Mental health is a very fragile yet very important aspect of life. It needs constant maintenance and care or else every other part of one’s life will be greatly affected. As a result, there has been a rise in public awareness of mental health illnesses and advocacy for treatment in recent years. However, this public awareness rise has also caused the epidemic of self-diagnosis and it’s doing nothing but adding unnecessary stress for everyone involved.
The trend of self-diagnosis became apparent on social media platforms like TikTok, especially in early 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic era, when climate change concerns and worries about the future plagued students. Many different content creators talked about why they may have a certain mental health illness, as a way to raise awareness of these conditions and reduce stigma. This then led to viewers and followers empathizing and possibly diagnosing themselves with the same disorders.
While using social media to spark one’s curiosity on these mental health problems is not an issue, using it as an ultimate source for diagnosis is not helpful at all. If anything, it can cause misdiagnosis and potentially wrong treatment, along with a loss of self-esteem, inaccurate self-identity and unneeded anxiety. While there are people who may use it to look for ways to help themselves, there are also those who use it to excuse bad behaviors, or worse, purposely affect the description of a mental illness. They then identify with the illness because of the aesthetic or glamor it’s developed and fixate on it, leaving students stuck with no desire for change.
Charlie Health states that only 21% of all information on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder on TikTok is actually accurate. So, if someone identifies with ADHD, they could be wrong, have a totally different condition or have no condition at all. A lot of people online also claim to have ADHD, but this could instead be a short attention span as a result of habitual scrolling through social media platforms like Twitter/X or Instagram.
The British Broadcasting Corporation has defined autism as a “neurodevelopmental disorder which often involves differences in thinking patterns, sensory processing, communication and social interactions.” These days, there are many videos on TikTok that have captions along the lines of “Everyone has a touch of the ‘tism,” essentially meaning that everyone is a little eccentric, thus giving people the wrong idea about what autism is. Not only is this misinformation, it also invalidates the people who actually have autism by depicting them as being weird or eccentric.
Similarly, the word narcissist has entirely lost its meaning; it denotes someone who has too much admiration for themselves to the point where they don’t fraternize with people who they think are unimportant. Nowadays, however, people who are considered to have inflated egos are considered narcissists, when in reality, the difference between a narcissist and someone with a big ego is that narcissists lack any form of empathy, and people with big egos might just be arrogant or misunderstood but still capable of empathy.
Another word that is thrown around a lot is trauma, as people have now started to call every bad experience trauma. This causes invalidation of others’ actual trauma. Using these serious words in less significant, mundane situations dilutes these diagnoses.
Mental health is a very complicated concept; there is no straightforward answer. This is one of the reasons why self-diagnosis is so dangerous. According to Jessica A. Jaramillo, the interim crisis coordinator and clinical supervisor at the Counseling Center at the University of Colorado, Denver, borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder are two different disorders with similar symptoms: suicidal thoughts, impulsivity, mood swings, irritability and risky behaviors. A person might have either BPD or bipolar disorder, so it’s important that a professional medical opinion is sought first before arriving at any conclusion, no matter how true one’s personal opinion might seem to them.
While others may say that online information is there to provide the people who claim to have various mental conditions with a sense of community and belonging, especially considering that mental health services can be financially out of reach for some people, I believe that encouraging their opinion is not going to help them find community. Because if they are eventually undiagnosed by a professional, they may have wasted time aligning with an improper community online. They could also end up identifying with something they don’t have, which is further detrimental to mental health.
Self-diagnosis is a very dangerous problem, especially because whenever these self-proclaimed mental health content creators like Nicole LePera promote self-healing and don’t believe in therapy, we give people on the internet a reason to self-diagnose, undermine the professionals who spent several years studying to help those in need and invalidate the people who actually have these conditions. While these content creators might mean well, they are doing greater harm and causing our youth to overly identify with possibly incorrect diagnoses. Being college students who are just trying to stay on top of our classes and still find time to enjoy ourselves, self-diagnosing may only do damage by shifting our focus away from academic and social well-being. We need to be very careful about what we take in from social media because it might just be an abject lie.
