TikTok Says I Have a Mental Disorder

As a practicing therapist and high school teacher, I have seen a huge uptick in teenagers who tell me that they believe they have ADHD, autism, or tourette’s syndrome, along with a host of other mental disorders. Ask school counselors and psychologists, and they’ll tell you that requests for IEP’s and 504 plans for autism and ADHD have spiked in recent years. Often, when I ask my students and clients about their diagnoses, I discover that they have not been to a therapist; rather, they were self-diagnosing based on information they viewed online, especially on social media.

Therapists, move over, there are new clinicians in town: TikTok and Instagram, and the aptly-named Influencers are influencing a spike in mental disorder self-diagnoses.

Many of us might roll our eyes at this trend, recognizing typical adolescent behavior patterns that are all too familiar across generations. But the reality is that social media and the internet are a huge part of not only teenagers’ lives, but ours too, and now play a dominant role in shaping how we think and view the world. As such, trending topics on social media easily veer into uncharted territories. This recent tendency to diagnose oneself with a mental disorder is one particularly serious example. We each have unfettered access to millions of videos of people showcasing “A life in the day of having (insert a mental disorder here),” or talking about mental health in euphemistic soundbites that are often untethered from clinical expertise and researched analysis.

Here’s the problem, if it wasn’t already obvious: you cannot diagnose yourself with a mental disorder. TikTok and the internet cannot diagnose you. Diagnoses come from trained professionals using very specific, carefully considered, and researched guidelines. Maybe you do have a disorder, but it is not official until someone qualified provides the diagnosis. Even in the case when one’s self-assessment happens to be accurate, we each inhabit our own perspective, and an impartial diagnosis cannot be self-assigned.

“But hey, uptight therapist,” you might be thinking, “what’s the big deal? So what if people diagnose themselves? There isn’t any harm in that! It’s good to be aware of your struggles! It’s good to spread awareness!”

Well, that’s one way to look at it. However, as someone who is daily immersed in both the classroom and therapy room, let me share some observations:

• Often, the self-diagnosis is used as a crutch. Not everyone does this, but there is a natural temptation to claim a disorder as a too-convenient reason to not engage with life in healthier ways. This happens even with a diagnosis from a professional, but with self-diagnosing, it is happening on a larger scale without any checks in place. There is a self-selection bias at work promoting the “disorder.” 
• A self-diagnosis does not come with the professional and evidence-based treatment guided by a licensed professional.  Having determined you suffer from a disorder, what’s next? The internet can provide a plethora of coping skills and “treatments,” but without a trained professional who can fine-tune a treatment that is based on research and evidence for your specific needs, it’s like drowning in an ocean surrounded by ropes yet not knowing which rope will pull you to safety and which will entangle you. 
• A self-diagnosis can lead to the incorrect medications being prescribed. General practitioners, like your family doctor, can certainly provide you with some basic antidepressants or ADHD medications, but their understanding is limited (Mitchel et al., 2011). Additionally, your genetic background, the ever-changing and updating world of medications, developmental issues like age and medical history, and so many other factors need to be taken into account when prescribing medication. Psychiatrists spend many years in school preparing for these very situations, and without a qualified professional providing a diagnosis, the risk of harm from the wrong medications is exacerbated. 
• With self-diagnoses trending, symptoms of real disorders are often minimized or even glamorized. For example, people with verifiably diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder will be the first to tell you that it is not fun, cute, trendy, or light-hearted. Being a perfectionist or wanting your radio volume to be set to even numbers, or being picky about foods, is not the same as the intense and very real struggle that constitutes a true OCD diagnosis. When the masses walk around claiming a disorder they know very little about, or that they haven’t been confirmed to have, it can be very invalidating for those who are professionally diagnosed, and it is a misinformation campaign that strips afflicted people of the resources and grave consideration they need to function. 
• Using social media to self-diagnose has created “disorder trends” that swing society towards a mass confirmation bias: all of a sudden, everyone has a disorder, and normal struggles related to engaging in life are assigned significant importance, red flags that someone is disordered and broken (Karasavva, 2025). Just because you’re sad doesn’t mean you have major depressive disorder. Just because you are stressed, it doesn’t mean you have post-traumatic stress disorder. Just because you’re an introvert, it doesn’t mean you have autism. The problem with over self-diagnosing is that it pathologizes normal behavior. It turns normal life–which is filled with stress, sadness, and anxiety, along with happiness and joy–into something abnormal. It is teaching an entire generation that struggle is not normal and to interpret ordinary negative emotions or common pressures of life as a sign of illness.

Let’s keep the job of assessing and healing mental health in the hands of those trained to provide accurate information and effective treatment. If you think you are struggling with a mental disorder, the best route is to make an appointment with a counselor or therapist who can provide you with the accurate information you need to understand your symptoms and to provide a treatment plan that is specific and evidence-based for your particular struggles.

Sources:

Mitchell, Alex J., Rao, Sanjay, Vaze, Amol. (2011). Can general practitioners identify people  with distress and mild depression? A meta-analysis of clinical accuracy. Journal of Affective Disorders, 130(1-2), 26-36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2010.07.028. 

Karasavva, Vasileia, Miller, Caroline, Groves, Nicole, Montiel, Andrés, Canu, Will, Mikami,  Amori. (2025). A double-edged hashtag: Evaluation of #ADHD-related TikTok content and its associations with perceptions of ADHD. PLoS ONE 20(3): e0319335 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0319335.