THE SELF-FULFILLING NATURE OF SELF-DIAGNOSES
As the boundaries blur, the very meaning of mental health terms begins to stretch, a phenomenon psychologists call concept creep. Milder and everyday emotional struggles like sadness become framed as depression, worry becomes anxiety, and struggling to pay attention to boring tasks becomes ADHD. Online communities where young people trade symptom checklists illustrate how easy it is to slip from self-reflection to self-diagnosis.
This can lead to further problems, of which the two main ones are the self-fulfilling nature of self-diagnosis and the obscuring of causes of distress and dysfunction. Interpreting your fear of giving presentations as an anxiety disorder may lead you to manage your anxiety by avoiding doing future presentations, and yet avoidance is a strong mechanism for fuelling further anxiety.
More broadly, by framing distress and dysfunction as a disorder or problem inside an individual, we draw attention away from social causes, such as poverty, inequality, discrimination and workplace stress. We place the burden of responsibility to recover on the individual, rather than on the system to change.
None of this is to suggest that mental health problems are not real. They are very real, and people can be hugely debilitated by them.
But by focusing too much on diagnosing mental disorders, we are teaching people to understand and label their distress in unhelpful ways. These labels risk becoming glamorised by social media in a way that does not improve self-management and overwhelms mental health services with requests for assessments of specific and trending diagnoses.