’s the news coverage of suicides due to cluster headaches? Besides LW and the EA forums, I’d only encountered it once as a kid on an askreddit thread or something.
The usual social contagion theory targets—anxiety, depression, anorexia, gender dysphoria, OCD, etc. are all highly salient to me (even before experiencing some of those myself—I think most can agree that these are discussed way more).
Evidence of effective simple drugs should be weak evidence against social contagion, I think. After all, they don’t solve the “real” problem, but are more likely to work if there’s some “closer to hardware” problem being treated. Not strong evidence because in the social contagion world, they could still nudge you away from what you spiralled into or serve as a prompt to stop (due to expecting that you should be fine now, or just generally shaking up your life).
I might be using the wrong word for the specific thing you are talking about. All my points are responses I thought up about the thing discussed in the ACX review of Crazy Like Us that you link to, but applied to cluster headaches.
Excluding stuff like not eating/drinking/sleeping, taking drugs, smashing my head, etc.
As gathered from idly perusing a cluster headache subreddit.