Let’s be real—it seems like everyone’s got a label now, and most of them haven’t been given by a medical professional.
Spend five minutes on TikTok or scroll through your feed and suddenly, you’ve got anxiety, ADHD, trauma, a rare attachment style, and probably three personality disorders. Sure, some of it’s about awareness and feeling seen, but a lot of it’s veering into a weird self-obsession that’s less about healing and more about making everything about you. Somewhere along the way, self-diagnosis stopped being a tool for understanding and started becoming a personality trait. And social media, unsurprisingly, is eating it up.
1. It turns actual mental health struggles into trendy aesthetics.
When every video has pastel fonts over moody music explaining “how to tell if you’re dissociating,” it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s just part of the algorithm. There’s a fine line between relatability and romanticising mental illness, and a lot of content blurs that line completely.
People start treating serious conditions like quirky personality traits or excuses for bad behaviour. The internet makes it easy to package pain as a vibe, but real people with real diagnoses don’t get to curate their symptoms for likes. It’s not cute or deep. It’s messy and hard and often not postable.
2. Everyone’s an expert now (with zero qualifications).
There’s no shortage of twenty-somethings giving TED Talk-style breakdowns of complex disorders—with no background beyond their own Google rabbit holes, of course. Suddenly, everyone’s “neurodivergent,” “trauma-informed,” or “high-functioning something.”
The problem isn’t just the misinformation; it’s that people genuinely start diagnosing themselves (and others) based on hot takes and vibes. Actual mental health professionals spend years studying this stuff for a reason. A trending audio doesn’t replace a clinical understanding of your brain.
3. It feeds the need to feel special.
There’s a comfort in naming things, especially if you’ve felt misunderstood for years. But when every emotion gets turned into a label, and every quirk into a disorder, it becomes less about insight and more about identity inflation. It’s not just about wanting answers anymore. It’s about being unique, complex, and tough to decode. In that way, self-diagnosis has become another flavour of narcissism. It lets people feel interesting without actually doing the inner work.
4. It gives people permission to never change.
Instead of using a potential diagnosis as a starting point for support, people often treat it like a full-stop. “I’m just like this because I have X” becomes a catch-all reason to avoid accountability or growth. That kind of thinking keeps people stuck. It turns self-awareness into a shield instead of a tool. Plus, it completely misses the point because understanding yourself is only helpful if it leads to action, not excuses.
5. It encourages performative vulnerability.
People now feel pressure to have some kind of “mental health journey” just to be part of the conversation. That leads to a lot of oversharing, dramatics, and trauma-dumping disguised as self-expression, often without any real processing behind it.
It’s not about connection. It’s about clout. Sharing struggles becomes a kind of currency, and whoever has the most labels wins. However, vulnerability without intention isn’t brave. It’s messy, and sometimes damaging, both to the sharer and the people watching.
6. It erases the difference between traits and disorders.
Just because you hate loud noises or feel socially drained after a party doesn’t mean you’re autistic. And just because you overthink doesn’t mean you have anxiety. But the internet has flattened everything into a checklist, where a few symptoms equal a self-diagnosis.
This harms everyone, especially people who are actually navigating serious mental health conditions. When the definition of everything gets watered down, the people who need the most support end up getting less of it. Because suddenly, everyone’s struggling in the exact same, vague way.
7. It makes people weirdly competitive about who’s struggling more.
There’s a strange hierarchy that forms when everyone’s self-diagnosing, like a race to prove who’s got the most trauma or the rarest mental health combo. It’s subtle, but it shows up in how people share their stories and respond to other people. Instead of support, it becomes comparison, and instead of healing, it becomes one-upmanship. That’s not community; that’s emotional Olympics. And it helps exactly no one.
8. It becomes a substitute for identity.
When people aren’t sure who they are, it’s easy to cling to a diagnosis, even a self-given one, as a way to define themselves. Especially online, where identity gets flattened into bios, labels, and categories. However, you’re not your symptoms. You’re not your attachment style or your executive dysfunction or your Enneagram number. The more people wrap their whole personality around a diagnosis, the harder it becomes to separate who they are from what they’re dealing with.
9. It gives people a reason to avoid therapy.
Why see a professional when a 90-second video or a carousel post can tell you “everything you need to know”? Self-diagnosis gives people the illusion of doing the work—without actually doing the work. However, Google can’t ask follow-up questions. A TikTok can’t challenge your patterns, and a thread of relatable symptoms won’t help you build coping strategies. Therapy is hard and unglamorous, but it’s where the real growth happens.
10. It spreads fear more than clarity.
For every person who feels comforted by a diagnosis, there are hundreds who spiral into thinking they have everything under the sun. Social media thrives on worst-case scenarios and symptom overload, and it leaves people convinced they’re broken in ways they’re not. It doesn’t promote peace; it promotes panic. Not only that, but instead of helping people feel more understood, it often just adds confusion, anxiety, and a hyper-focus on every little feeling.
11. It distracts from real, boring self-care.
Managing mental health isn’t always interesting. It’s sleep, water, boundaries, uncomfortable conversations, and sometimes medication. However, none of that makes for flashy content. So people focus on what’s shareable, not what’s sustainable. They build an entire self-image around the idea of healing, while quietly avoiding the unglamorous bits that actually make a difference.
12. It leaves less room for nuance.
Maybe you’re anxious in crowds, but not at work. Maybe your mood swings are hormonal, not bipolar. Maybe you’re burnt out, not depressed. The thing is, nuance doesn’t perform well online—clear-cut labels do. As a result, people start boxing themselves in to fit an identity that isn’t fully accurate. And in doing that, they miss the flexibility that mental health conversations actually need—the ability to say “sometimes,” “kind of,” or “I’m not sure yet.”
13. It’s being rewarded by algorithms, not professionals.
The stuff that gets pushed to the top of your feed isn’t peer-reviewed or clinically sound. It’s what’s most clickable, shareable, and emotionally charged. That’s what the algorithm wants, not what’s healthy. If that’s where most people are getting their mental health info, it’s no wonder things feel skewed. We’re being taught to self-reflect in ways that are catchy, not necessarily correct.
14. It makes us worse at supporting each other.
When everyone’s focused on their own diagnosis, it’s easy to lose sight of how to actually show up for other people. It becomes a competition or a comparison, not a space for mutual care. Real support isn’t about comparing traumas or swapping symptoms. It’s about listening, being patient, and staying open, even when someone else’s experience doesn’t match your own.
15. It encourages people to stay stuck in the label.
Getting a diagnosis, real or imagined, can feel like an answer. But when people use that label to define their future instead of guide their healing, it becomes a box. Something they stay in instead of grow from. Mental health work is supposed to help you move forward, not settle deeper into your identity as a permanently broken person. Self-diagnosis can be the first step toward understanding, but it shouldn’t be the last one.
