Self-Diagnosis in the Age of TikTok: What Does It Mean for Our Mental Health?
Image Credit: Nick Fancher
If your algorithm is curated towards mental health, you will most definitely have come across these: short videos with titles like “Signs you didn’t know were ADHD” or “Things I didn’t realise were trauma-related.” These titles garner millions of views, thousands of comments, endless inundations along the lines of “This is so me”.
We are living in a moment where diagnosis is no longer confined to the clinic. It’s being sought out, debated, and sometimes even proclaimed on social media. For better and for worse, this is changing the way people think about themselves and about “mental health.”
In this blog, I am going to explore the upsides and downsides of this way we try and find explanations for the ways we are being and how this is altering the landscape and what that might mean for you if you identify with any of the content in the videos.
The Rise of Diagnostic Identity
There’s a reason why these videos resonate. For many, a diagnosis can offer relief: it is a way of making sense of distress that, for a long time, has felt chaotic or inexplicable. As one person quoted by Lucy Johnstone in A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Diagnosis reflected:
“I cried. It was wonderful. Because all my life suddenly made sense. None of it was my fault… I’d put it in the top five greatest things that have ever happened in my life.”
For others, diagnosis can bring comfort in knowing their struggles are real and recognised, rather than dismissed. Some describe it as a route to belonging:
“Once I understood what autism was, there was no hesitation. I was like: ‘Yep, that’s me, 100%.’”
It’s easy to see why these stories spread so quickly. In a culture where many feel misunderstood or “different,” having a label can feel like a key that unlocks community, identity, and even hope for treatment.
The Shadow Side of Labels
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Whilst the same label that can bring relief for some can often bring despair for others. Not everyone experiences a liberating feeling.
Some describe diagnosis as erasing their sense of self:
“I walked into the psychiatrist’s office as Don and walked out a schizophrenic… I remember feeling afraid, demoralised, evil.”
Others describe it as a weight that reshaped their future in an instant:
“With the snap of a finger, I was labelled and forever changed.”
There are also voices of hopelessness:
“My diagnostic label promoted despair and threatened to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Instead of bringing belonging, diagnosis can heighten the sense of being an outsider, marked as “different” or “dangerous.” Families, too, sometimes experience stigma that runs through generations.
The paradox is clear: for some, diagnosis reduces shame. For others, it creates it.
Social Media and the Amplification of Self-Diagnosis
Image Credit: Nick Fancher
What makes this moment unique is the staggering reach of platforms like TikTok. Hashtags like #ADHD and #trauma rack up billions of views. Some videos are genuinely educational. Others oversimplify complex experiences into a list of “symptoms” so broad that almost anyone could identify with the “illness”.
This has two effects: First, it creates visibility for struggles that were once hidden. People feel less alone. They find language for their pain.
But second, it fuels self-diagnosis in a way that can bypass clinical nuance. Ordinary human struggles, like sleepless nights, distraction, sensitivity and sadness risk being filtered through a diagnostic lens which can lead to people seeking labels online before seeking context, proper care, or even conversation.
The Changing Meaning of “Mental Health”
Image Credit: Romain Vignes
Adding to this complexity is the way our language and meaning has shifted, and therefore affected how culture shapes itself, in both good and bad ways.
Decades ago, “mental health” meant wellness which is the positive opposite of mental illness. To say someone “had good mental health” was to say they were thriving. Today, “mental health” almost always refers to problems, conditions, or crises.
So, when people say “I’m struggling with my mental health,” they’re not usually talking about wellness, they’re actually talking about illness. There’s no harm in clarifying though!
On the surface, the popular slogan “We all have mental health” looks like progress. It encourages open conversation. It reduces shame. But it can also blur the line between ordinary distress and diagnosable illness. It suggests that everyone’s difficulties need a label and that those labels are the natural way to understand suffering.
And here’s the irony: while social media tries to destigmatise, it may actually be reinforcing the very systems that medicalised distress in the first place.
Between Belonging and Burden
What we’re left with is a landscape of contradiction.
For some, diagnosis is empowering. It offers relief, clarity, belonging, and even survival.
For others, it’s disempowering. It brings stigma, hopelessness, or the sense of being reduced to an illness.
For society, the spread of self-diagnosis online blurs the boundaries between health and illness, distress and disorder.
Perhaps the biggest shift isn’t just that people are self-diagnosing on TikTok, but that many now feel they must adopt a diagnostic identity to be taken seriously in order to explain their pain, to belong and to have their story validated.
So what does this mean for our mental health?
Image Credit: Ales Krivec
We can’t deny that social media has given people language, visibility, and community. Nor can we ignore the risks of oversimplification, self-stigma, or the infiltration of medicalisation into every corner of life.
The real question is whether this culture is bringing us closer to wellness or further away from it.
When mental health is spoken about as illness by default, when belonging depends on adopting a label, and when diagnosis becomes the main gateway to recognition, what happens to the idea of simply being human? The idea of struggling, adapting, and growing in ways that can’t always be captured by categories…
Perhaps the challenge ahead is not to abandon diagnosis altogether, nor to embrace it uncritically, but to hold the paradox: that labels can heal and harm, free and bind, include and exclude.
And to ask, with genuine curiosity: what kind of mental health culture do we want to create for the future?