When you go on social media sites these days, you find a great deal of mental-health related content. TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are full of discussions on mental health and treatment options: Posts and stories from people dealing with mental illness, which offer you, the viewer, access to various styles of psychotherapeutic methods and psychological testing. This easy access to information also allows you to diagnose your own symptoms while forming an identification with the content creator who shares their own struggle with mental illness. In the end, you feel you’re able to learn about common mental health diagnosis such as depression and anxiety, or even more complex ones such as ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), ASD (autism spectrum disorder), PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), and more. Although having easy access to mental-health information seems empowering at first, it creates a myriad of complex phenomena that could potentially hinder a successful psychotherapeutic process. One of the outcomes of this easy accessibility is the desire for self-diagnosis, the fundamental assumption that it is possible to obtain mental health diagnosis without the involvement of mental-health professionals.
Most notably, self-diagnosis often plays an important part in when or how to seek psychotherapeutic treatment. The desire to self-diagnose using the information available on social media might make you feel less alone because you saw others who were describing what you are going through. Also, the information you get from the content creator can make you feel certain of your own diagnosis. You might then use this temporary resolution to look for a particular psychotherapist who will agree with your impression of what you are going through. Although this all sounds good, the treatment devised by self-diagnosis can prevent you from receiving the best care available because only a well-trained professional therapist can offer a proper diagnosis.
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You Shouldn't Have to Do It Alone
You might find self-diagnosis to be helpful, but you might soon come to a place where it doesn’t help you in the way you initially thought. First, self-diagnosis can be a way to control and contain uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that are coming up inside you. You might think that giving yourself a diagnosis can offer an actionable solution, but it can also lead you to ignore other feelings within you that are more challenging to understand. After giving yourself a diagnosis, you might say to yourself, “Now I know what I’m suffering from, I just need to know what to do get rid of it.” This action-oriented thought can be a way of preventing yourself from experiencing confusing feelings that are not yet nameable.
Second, when you self-diagnose, chances are that you are telling yourself you do not need any other help figuring things out. But if you proceed with this conviction, most often you will miss out on gathering important perspectives and insights that are helpful for your psychotherapeutic journey. In other words, if you stick only to your own understanding of what you are struggling with, it can prevent you from getting the right kind of help you need. A major aspect of psychotherapy is to bring another person with a different viewpoint. Not only does your psychotherapist have knowledge experience, and specialized training, they are also—perhaps most importantly—not you. In other words, psychotherapeutic work is very different from trying to figure out your struggle on your own. It’s also not the same experience as when you engage with your family members, friends, work colleagues, or social group and ask for their advice. The work your therapist offers is something entirely different from all these familiar experiences. To put it more straightforwardly, psychotherapy can offer the opportunity for you to experience your life in a new way because your therapist can help you see, feel, and relate to yourself from a perspective that was not available to you before.
Although coming across mental-health related information on social media can be interesting and reassuring, it is important to approach with caution. There is a great deal of misinformation out there because most often the content and findings are not supported by established research. What you might find instead is hidden marketing efforts: The content creator’s material is backed up by online psychotherapy products, the aim of which is to encourage the viewer to use their product to seek treatment after seeing the content.
Learning from other people’s stories is valuable. It might also be valuable for you to share your story with others on social media. Indeed, accessing resources can be an important first step towards seeking help. However, it would be beneficial to work with a well-trained therapist and begin to know all the parts of you with curiosity and openness. If you were to experience psychotherapy in this way, it offers a journey where you will regain your mental health.
As humans, we are all incredibly complex beings. While we are influenced by a myriad of issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, temperament, constitution, and more; how we understand and approach these issues are not fixed. Our future is open to us. However, this openness or uncertainty can also be anxiety provoking. The important work of psychotherapy is learning to sit with difficult feelings and uncertainties so that we can better understand ourselves and be more resilient, effective, and powerful in our lives. In that sense, if you are considering psychotherapy, saying no to this self-diagnosing tendency can be an important step to finding the right kind of psychotherapeutic help.
