It is a joke, yeah, but it can also be a mood booster. So it's both.
Perhaps we all could benefit from some knitted Coding Support Chickens?
If you can do it without a duck/rock/colleague/whatever, that's great! But for some, it is easier if they have someone to talk to.
Service dogs on commercial flights are a separate USDOT category. The dog needs to be trained for a specific task for a disabled passenger, and the passenger must provide an attestation form. Airlines must allow service dogs, but they can still deny transport if the dog poses a safety risk or causes significant disruption before or after boarding. I'm not sure how enforcement works in practice, but I certainly wouldn't try to fly with a dog using a false attestation.
I am a total fan of emotional support chickens, real or knitted. I am also a fan of rotisserie chickens.
I'd argue it isn't. The first edition of the DSM was published in 1952 [1]. This is right after "the routine annual comprehensive physical examination (PE) became a fixture in American medical practice" [2].
Add 25 years for a generation to be educated, another 25 for the old guard to retire, and you'd expect the paradigm shift around mental health to land around the millenium. Unless you have evidence we had a nonlinear jump between then and now, I'd argue the trend is analagous to folks becoming aware of and culturally assimilating the concept of blood type.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man...
I do think that there is a component of fashion or social currency that has piggybacked on medical awareness, or perhaps as a byproduct of its mixing with moral credentialism of disadvantage.
People have been stigmatized and isolated for generations for being “different” in some way. Emotional and psychological reasons included. People are all different. We all have different issues. We all have different experiences. No one should be shunned for seeking out others with similarities to get advice and support. And how can you do that without making people aware?
Do we have more mental health issues than in the past? I don’t think so. I think we’re more aware and more accepting than past generations.
Some health care professionals are becoming hesitant to talk about diagnoses because it hurts the patient when they start identifying with the diagnosis it makes the condition worse when the patient starts to act more like the diagnosed condition because that's how they're supposed to act
And it's interesting to me that we now have the UK government talking about providing mental health support to try to foster grit and self-reliance - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/16/much-needed-...
I used to be dismissed as lazy, and I simply had to live with my apparent moral failure. Man, I tried so much self-improvement advice, and none of it worked.
Now I know that this is not the case, that there’s nothing wrong with me, and I found a huge community of like-minded people. Turns out there are quite a lot of self-improvement tools for autistic people, and they actually work.
(I believe many ADHDers feel the same way about their diagnosis.)
I am likely to have ADHD. Was never diagnosed as a youth because I never allowed it. Seriously! Growing up during the late 70's and 80's was a weird time for these things.
My mistrust in all of that came from watching friends get diagnosed then medicated. Then most of those people kind of shut down. Some presented very differently, generally not in a good way, as far as I was concerned.
A few personas I loved just got medicated away.
So... nope. Not gonna happen. I threw up a barrier that took well into maybe my late 30's to come down.
I had decided very young that I was in charge of who I was, nobody else and was fairly aware of all that during formative years. My trust was literally zero on that front, unless knowing someone would, in my eyes, be good for me.
From there, I identified with who I thought were pretty great people and the rest got the Okie Dokie, next treatment.
These days seem different for sure.
I knew damn well I was not neurotypical, a word that did not appear for many years ahead of my own struggles, and frankly that had to be OK, because I needed to be OK to exist as me. Who were others to say otherwise?
Today, seems like we live in a more permissive society than we did before. I do know my own perception is keen for having managed my own struggles. I can reach others and help. No meds needed, just real trust and the right experiences.
Sometimes meds are needed too. I feel they are used in lazy ways too often. Other means should be first.
And my beef with the meds boils down to how effective the right experiences can be.
Kid has anger management issues?
Medicate!
Or.. maybe put then into a wrestling club and see them mello right out and become a great, fairly tolerant person.
Both can work well, and both can go badly too.
It mostly boils down to how the humans in charge of debugging and empowering the young humans handle problems and the tools they use.
IMHO people reached for the meds far too often back then.
Maybe we are now too permissive, not doing enough to tease out the best in people, coping instead.
What I like most in your take is you are self aware and have others like you to build on.
I did not. Or, I did, but finding them and experiencing what you are was a lot harder, due to how less connected everyone was back then.
What I did was seek good mentors. Found them and came up OK, and capable. You appear to be getting after the same thing.
Good!
It all starts with self acceptance and awareness. From there, many who achieve those things can build on that and live a fine life.
I bet you do. Thanks for sharing a little perspective. It is high value.
I've never, ever been as stressed out as during school, grades 7-12. If the rest of life had been that stressful or worse, I'd have checked out a long time ago.
Every single time without fail (except maybe the jump from kindergarten to school) what actually happened was that the adults around me breathed down my neck a little bit less and I got access to a little more freedom to do fun stuff.
Being a kid in school is horrible. You're entirely reliant on your parents to buy you everything and enable you to experience things, nobody trusts you, everything is full of arbitrary rules.
The jump from school to university was especially stark - I kept being told it was going to be really hard, I'd need to work way harder than in highschool etc etc. Turns out what actually happened was I went from 6 straight hours of unavoidable class a day to maybe 2 or 3 much more interesting ones that were recorded and posted online and could be skipped when needed with no consequence, roughly the same amount of homework and I got to live with people my age 5 minutes walk from a 24 hour McDonalds.
And working... they pay you quite a lot of money to be there (seriously even a minimum wage job is unfathomable to a kid, do you know how many gameboys you could buy with that?), there's no homework and you get to do something you're really good at.
Before that period? I don't remember much. After that period? Everything gets downhill. Being an adult in a society sucks and I hate it. Normal people lifestyle, with its routines and "work/life balance", with everyone around you having expectations around random customs, with having to do everything in tiny bite-sized chunks, because there's not enough time left after work, chores and family - that's just not compatible with my mind.
Yeah, I guess, this could be a mental health issue.
This article does use words related to mental states, like "comforting" and "relaxing." But that's pretty difficult to avoid in most writing of non-trivial length.
My point is exactly that that kind of thing reads like a joking exaggeration, but this sort of approach to things is really common now and I truly have trouble telling when people are joking or being serious about it. Most of it reads like joking to me, but I don't know. It's also been going on long enough that it's making me wonder even more, since, judged as a joke, it was played out and over-done years ago.
Maybe you need a chicken. [EDIT] But perhaps we all need chickens?
But thank you for helping me understand this. The framing is 100% serious, I guess.
One of the leading stories in the article is about delivering them to survivors of Hurricane Helene - an interesting linguistic choice in its own right (Helene impacted roughly 2 million people, killing about 200. It had a 99.995% survival rate).
I suspect most people make these chickens simply for fun and decoration.
You conflate "health" with the word "palliative," when the latter specifically refers specifically to serious health problems. I go to the gym for my physical health and my mental health, but that doesn't imply that skipping one gym session would lead to a serious physical or mental health problem. Same goes for "mental health days." There's nothing sensational about referring to one's health.
And yes, we always refer to people who survive natural disasters as "survivors." Google "survivors of hurricane helene" and you'll find countless articles with headlines like "Survivors Describe Their Frightening Experiences," "4 Ways to Help Hurricane Helene Survivors," "Federal Assistance for Hurricane Helene Survivors Surpasses $137 Million," etc.
Yes, I agree, which is why I used it as an example. You are confirming that the observation is not bias! Im not claiming that the article is exceptional in this regard.
I think it is precisely the framing and focus on health and safety which is interesting!
I disagree with all of it. Using the term "survivor" in its most basic and widespread sense is not at all interesting in the context of your false argument about "cultural currency."
> It is medicalized... A day off work to rest, relax, and enjoy isn't just vacation (which also implies these concepts), but a mental health day.
The destruction of individual agency, in favor of top-down systems of control. The culture is a self-reinforcing thing, but what's pushing the culture is individuals having to express their own needs in terms of what the system will allow them. The "day off" isn't allowed - paid ones are not required to be provided by law, and the wealth-centralizing economic treadmill has made it so most people do not have the finances to lose a day of pay.
Similarly with emotional support animals. Airlines have policies that certain types of pets need to travel in the cold cargo hold, getting left waiting on a hot tarmac, with horror stories abounding. Landlords outright prohibit pets or put you over the barrel for "pet rent" (it's not like paying pet rent gets you extra space or amenities, or makes it so that chewing on the woodwork then becomes "normal wear and tear".
So enter people skirting their systems by any means possible, in this case the federal laws that created the legal concept of emotional support animals. And then comes the crab bucket mentality of rolling our eyes at people who we deem to be inappropriately using the escape hatch.
To avoid the euphemism/abstraction treadmill, we would need to be having these conversations maturely. But politics always seems to just end up going sideways (/me loosely gestures at the current ongoing destructionist catastrophe)
As a result a recreational hobby gets dressed up as self care or pro-social action. There can be an element of truth to this of course, but I do think it introduces a lot of exaggeration and conflation.
Putting my biases on the table, the whole thing strikes me as childish and dishonest. Kind of of like a kid rationalizing to a parent how they will use some new toy to get their homework done faster.
> Individuals feel the need to frame or justify and defend their individual actions and desires.
This, exactly this. I only recently realized this has been a huge factor for almost my entire life. There was always something more important to do than what I wanted. Parents wanted me to do things. School wanted me to do things. Religion wanted me to do things (courtesy of growing up in a proselytising Christianity-adjacent cult, 1/10 would not recommend). Later, in adulthood, it's family expectations again, then relationships, and then of course, work. The sum total of things I'm supposed to be doing, and that reflect good on me when I'm seen busy doing them, is effectively unbounded, leaving no place for any "selfish desire" such as... IDK, relaxing, taking a walk, clearing my head, watching stupid shit on the Internet.
Of course, those desires don't go away just because there's always something more important to do. But I can't just satisfy them without feeling like having to justify to myself and others, why I'm doing the "me thing" instead of the "important thing". Might be why I've struggled with procrastination all my adulthood - "I'm working" gets others off my back, and then it's only me I have to justify my choices to.
(As a kid, I didn't do "new toy to get my homework done faster", but I sure did the other thing - a computer to help me learn. It was a great argument, because it was partially true and my parents also heard it from adult sources (e.g. news programs).)
I'm not really sure why I do it, and why many others seem to. Some kind of insecurity? Like, I want to escape the neverending demands of other people without hurting my relationships with them, so I justify it in a way that makes fulfilling my own needs sound like either a) a critical, unavoidable maintenance work, something that's not really a choice, or b) it's actually doing them a favor, or c) it's capital-I Important. It's preemptively denying others the ability to counter "hey, what about me and my needs". A form of conflict avoidance, I guess.
I envy people who can just take vacations, or do hobbies, or whatever, without guilt or the need to justify it to others.
Not everything that brings people joy is an emotional support xxx.
Similar to saying you have OCD because you double checked if you switched your iron off. It's not obsessive compulsive you just double checked something.