Stop Diagnosing Yourself via TikTok. Please.
What you’ll find in a two-minute TikTok and what a trained pro might say to you are often not the same thing. Consider, therefore, skipping the endless scroll.
Let me be upfront: I’m not a fan of social media (stay with me, Gen Z and Gen Alpha). I think it chips away at our attention spans, floods our brains with noise, and makes real human connection harder by the day. That said, I get the dilemma. If you’re not on it, you’re out of the loop. People don’t talk about things anymore, instead they send each other clips. And whether I like it or not, mental health TikToks, Insta reels, and algorithm-generated “therapy speak” are part of the culture now. Even without scrolling, I see them constantly. They’re sent by clients, friends, colleagues. Some are genuinely thoughtful and well-researched. There are therapists doing great, meaningful work online, and I respect that.
But here’s the thing. Most people scrolling aren’t therapists. And trying to parse the difference between grounded clinical insight and follower-chasing hype? That’s hard, even for professionals. So instead of getting support, a lot of people end up self-diagnosing based on 15-second clips that make grief look like a mood disorder, make OCD seem like a cleaning quirk, and make emotional dysregulation sound like a vibe. Don’t get me started on attachment styles (cue buzzword of the year). The result? A generation of people convinced they are broken because they cried twice last week and couldn’t focus during a meeting.
And also. No one is broken. Not ever.
What’s Actually Going On
A lot of what gets labeled as a disorder is… just being a human being with feelings. You might be sad, stressed, scattered, overwhelmed, grieving, burnt out, or existentially spiraling—all completely expected parts of the human experience by the way—but that doesn’t mean you meet diagnostic criteria for a psychiatric condition.
The human brain is supposed to have emotions. That’s not a bug in the system, it’s the system doing what it was designed to do. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes, “Your brain doesn’t react to the world. It predicts your experience of the world.” Emotions aren’t pre-programmed reflexes, they’re constructed, moment to moment, based on context, history, and the meanings you’ve learned to assign to things. So that pit in your stomach before a big meeting? That spiral after three days of no sleep and five iced coffees? That shutdown feeling when you’re overstimulated? Not disordered. Predictive biology doing its job.
The problem isn’t that you’re feeling things. The problem is we live in a culture that pathologizes feeling. We’ve somehow gotten to a point where having emotions at all, especially intense or inconvenient ones, makes people think something must be “wrong” with them. Spoiler, nothing is wrong with you. You’re alive. You’re responding. You’re human.
Sometimes, yes, emotional responses can get so intense, prolonged, or consuming that they start to interfere with your ability to live the kind of life you want. That’s when it’s worth slowing down and asking: Is this pattern working for me? Is it helping me move toward the relationships, values, and life I care about or pulling me further away?
That’s not about slapping on a label. It’s about noticing when your mind, body, or habits are caught in loops that make your world smaller instead of bigger. Therapy doesn’t exist to pathologize your pain, it exists to help you create more space inside of it.
But if you’re going through a breakup, grieving a loss, adjusting to stress, or facing a major life change and you’re a little bit of a mess? That’s not a diagnosis. That’s being alive in a body that works.
Why It Matters
Self-diagnosis isn’t just inaccurate—it can be actively harmful. Here’s why:
You might miss what’s actually going on. Slapping a label on yourself based on a 60-second clip can distract you from the deeper work of understanding your lived experience. You might misidentify something as anxiety when it’s actually trauma. Or mistake trauma for ADHD. Or assume you have OCD because you like structure, when what’s really going on is chronic distress. Diagnosing yourself with something you don’t have can mask what you do need support with.
You can start over-identifying with a label. The diagnosis becomes your personality. You build a whole identity around a TikTok soundbite, and suddenly you’re filtering every experience through that lens. Human beings are not just one thing. We are many, many, many things and those things shift over time. A rigid identity around a single label can keep you stuck instead of helping you heal.
You might avoid treatment. Thinking you already “know” what’s wrong can keep you from seeking real support. But here’s the thing: everyone’s mental health story is complex. Really complex. It takes a trained professional to step back and consider all the moving parts: your development, family systems, trauma history, neurodivergence, cultural background, how early relationships influence you, how your lived experience has been shaped by race, gender, sexuality, ability, and systemic forces that don’t show up in symptom checklists, and the things you’ve learned to hide just to function.
It minimizes the very real pain of people actually living with those disorders. Watching someone casually co-opt OCD for aesthetic purposes is enraging when you’ve spent your whole life battling obsessive thought spirals so brutal they make you afraid of your own mind and terrified of the world. This is me. I lived that.
And? So. Many. Diagnoses. Overlap. Anxiety, trauma, OCD, ADHD, depression, eating disorders, they share symptoms. They can mimic each other. They show up in layers. It takes real clinical training and time to untangle it all with the care it deserves.
The Difference Between Awareness and Overpathologizing
Look, mental health awareness is a good thing. If a TikTok helps someone realize they’re struggling and gets them into therapy, that’s a win. But there’s a difference between awareness and using symptom checklists as astrology memes.
You don’t need a diagnosis to justify your suffering. Your pain is real. Even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a DSM category. Just because something doesn’t have a billing code doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to prove your struggle to deserve care. And sometimes, the most compassionate thing isn’t to chase a label, it’s to pause, breathe, and let yourself feel what you’re feeling without trying to define it or clean it up.
At the same time, I want to be clear. For many people, especially those navigating neurodivergence, chronic mental illness, or marginalized identities, a diagnosis can be deeply validating. And that there’s a name for what you’ve been living with, you didn’t choose it and you’re not making it up. Labels, when used thoughtfully and in context, can provide access to support, community, accommodations, and a sense of self-compassion that might’ve been missing for years. This isn’t about dismissing diagnosis, it’s about not letting TikTok be the one to hand it to you. It’s also not about minimizing your experience. It’s about honoring it without forcing it into a box that might not fit. You’re allowed to hurt. You’re allowed to not know exactly what it is. You’re allowed to be a little bit messy and still completely worthy of support.
What To Do Instead
Get curious, not clinical. Ask, “What am I feeling?” instead of “What’s wrong with me?”
See a licensed professional. (Hi, I’m one.) We went to school for this. We can help you sort what is a human experience, what might need more support, and what can actually help.
Stop making TikTok your therapist. Your FYP doesn’t know your trauma history, attachment style, or family dynamics. Let’s not give it your mental health treatment plan.
Practice self-compassion. Not every struggle needs a label. Some things just need space, gentleness, and a little less scrolling. And for those struggles that do need a label? Same rules apply. Let it come from care, not content. Let it come from curiosity, not panic.
Final Thoughts
The human mind is messy, brilliant, inconsistent, and confusing. That’s kind of the whole deal. You are allowed to be confused, emotional, tender, and overwhelmed without needing to diagnose yourself into oblivion.
So please, for your sake, and for mine, step away from the TikTok rabbit hole. Or at least take it with a grain of salt, a dash of curiosity, and the reminder that healing is not a trend.
