study<\/a> published in the journal Acta Psychologica. Moreover, the study found that \u201cthe overwhelming majority of TikTok videos on mental health are not created by professionals, and most contain misleading information.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nKaufman would spend the next three years fighting with her parents, smoking weed, vaping, and getting involved with sketchy older guys. At the time, these behaviors seemed like symptoms of her mental illness. But looking back, now 21 and happy, Kaufman thinks they were just symptomatic of being a teenager.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We worked a retail job together in 2022 at the infamous one-size-fits-all clothing store Brandy Melville, often commiserating over a can of Diet Coke. I thought she was the \u201ccool coworker\u201d because of her vaguely apathetic aura, platinum-blonde hair and affinity for sad music. At the time, I had a raging eating disorder and thought of the 1990s Kate Moss as my personal Jesus \u2014 a delusion fueled by my employment at the shamelessly body-type-exclusionary store. (The \u201cone\u201d size is extra-small.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Compared to what\u2019s happening today, Kaufman\u2019s form of self-diagnosis was low-tech. In 2018, Kaufman relied on WebMD and Mayo Clinic articles. Now, mental-health influencers are rampant on TikTok, and social media are rife with infographics listing symptoms of OCD, autism, and everything in between. The trend started during the pandemic, with content creators offering users easily accessible resources for therapy. But the result has been to flood young people with potential diagnoses, and has made us very quick to call ourselves crazy.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Many never seek professional help, but some do, often in order to validate the conclusions they have already reached. Frequently, those conclusions turn out to be wrong. \u201cAt least three-quarters of the time, we are talking about normal variation,\u201d says Dr. Jennifer Katzenstein, a pediatric neuropsychologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Katzenstein says she\u2019s seen an increase in self-diagnosis in the last three to five years among her teenage patients. Many don\u2019t realize, she says, what normal stress looks like, or what normal social anxiety looks like, or that sometimes it\u2019s normal to be inattentive and easily distracted. \u201cA lot of our kids who feel awkward in social situations think that they\u2019re on the autism spectrum,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re coming in thinking that\u2019s the diagnosis.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Katzenstein notes that the problem is a side effect of a well-intentioned and mostly beneficial nationwide push to remove the \u201cstigma\u201d from mental-health conditions. Destigmatization means we aren\u2019t bullying people for their diagnoses anymore. And the lobotomies and forced sterilizations of the past have become inconceivable. We can now openly have conversations about mental health. But the side effect is that these conditions have gone viral and are seducing vulnerable young people who want explanations for their emotions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Moreover, as teens and early-20-somethings tinker with their identities, they\u2019re working these supposed conditions into their self-images and behaving accordingly. When they view themselves as sick, they accept and anticipate sick behavior. \u201cWe go in looking to affirm,\u201d Katzenstein says. \u201cOur brains want to be right.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kaufman landed on MDD because she thought of herself as someone who was fundamentally sad, not someone who experiences sadness. Her supposed condition became her identity. During this period, she says, she also expected less of herself and would excuse bad behavior as symptomatic. Her social circle echoed and amplified her conclusions. \u201cThere have been times where most of the people I\u2019ve surrounded myself with treated their real or perceived diagnoses as a personality trait,\u201d she says.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The social consequences of destigmatization have been much more far reaching than might have been expected, and have created many negative downstream consequences. At 23, I have become used to the idea that I\u2019m \u201ccrazy\u201d \u2014 that everyone is. A guy at a party recently said to me that he was interested in me because he was \u201cinto super skinny chicks who act insane.\u201d Offensive words, but my first response was to be flattered by \u201cskinny.\u201d I barely clocked the \u201cinsane\u201d part.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen they view themselves as sick, they accept and anticipate sick behavior.\u201d <\/p>\n
This is the cultural ambiance now. On dating apps like Hinge, it is alarmingly frequent to encounter guys who\u2019ve answered the \u201cI go crazy for \u2026 \u201d prompt with \u201cgirls who are slightly autistic.\u201d Friends of mine have been told that their \u2019tism is cute (yes, Generation Z abbreviates autism now).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Obviously, this trivializes real mental-health issues, and it fetishizes them, too. When guys say they are into girls with autism, what they mean is that they\u2019re looking for quirky girls who are a little awkward and random. They want the effervescent and pink-haired Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, not the girl with sensory issues who can\u2019t interpret facial expressions or understand sarcasm. Not to mention that people with legit autism diagnoses would probably prefer to be chosen for themselves, rather than their neurodivergence.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s difficult for everyone, from peers to parents to mental-health professionals, to navigate this new landscape. Gwen Schubert Grabb, a Los Angeles-based therapist, says she\u2019s seen the \u201ccome one, come all\u201d attitude of the mental-health movement being taken advantage of. Increasingly, she says, young people \u2014 and some older adults, as well \u2014 arrive with a list of symptoms to rattle off. And sometimes they have an agenda. \u201cLook at the emotional-support and service-animal industry,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople I don\u2019t even know will call me up and ask me to write a letter so they can bring their dog to some kind of event. I am like, \u2018No, I\u2019m not doing that.\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
But she\u2019s a professional and can discern when something illegitimate is afoot. Most others can\u2019t, or are afraid to.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anna Caruso, 22, a senior at Northeastern University, has long suspected she has an anxiety condition and, at times, depression. But she kept it to herself growing up because the attitudes at home and at school were not sympathetic. However, she noticed a pivot in acceptance toward mental illness during Covid.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Caruso says that when her high school reopened during her senior year, a student body that once seemed perfectly healthy was now largely mentally ill. It seemed unlikely, but difficult to challenge. \u201cYou never want to be the person to say, \u2018Hey, I really don\u2019t think that you have a mental illness,\u2019 right?,\u2019\u201d Caruso says.<\/p>\n
She does not underestimate the impact the pandemic had on young people\u2019s psyches \u2014 social isolation and a rise of deaths across the world should be, by anyone\u2019s standards, a valid reason to be unhappy \u2014 but the sheer numbers struck her as unbelievable. And to be fair, she\u2019d diagnosed herself, as well, with some combination of anxiety, ADHD and depression.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring Covid, I feel like everyone wanted to be, I don\u2019t want to say a victim, but people wanted to be felt sorry for,\u201d says Caruso.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The pandemic years were also the era of George Floyd and McCarthyism-levels of cancel culture. I\u2019ve long been tempted to believe that some of my straight, white, affluent peers were using neurodivergence to join the ranks of the marginalized. If someone was \u201cmentally ill,\u201d then they, too, were a part of America\u2019s disadvantaged class.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve seen white classmates trade stories with students of color about times they\u2019ve been subject to \u201cmistreatment,\u201d because education systems designed for the neurotypical, for example. Classmates have also established \u201csafe-space\u201d social circles. Sometimes it\u2019s as subtle as nodding along to a black peer speaking on prejudice, with an attitude of: \u201cwe\u2019re in this together.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a cultural atmosphere that systematically rewards suffering, people tend to find a reason to suffer. But there is a crucial difference between sympathy and empathy. And as with the mental-health discourse, there is a grave risk of romanticizing, or trivializing, the real issues. So far, destigmatization has been many things: a flytrap for teens trying to understand their identities; an excuse for guys to be weird about girls who \u201caren\u2019t like the others\u201d; and a means to expiate white guilt. Mental-health problems should not be stigmatized, but this trend should be. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Eva Kaufman was 14, she struggled to make sense of her mental health. A native of Cambridge,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5993,3106,134,554,555,111,139,69,117364,52524,672],"class_list":{"0":"post-186294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-autism","9":"tag-gen-z","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-self-diagnosis","17":"tag-stigma","18":"tag-teens"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}