Self-diagnosis through social media

Increased awareness about mental health is leading to a dangerous trend of self-diagnosis, causing overdiagnosis and misdiagnosis, while underdiagnosis remains a concern. Accessible counseling and awareness programs are needed to address these issues.

Last month, I was teaching a class of young students who are training to be mental health professionals. One of the students asked me, “While there is a rise in awareness about mental health, is there a trend that worries you?”

Self-diagnosis through social media

As I was reflecting on this, I recognized that we are living in a strange time when it comes to mental health. As a nation, there is definitely a concern around underdiagnosis, but there is a dangerous trend of self-diagnosis leading to overdiagnosis and misdiagnosis.

The lack of awareness and stigma attached to mental health contributes to underdiagnosis. In my work with NGOs and organizations, what I consistently hear is people telling me that anxiety, mood concerns, issues related to sleep are trivialized or not recognized which in turn often leads to people suffering alone for years before they can find any help from professionals. The lack of understanding and support linked to seeking help makes it harder for people to reach out to a mental health professional.

At the same time, what I seem to hear consistently in my work across schools and organizations is an increase in self-diagnosis - all in the absence of any checking or speaking to mental health professionals. Social media usage has had a huge role in creating awareness about mental health but has also increased the process of people self-diagnosing themselves and then others too. Today there is extensive information available on the Internet about mental health conditions and sadly this has led to a phenomena where people seem to be reading posts and reaching conclusions about what they are struggling with. It has also led to increased labelling and also use of terms such as ‘narcissism’, ‘gaslighting’, ‘co-dependency’. This trend is dangerous because it leads to people developing fixed and unfounded beliefs about themselves and others. This lens of judgment can lead to conflicts in relationships and also come in the way of our own emotional wellbeing and the distress we experience.

If we want to give mental health a good name, we would need to address both these concerns. When it comes to underdiagnosis, there is work that needs to happen in rural and urban areas both in creating awareness, offering counselling and psychiatric services that are affordable and accessible to people. We need to develop training programmes that help us train communities and offer content in local languages. This can help people learn and identify signs of mental health conditions early on and access help in a timely manner.

When it comes to overdiagnosis, it is important to create awareness that having access to a checklist or diagnostic criteria for a mental health condition doesn’t necessarily equate with seeing a qualified mental health professional. Human mind is complex and if we have to understand people’s behaviour and symptoms, we need to keep in mind the unique set of circumstances people grew up with and are surrounded with, along with the social support available to them – before we can fully make sense of their reality. As a result, the process of diagnosing a client requires time, looking for evidence and patterns over a period of time, across relationships. It also requires identifying the intensity, frequency of the distress. With self-diagnosis, we lose nuances linked to mental health conditions and are at the risk of overgeneralizing the symptoms when it comes to others or ourselves. Very often I see individuals confuse a set to traits to personality disorders or mental health conditions. This is extremely damaging. When we are choosing to use information available on the Internet through posts, videos to make diagnosis about others or our own selves, we are oversimplifying and diluting a process that requires time, and a skillset that has been learnt and developed over years of training. When clients come to my office, I tell them that videos can be a beginning point if done accurately to create awareness, but if they become a tool for self-diagnosis, they are causing more harm than good.

As a country, it’s our collective responsibility to become more mindful in how we absorb information about mental health online. At the same time, work towards increasing access, affordability and reaching out to mental health professionals when it comes to addressing our concerns in relation to emotional wellbeing.