#or when they blame unrelated behaviors on their self diagnosis - as if that's an excuse even if they were related
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the problem with self-diagnosis that most concerns me is the risk of people, teenagers especially, pathologizing normative behavior
#p.s.#yes there are social and financial and sometimes familial barriers that limit people's access to official diagnosis#and I don't think self-diagnosis is an inherently bad reaction to any of those#but the thing is you can reasonably look through the diagnostic criteria for just abt any mental illness or disorder and diagnose yourself#with it if you spend enough time analyzing everything you do#diagnoses don't indicate just a pattern of behavior but the severity of the pattern and the context in which it was formed#like all those 15 year old who think they have BPD#you don't have BPD hon you're just 15#doesn’t mean you don't need support or mental health services#but the reason we don't diagnose teens with BPD is bc there's no real way to tell since most teenagers just kind of act like they have BPD#if you're acting like you're 15 and you're 15 that's called being a hormonal teenager#if you're acting 15 and you're 30 that's BPD (this is a gross oversimplification but you get the idea)#also we don't tend to diagnose personality disorders in teens very often bc teens are still developing their personalities#like you can do all the research in the world in your early teens and correctly come to the conclusion that your behavior mimicks BPD and#the incorrectly self diagnose as BPD bc you understand all the symptoms of BPD but don't actually understand what a personality disorder is#or how it develops#I've met tons of people who are self diagnosed as this or that who couldn't correctly define a depressive episode let alone their own#diagnosis#also the tendency for people to perpetuate completely normative behaviors as signs of one disorder or another indicates to me that a lot of#people don't understand these diagnoses as much as they may think#or when they blame unrelated behaviors on their self diagnosis - as if that's an excuse even if they were related#again I don't think self-diagnosis is bad but seeing large amounts of teenagers and kids pathologize their age appropriate behaviors as the#most severe kinds of disorders and then having full grown adults go to bat for their right to view their normative behaviors as a mental#disease that they will have to manage for their whole life is... concerning to say the least
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