Sorry to Burst Your Bubble! Self-Diagnosis Does Not Make You Sound Precocious

As a student, after a long, hard day at school, you will most probably find yourself flopping onto your bed, taking out your phone, and doomscrolling and doomscrolling and doomscrolling into eternity to take your thoughts off the steadily rising mound of collected and procrastinated on homework that’s currently waiting for you. Eventually, in the middle of scrolling through, say, Instagram Reels, you come across one with the caption “10 SIGNS YOU MIGHT HAVE AUTISM,” in big, bold letters. Down below in the comments, you see tons of people saying things like, “Wow, that’s exactly what I have! I might actually be autistic!” This is the usual mental health awareness post you can get on your feed. 

This is an example of content that shows how social media may influence people to falsely self-diagnose.

What you might not know, though, is that content like this can actually be pretty harmful, especially to viewers like you. 

In this day and age, we like to think of ourselves as pretty progressive. One thing that used to be “taboo” that we’ve gotten good at talking about is mental health. But it’s a little too good, sometimes. In the name of mental health awareness, a lot of the younger generations—millenials and Gen Z—have taken to social media platforms not only to voice their stances on it, but also to educate others about it. And while that’s all fine and dandy, sometimes it can go a bit too far. 

Why am I saying this? Well, with the current onslaught of shortform videos just like the one I mentioned earlier, a lot of people—especially young people—are vulnerable to getting it into their heads that certain “quirks” of theirs are actually mental illnesses. Sometimes, they even go above and beyond, and confirm that they have these mental illnesses through the information they’ve gathered online. In short, they are self-diagnosing illnesses with the help of the Internet, not a licensed medical professional. 

That, in itself, is already harmful, because they are assigning themselves illnesses and the stress that comes with them, which is only perpetuated by the existence of filter bubbles.

Why is this something that is concerning? Here are three key points: 

• First of all, self-diagnosis can be a life-threatening act. If you play too much into what filter bubbles tell  you, that can have effects on your life—mentally, socially, and physically. 

• Second, social media itself is threatening to our mental health. Although it has helped in mental health awareness and bringing self-care to the forefront, it continues to negatively impact our mental health. 

• Third, filter bubbles work only to satisfy you, not to inform you. They only give into your confirmation bias. 

With this issue in mind, it would help to put forward a very simple solution—and that is to learn to burst all of our bubbles. Take everything with a grain of salt, and please, for the love of God, go to a doctor or a professional to confirm something, anything, never go to your favorite content creator. 

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