New Ways To Tell Everyone That You're A Snowflake Who Can't Handle Life

Are you overly sensitive to rejection? Do you take it particularly hard when you’re criticised, playing the moment over and over again in your head? Are you constantly on the lookout for mild disapproval from others? If so, you might have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

Or you might just be a terrible human being who cannot cope with life… 

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or “RSD”, is just one of the latest buzzwords that has become associated with autism and ADHD following the uptick in diagnoses for both conditions. Between 2019 and 2023, there was a fivefold increase in the number of open suspected autism referrals in the UK, while prescriptions for ADHD medication saw a 51 per cent increase over this same time period, according to the Nuffield Trust.

But we mustn’t sneer at this and consider it to be a case of people being eager to gain a tick in the box, even if the Health Secretary has his doubts too! 

As awareness increases (or overdiagnosis, depending on your view), the standard ADHD or autism diagnosis has become insufficient for some sufferers, who are seeking more niche subsections of the condition they can identify with. RSD, for example, is understood to be an extreme emotional sensitivity to rejection or criticism. It’s a fairly recent addition to the mental health lexicon, having been coined by psychiatrist William Dodson in the 2010s.

Of course, one everyone has it, you’re not special any more and have to find something else.

An equally popular cluster of ADHD/autism symptoms is Pathological Demand Avoidance, aka PDA, which is when an individual experiences an extreme resistance to doing something that is requested or expected of them. This can include anything from big tasks to everyday demands, like the mere act of going to work, as per the UK-based PDA Society, which defines PDA as “a determined avoidance of so-called ‘common’ demands of life.” Despite PDA being coined by psychologist Elizabeth Newson in the 1980s, it’s important to note that neither of these terms is included in formal diagnostic systems.

But they are proliferating in the places these people go to find validation of course: 

That hasn’t stopped them from taking root on TikTok, where users are embracing the terms with open arms.

’Users’ being a very apposite term for these people…