Influencers on social media are sharing content that claims to help followers self-diagnose complex medical conditions ranging from A.D.H.D. to autism. And the data reveals that the effect of self-diagnosis is far-reaching. But what happens when large portions of the population believe they have a condition that medical data doesn’t back up? On “The Opinions,” the culture editor Nadja Spiegelman speaks with the columnist and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom and the author Mary H.K. Choi — who has written about her own A.D.H.D. and autism — about the phenomenon of self diagnosis, the need for people to label themselves and whether such labels can help or limit us.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Nadja Spiegelman: We’re going to be talking about neurodivergence and diagnostic labels, like A.D.H.D. and autism. What interests me in that conversation are the systems that we use to understand ourselves and how they change our self-perception — and sometimes our lives.
Mary, you were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. and then with autism, both as an adult. I was wondering if you could start by telling us about your journey to those diagnoses, and what they allowed you to understand about yourself that you didn’t have words for before.
Choi: This happened in my early 40s, which is to say that I do think that there was this suspicion my whole life that something was — not amiss, but in my 30s, at some point I was like, “I don’t get invited to weddings. What is that?” And then it was the dual thing of, “And I don’t want to go to any weddings.” And so I said, “OK, that’s a thing,” and I set that aside.
But there were these schisms, or things that I really believe held me apart from other people. And I didn’t really know what that was, but boy, was I working really, really hard to make sure to mask those qualities. And so some of that is just people pleasing or this almost preternatural sort of receptivity to what I think you will do.
And that made for a lot of really ill-advised, long, monogamous relationships. Because there’s a lot of safety in being like, “We’re together. I’m using this other person as a human shield. It’s going to be fine.” But at a certain point — more specifically, when my dad got sick and he passed away — there was just such a torrential, seismic reorganization of my thinking. And so I was like, “Not only is it weird that I can’t seem to reconcile how death works” — and I’m sure this is not a unique proposition, but because no one significant in my life previously had died before, which is also incredibly rare. What a gift, to be in your 40s before you suffer that kind of grievous loss.
But when he died, I was so caught up in masking, and what that looked like was: OK, well, my mother is closer to my dad. She’s known him longer, so she gets to be this degree of sadness. And then my brother, because he’s the masculine child and he has sons, he gets to grieve for his father this amount. And I just kept crunching on this in this really recursive way. How do I figure out, with these two data sets, how I’m supposed to feel? And then I was ——
Spiegelman: Were you figuring out how you were supposed to feel, or were you figuring out how much you were allowed to express? Was it internal or was it about external expectations?
Choi: I wish it was just external expectations. The fact that it was entirely internal is the thing that I found so disquieting, where I was like, “Fam, you just want to know for yourself how much you are allowed to miss this person.” And then it was, “OK, something’s weird.” And at that point, I started looking into social media. I immediately went to an authority, a.k.a. TikTok, and from there I sought actual diagnostic assessment.
Spiegelman: What came first for you, your diagnosis for autism or for A.D.H.D.?
Choi: I was assessed for A.D.H.D. first by a psychiatrist, and then afterward I was formally assessed for autism, but they were having a two-for-one sale, so I got assessed for A.D.H.D. at the same time. And so A.D.H.D. first, around five years ago, and autism was about three and a half years ago.
Spiegelman: How did that retroactively change your understanding of your life?
Choi: It was a complete O.S. update. Not even an O.S. update. It’s not like going from one to another. I was like: Oh, my God. Not only do I feel so profoundly affirmed in the fact that I knew it was weird that I had time blindness. I knew it was weird that I have absolutely no sense of direction, to the point where I can get lost on my way home — to a home I’ve lived in for 20 years. I could meet you once, and if you got a haircut, by the next time I saw you, I would know you got a haircut.
My pattern recognition is really, really potent. The way I store information is really specific. The way I even tell a story is very peripatetic; it’s very nonlinear. And it also answered a lot: why I didn’t feel close to a lot of people and why, when I was with a lot of people, even though I’d known them for such a long time, I felt completely closed off and exhausted.
And so that was really helpful. It explained so much for me, and it affirmed so much for me. But then there was also so much grief. I think there was a childlike belief in my heart that befriending people or keeping friendships would become easier, or that my sense of direction would improve when I’m a grown-up.
Meanwhile, I’m in my 40s. There is a lot of grieving those hopes in certain ways. But that’s also really beautiful, because there is so much surrender and there’s so much peace in that kind of reconciliation. At least C.P.U.s aren’t being eaten up by all the tabs being open for all the things I’m waiting on to get better.
Spiegelman: That touches on one of the central questions I have, which is, in what ways can a diagnosis be liberating, and in which ways is it limiting?
Tressie, you’re a sociologist. How do you think about these labels and the ways in which they limit us, how they liberate us, how we use them to categorize ourselves and each other?
McMillan Cottom: Sociology is quite literally the study of groups and societies. And so when it comes to labels, it’s one of the ways that we sort ourselves into our groups, and we determine what’s normal. A lot of what Mary has said is a miscalibration between her internal state and what is considered normal or normative.
But as a sociologist, for me, everything happens in a context, and I think labels maybe do their best work — their most what we might call functional work, positive work, pro-social work — is when they help us figure out ourselves in a way that gives us a better way, yes, to talk about ourselves, to talk to ourselves, to recalibrate our expectations for ourselves.
The flip side, however, of a label is that any kind of sorting lends itself to moral judgments, to hierarchy, and can become just another boundary or binary that traps people in a group that does not feel normal to them, and those things can change over time. And I think one of the things that we are experiencing is just a moment of rapid change in how people identify themselves and how many people feel empowered to identify and sort themselves.
These are things that are still actually pretty new in the long duration of history. And we’re just in an era where, I think, we are renegotiating which labels are available to us and expanding the repertoire. And the good side is, for a lot of people, that is going to be empowering. It is going to help them make sense of their world. If done uncritically, though, I do think it will do the opposite. It is going to make more people feel left out or out of step with what is expected of them and can create more anxieties about what are the right ways to act and think and feel, when really the answer is there isn’t a right way to think or act or feel.
But everything, to my mind, always has a little bit of both.
Spiegelman: I want to dig in specifically on the label “neurodivergence.” When I was looking up the origin of the term, it was introduced in the late ’90s by an autism rights activist, but really gained steam during the pandemic.
If you do a Google Trends search on the word “neurodivergence,” in 2020 it takes off. And we are, right now, in peak neurodivergence. As I understand it, neurodivergence is not a medical term. It’s an umbrella term that can hold many different diagnoses and ways of being that differ from the norm. It’s an umbrella term for: This person’s brain is a little bit different from the normative brain, as we think of it.
Choi: Neurodivergence, as I understand it — as I experience it — is that it introduces this notion, specifically with autism, that it’s not a gradient. It’s not that you go from low-support needs to high-support needs and that’s that. There is this saying, in the autism circles, if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.
The profile is very much a three-dimensional constellation, where it’s not a left-to-right extremity. Neurodivergence is this beautiful queering term, where it’s basically like, it’s not a binary.
That to me is really, really helpful. It’s a launchpad, and being, “OK. This is the base-line information I have, and then from there I can add the colors to the tapestry of my own mental stuff.” It’s a beginning place. You might call it “Yes, and?” in improv.
Spiegelman: Looking at the data, something happened around the time of the pandemic, but it’s not clear why or what exactly. A Canadian study out of British Columbia found that the rate at which adults were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. more than doubled during the pandemic and then, starting in the summer of 2021, nearly quadrupled from the prepandemic rates.
Tressie, what was happening around the time of the pandemic that we both started talking about neurodivergence online and started seeing this increase in adults being diagnosed with A.D.H.D.?
McMillan Cottom: The spike in adults — the start of that trend of adults being diagnosed with A.D.H.D. — lags and mirrors the same sort of pattern that we saw happen with children. And I think, actually, those two things are related. These types of cultural transformations always happen within a context, and so it is not a surprise to me that during Covid — and what we really mean is during Covid shutdowns, right? The social isolation, the social distancing, everything that came with that horribly fraught period between Covid becoming a global phenomenon and the first vaccines. Everything about that moment isolated us in the real world, cut us off from our social systems, broke us from our routines, and then funneled almost all of our energies, our performance of ourselves, our connection with other people through the internet.
We’re working on Zoom, we’re doing Zoom school. At the time, there were lots of studies about Instagram face and Zoom face because we were watching ourselves, some of us for the first time, with that kind of concentrated focus, and skewed our perception of how we looked.
You see an uptick in interest in things like cosmetic surgery and face filters. The same thing is happening with the idea of our mental health, which is that a social rupture produces a lot of anxiety. The way we manage that is by going online. And one of the things that had happened by the time we were all going online in 2020 that had not been true even four or five years earlier is that the algorithm made the internet feel personalized and delivered these ideas to you, not because you had been up thinking last night like, “Hey, is my hyperfocus maybe an indication that I could use some medical intervention?”
No, you were sitting there shopping or watching the C.D.C. announcement on TikTok and Instagram, and the algorithm decided to expose you to the idea that, “Hey, if you do these five things, you may have A.D.H.D.,” or “A.D.H.D.ers be like” and “Normies be like this.” That whole framing, the algorithm was pushing the idea that it was normal; changing people’s expectation, at a time when people were extremely anxious about everything and did not have a lot of ways to figure out what was normal, what the options were, and we just had so much more time to do the self-assessment, to obsess with ourselves in a way that usually work and commuting and school and everything would have distracted us from.
Covid is a very, very big part of the story about adults seeking, if not a formal diagnosis, then a medicalized label that would have some sort of coherence in a time of great upheaval.
Spiegelman: I want to make clear that a medical diagnosis of any kind, and especially mental health diagnosis, is important. It can be lifesaving. It can allow access to treatment, to medication, to accommodations that people need. And I want to make a separation between talking about that and talking about a phenomenon that we’re observing online, because I think that what you’re talking about is true, Tressie, that there are social media videos that throw around medical terms without necessarily being medically sound.
There’s a study that showed that 52 percent of the top performing A.D.H.D. videos and 41 percent of the autism videos contain inaccurate medical information. I collected a few and according to social media, these are symptoms of autism: liking the sound of a hair dryer, feeling tired after socializing, having very strong opinions, looking up the menu at a restaurant before going to it, heavily researching a product before buying it, having a high pain tolerance, having a huge compassion for suffering, having only one or two close friends instead of many close friends.
What’s interesting is it’s within the capacity of the algorithm to want to tell us about ourselves, and it is changing how we think about ourselves.
Choi: I do wonder, though, you know how everyone’s worried about Gen Alpha’s internet-consumption habits, and the manosphere and this, that and the other, and how Gen Alpha doesn’t know Juice WRLD is dead. Like, all of these different things ——
Spiegelman: Wait, I don’t know about this. What is Juice WRLD?
Choi: He’s a rapper, but he appears in different video-game-based places where it doesn’t make a difference to them if he’s alive or dead, because they still have access to his avatar or his skin or whatever.
McMillan Cottom: I regret that I know anything about this, by the way, Nadja.
Spiegelman: I’m grateful to you for bringing me more online. Thank you, Mary.
Choi: I just say this to say, if you were to actually talk to these kids and ask, “How much do you believe this?” or “How seriously do you take this?” They know. They don’t ——
McMillan Cottom: They’re so savvy. Their parents are a little too incredulous, but the kids, actually, are pretty much aware of the culture.
Choi: So I question, for anyone who’s even written “autistic” or, “Oh my God, that’s me” — I do wonder sometimes if we assign too much credulity to them. And if we were to ask them, “Do you actually seriously consider yourself to be autistic?” I think that we might get a much more nuanced take on it, or a much larger conversation, rather than, “LOL, I love blow dryers, so therefore I’m autistic.”
McMillan Cottom: That’s my instinct too, Mary, not just generationally, but I think there is a difference between the shorthand that develops in internet speak. There’s a language of the internet that lends itself to self-identifying, because that is the way you speak back to the algorithm.
This is the communication method. By the way I identify the things that I allow to capture my attention, that is my interaction with the algorithm, and it gives me some sense that the algorithm is accurate. Because it is responding to the things that I’ve inputted, even though that may not necessarily be true anymore.
That lends itself to maybe taking on labels that don’t in any way shape how you actually see yourself or the decisions you make in your life. But we aren’t exactly clear on the line between fun shorthand and the way the concept creep of these terms can take up residence in your mind, even if you do not think that they have done so.
My friends have been joking with me for quite some time, for the record, that I am neurodivergent — or neurospicy, as my friend Johnica likes to say. Shout out to Johnica, who does have an official diagnosis, which is very hard for women — shout out to Mary — almost impossible for Black women, which my friend Johnica is.
And so we have talked very openly about this and her journey of getting a medical diagnosis, and every step along the way, she has come back wanting to report to me that she is pretty sure that I, too, am on the spectrum. And I’ll tell you what I told Johnica: “Johnica, girl, I don’t have time for a new way to understand myself.”
I don’t discount that it may be absolutely true. I’m saying that I do not have the bandwidth at this time to figure it all out. I’ve gotten this far. I’m just going to ride it out. But I do think that there are a lot of people who are in that mushy middle. Well, you know, it might be fun. It might even be a little clarifying, the way your horoscope might be some days. You don’t believe in it, but hey, that is really timely today. I do need to pay attention to my deadlines today. If I want to attribute it to Mercury retrograde in a quick joke to my friends in group chat, fine. But that doesn’t necessarily signify that I have changed how I think about myself. I’d be really interested in parsing out the difference between our shorthand, driven by internet speak, and the real changes for people who find either self-diagnosis or community, or how self-identifying as neurodivergent really impacted their everyday life.
Spiegelman: I was reading one of your Substacks, Mary, the one called “Why I Quit Therapy.” You were saying that, to some degree, the diagnoses had also caused you to hyperfocus on symptoms in a way that had felt like perhaps you needed to take a step back from it.
Choi: There’s an aspect to it that is incredibly stultifying, and there is an aspect to it — to your point, Tressie, what you were talking about, with the pandemic and isolation, where people talk about dissociation all the time. And sometimes I really do be, like, jettisoning out of my body, leaving that body for dead, where it’s just me and my brain now. It’s all pure cognition. And for me, talk therapy, even something like cognitive behavioral therapy, it got to a point — and I also did the 12-step, I’ve taken my own inventory, all of these things — where I’m just like, “By God, like, how much more do I need to parse effluvia of my own personhood?”
I don’t think I need to be in therapy to identify how I’m feeling. Alexithymia, which is an inability to really recognize emotions within yourself, or feelings within yourself, is an aspect of autism that I do also have. And so I was just like, I think that time is better spent for me really sitting down with a thing that I suspect to be sadness without curing it, labeling it, understanding it, routing it back to some sort of childhood phenomenon or something that happened to me, and just being like, “Apparently, you’re sad.”
McMillan Cottom: I think that is so important. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’ve been working on this memoir that, in part, deals with why the psychologicalization of the culture did not in any way empower me to better understand or to make better decisions in my family unit, that there is a difference between understanding your feelings and feeling your feelings. And understanding can have so much positive feedback attached to it, right?
Your therapist gives you an “attagirl.” Your friends tell you, “Ooh, girl, what did you figure out today?” And you get to unpack it with them over a little martini or, you know, whatever your thing is. You’ve got this new and exciting story to put on the ’gram or on TikTok, and it’s really hard to come up with new content ideas, so that’s great, right?
There’s just a lot of positive feedback loops to understanding your feelings. I think a lot about the trend, especially among adults — especially during this time of Covid, which I just think is a social rupture, and anything that accelerated during that time deserves our critical eye, not because it’s necessarily bad, but let’s just think it through.
And it happening during that moment gives me some pause to think about how much of this is about people avoiding the feelings, right? And getting into the hamster wheel of the positive feedback of performing how well they understand their feelings. And I do think that matters because we’re not exactly sure how much of things like this — the list you just gave me, it reminds me of, you go to the state fair and there’s somebody there who’ll read your palm. And they look you up and down and they’re like, “Hmm, you have major decisions in your life and you need to resolve things with your mother.” And you’re like, “Gasp!” Then you go home and you think about it and you’re like, “Well, I’m a 40-year-old woman. What 40-year-old woman doesn’t have major things in her life and needs to have a serious talk with her mother?” So there’s an aspect to this where I think the list of things, like, do you not like loud sounds? Do you have a favorite spoon? That one got me recently. I do have a favorite spoon, as it turned out, and I do only eat out ——
Spiegelman: I also have a favorite spoon.
McMillan Cottom: I do only eat out of one bowl. And I’m like, well, if this is the diagnostic criteria, right? It can be both really rewarding, because it labels a feeling that you haven’t yet finished feeling, but so broad that there’s no risk in it asking you to do anything. Because what am I supposed to do about my favorite spoon? I’m just going to keep using my favorite spoon. And I think that trap keeps us from dealing with how much some of our anxiety is just earned. It is an earned, real response to anxious times. Covid was anxiety producing. It was hard and it was challenging, and maybe, just maybe, that’s OK.
Choi: Totally. But also, the human condition is really tough.
McMillan Cottom: It sucks! It’s hard! The Buddhists came up with the whole thing. The Buddha said to us, “Attachment is suffering.” This is the human condition, and I’m not sure that sometimes, the way we treat the self-labeling and the labeling of others, helps us in that condition.
Choi: I will say, though, that the other thing, too, not to put a button on it, but there is — as a dopamine-seeking brain, and as all of us dopamine-seeking people, whether that sort of thing is regulated or not — a tremendous incentive and satisfaction in naming a thing, because it feels solved.
The taxonomy is great — not only giving yourself agency to call yourself something, but to be like, “And now I’m done.” There’s a kind of a gavel-thwack in being like, “Oh, that’s an A.D.H.D. behavior, that’s an autistic behavior,” rather than “I am actively being challenged at this moment. I do not know if I have the resources to figure this out. I am so deeply, deeply isolated and uncomfortable,” rather than, “I’m Au/D.H.D. Slap it on the bio.” Other people are like, “Yay, us too.” It’s like a chorus of minions, and then that is just a different serotonin, dopamine moment than just sitting with that horrible feeling of absolute ambiguity.
Spiegelman: I want to go back and catch something from earlier, because we were talking about the young generation, that they don’t take these things so seriously. They can tell the difference between an autism video that is not medically sound, and they don’t take it too seriously.
But there’s a survey from last year that shows that nearly a third of American adults and half of Gen Z adults report having diagnosed themselves with a mental health condition because of stuff they saw on social media. I am susceptible to these videos. I think I have A.D.H.D. I cannot focus on a task for very long. I want to be thinking about lots of different things at once. And then, when I meet my friends, I have friends who have many more symptoms than just the ones that I see on the internet, and I’m like, “You really need medication in order to function in a work office environment in a way that I do not, and I understand that your diagnosis is something different from something that I’m diagnosing myself with based on a couple of traits on the internet.”
And I see those two things as separate. To me, this feels really personal, this question, because it’s something I’ve thought about my whole life. My family — my nuclear family, I would say — absolutely none of us are neurotypical. But my French mother has always been very, very against the idea of any kind of mental health diagnoses, and especially when my ——
McMillan Cottom: Very cultural.
Spiegelman: Especially when my sibling and I were younger, and I think exhibiting behavior that could have lent itself to a mental health diagnosis and intervention, she really didn’t want us to feel limited in our capacity to become our full selves by giving a single word to what we were.
Tressie, when you’re saying, “I resist this. I don’t want to be labeled in this way by my friends, even though I see myself in so many of these descriptions,” how do you think that through?
McMillan Cottom: I think my gut really leaned into your mother’s perspective on this, which could even be useful in some sense. But when a child is still developing, unless the behaviors are getting in the way of that development, development is not linear.
I actually am not entirely sure it matters if a child can read aloud from the picture book at the end of kindergarten, and maybe it’s OK if it doesn’t happen till second grade. And that we used to have far more flexibility, at the classroom level in schools, for those determinations to be made. When the student-to-teacher ratios were much more humane, when there wasn’t a whole bunch of standardized testing and teaching to a test, a teacher could go: “OK, Tressie, you read really well, but you cannot get the round item into the square hole, and yet you keep trying.” That was a real thing that happened to me. I almost flunked kindergarten because I couldn’t cut a piece of paper in a straight line. This was an assessment for whatever reason. But I could read at the sixth-grade level. And a teacher could assess that and go: “OK, you’re probably fine. It’s going to shake out by high school.”
The idea that all of that flexibility has left our children’s lives — children’s lives have become so structured that the stakes of the diagnosis seem really out of whack with the possible benefits for a lot of people and families. And so as an adult, what I was dealing with is that I’d come from that time when there was so much more flexibility for me to develop in my own way, and the milestones weren’t so rigid.
Having come up with that worldview, I’m not really willing to give it up just yet. Something about it just didn’t quite sit well with me. That is not to say that I reject it, however, again, from my friends, and that I won’t necessarily reconsider, but that was my gut. I think my gut was much more like your mother’s.
Spiegelman: Mary, for a hypothetical, if we could imagine a world in which you never received a diagnosis, but somehow, in your 40s, a friend or a therapist suggests these behavioral interventions of, “Maybe you don’t have to go to parties you don’t want to go to, and maybe you can wear earplugs in loud spaces——”
McMillan Cottom: That’s radical. Are you telling me, Nadja, that I don’t have to go to parties I don’t want to go to?
Spiegelman: Only if you get diagnosed. Without a diagnosis, you have to go to the parties you don’t want to go to.
McMillan Cottom: This changes everything.
Choi: That’s the hidden accommodation.
To your point, I understand the thinking behind that, too. And I agree. If you were to get a full behavioral diagnosis from a clinician, and that affords you certain accommodations in school, who is to say if those accommodations, again, that largely are one-size-fits-all — you get more test time, or you get more this, or you have this remedial class with other kids — like, that is also not for you. And it could affect you in adverse ways that we absolutely do not know. And in my particular circumstance, because I wasn’t diagnosed until later, it was edifying and clarifying to see all these really meticulous and hilarious Rube Goldbergian ways that I had organized my life with routines or systems and things like that.
A lot of those were ingenious, and a lot of those actually do point to my acuity and faculties in other places, where those skills outpace an allistic person, a non-autistic person. And that I do derive a great deal of pleasure and esteem from. Really, the only perk for self-identifying or being formally assessed as an autistic person is because it is not a drug-seeking behavior.
Unlike A.D.H.D., there is no amphetamine that I’m trying to get with this behavioral diagnosis of self-evaluating. All I can actually do is give myself more time, more patience, and an exponential amount of compassion and kindness.
There was a moment in which I was just like, I’m woo-woo. I do Internal Family Systems, I do inner-child work, all this stuff. I’m like, “Oh, my inner child has very special needs.” And I never got that until my 40s. I felt unloved, but even by my parents, and so it’s not my parents’ fault entirely. That affords me more compassion for them.
It’s just like, “Oh, I wasn’t ruined by my parents’ immigrant experience and workaholism.” It was a factor in the way that I received love. And it’s hereditary, so I’m just like, are you neurodivergent? Can I give you more compassion and understanding? Really, the only boon or the salve of it was the fact that I was like, OK, I can be less unkind, and I can be less demanding of myself, and I can be less perfectionistic or hard on everyone. And so, for me, that’s been an incredible gift.
McMillan Cottom: That is so profound, Mary.
Spiegelman: Tressie, I wanted to ask you as well, what is it about labels and the ways in which we label ourselves that can be liberating?
McMillan Cottom: A label is a possible shortcut, yes, to foreclose possibilities, thought-terminating clichés. But it can also be a way for you to give yourself a permission structure that for some of us, how we are socialized, the repertoire of identities that we inherit from our families, from our communities, may not have a costume in it for us.
And so maybe it takes something as medical-sounding as a diagnosis to give ourselves the permission structure to be kind to ourselves. Maybe that’s what it takes for some of us, which I think is not an indictment of the people who do it. It is an indictment of our culture that gives people so few options to find themselves in a healthy way, with reasonable risks that we would go through instead of this whole process.
It is not easy to get a diagnosis. I’d even argue there are downsides to self-identifying as such. It can come with a lot of judgment, and it can come with jokes and things that can diminish your experience. I think it is an indictment of a world that for some people feels more reasonable than just saying, “Maybe I’m going to be kind to myself today. Maybe I’m going to give myself more time to get where I need to be. Maybe I won’t rush.” Like, “Maybe I’m worth the extra steps in my process that it takes for me to get out of the door in the morning.”
And I just find that really profound, and not a process that necessarily needs the label, but that we have produced labels that engender that kind of permission structure — it says something about where we are, what we need, and the people who need it and who benefit from it.
Spiegelman: Thank you both so much for talking about this with me today. I appreciate how much you’ve shared both of your intellect and of your personal experiences. It’s been really wonderful to talk about it with both of you.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Annie Galvin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Video editing by Steph Khoury and Kristen Williamson. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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