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Why Do You Care How People Talk About Their Mental Health Online?

Yes, people are overusing self-help language on TikTok and Twitter. They’re asking for help the best way they can.

Here we are, standing at the edge of our second pandemic winter. The globe is warming, the plague is mutating, and everyone I know is at the edge of one spiritual abyss or another. Worse still: People on the Internet are talking about their mental health, and it is a bit annoying.
The past year or two has seen a notable rise in casual mental health chatter on social media. You’ve seen it: The uptick in friends with ADHD or autism diagnoses, the ambient jargon about neurodivergence and trauma. In another year, these might have been private conversations, but the pandemic — which has put people under intolerable psychic strain even as it’s made intimate, face-to-face processing harder — has made it common, even fashionable, to sort out one’s mental health online.
The level of medical expertise in these discussions is pretty low, and people often misapply clinical labels to common behaviors, sometimes obnoxiously; avoiding difficult conversations becomes a “trauma response,” not merely the human urge to defer unpleasantness, and forgetfulness is proof of ADHD, rather than evidence of being fried. There’s been a wave of culture journalism begging us to cut it out with the pop psych already: It’s “treating mental illness like a subculture, complete with its own vocabulary that only those in the know can use and weaponize.” It’s “widening the definition of trauma to encompass basically everyone” as a “play for relatability.” It’s an example of how “capitalism needs to sell us an ever-wider array of identities to feel secure and logical within.”
Maybe. Or maybe everyone is in a super bad place right now, because going outside and seeing people has become dangerous, and we’re all alone much more often than we’d like, and because we’re de-socialized and lonely and in need of connection or validation, we’re talking about how bad we feel to more or less anyone who will listen. Maybe “everyone has trauma” in 2021 because living through 2021 is traumatizing. Maybe the ways in which people express pain don’t have to be clever, or original, or even medically accurate, to be important.
Pop psychology has been popular for decades because it provides a vocabulary through which people can grasp and validate their own unbearably painful experiences. There is a distinct (and, yes, very capitalist) element of faddishness and fashion to how that terminology gets adopted and exhausted: In the ’80s and ’90s, someone with a pattern of abusive or one-sided relationships was “codependent;” in the ’10s, they may have been doing too much “emotional labor,” or perhaps being “gaslit” by a “malignant narcissist;” now, they’re an “empath” who needs to unlearn their “trauma responses.”
The problem being described — a tendency to pour oneself into supporting cruel or dysfunctional people who do not support you back — is always the same. So, I would argue, is its underlying cause, which is that society encourages punishing levels of selflessness from women in relationships with men. (You probably had a distinct gender in mind for all those cases, and women comprise three-quarters of the readership for self-help literature.) Yet in each case, the person grabbing at a trendy label to describe themselves has been abused, or at least wounded. Do they need to be able to talk about that injury with the skill and precision of a licensed trauma therapist? Does it hurt anyone if their descriptions of their own pain are cliche, or sloppy, or even a little wrong?
Maybe “everyone has trauma” in 2021 because living through 2021 is traumatizing. Maybe the ways in which people express pain don’t have to be clever, or original, or even medically accurate, to be important.
Yes, there are risks to pathologizing normal behavior. People who believe they’re sick tend to seek treatment, which creates a vacuum for con artists and snake-oil salesmen to fill. The Internet subculture around “narcissistic abuse” was largely created by a man named Sam Vaknin, a self-professed “psychopath” who was, himself, abusive. Slate has uncovered a disturbing number of unlicensed “trauma coaches” who use TikTok to reel in patients they aren’t qualified to help. We should all examine the sources of our advice before we take it. That’s common sense. The only people who can provide medical diagnosis or treatment are qualified medical professionals, and even those professionals sometimes get it wrong.
Yet the urge to understand ourselves better, or to find words for what feels wrong in our lives, is only human. And, despite all the mental health talk we’re doing, psychological distress and divergence are still widely treated as shameful. Just this week, an autistic person explaining why they couldn’t participate in a food boycott was turned into leftist copy pasta and mocked into oblivion. (The poster should have known to stay quiet, participants explained, because if there’s one thing autistic people are famously good at, it’s knowing how their statements will be received in every social setting.) On the right, there are entire web forums set up to mock autistic people into suicide. Pop culture sometimes tries to “destigmatize” mental illness, but stops at its most minor symptoms; Ted Lasso, for instance, treats the lead character’s occasional panic attacks as a potentially career-destroying diagnosis on par with schizophrenia. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend handed its main character a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, one of the most stigmatized conditions in existence, only to win an Emmy for a musical number about anti-depressants, which are commonly used by people without BPD.

A song called “A Combination of Anti-Psychotics And Behavioral Therapy Intended To Reduce Violent Or Self-Harming Episodes Is So Not A Big Deal” would be more accurate, but it also wouldn’t work, because people still attribute Big Deal status to those treatments, and might have trouble sympathizing with a TV character who needed them. “Neurodivergence” is acceptable when it prevents an otherwise charming person from answering emails, but when it actually limits their ability to perceive and follow social norms, that person is mocked and shunned. The idea that people are angling for special treatment or clout by sharing mental health diagnoses — or self-diagnoses — isn’t convincing. Visible pain and difference still invite widespread condemnation; most people still believe that being “normal” is the same thing as being “good.”
Until that changes, public mental health disclosures will always read as an overshare, abject and vulnerable, like seeing a part of someone that shouldn’t be exposed. When mental health talk gets too loud, we’ll always push it back into the margins by calling it cringe. That pressure to keep our emotional crises zipped up and tucked away is, ironically, exactly what allows capitalism to exploit them — people buy self-help books and wellness retreats and expensive sessions with trauma “coaches” because they believe no-one else will listen or care.
When people rush to explain themselves with trendy pop-psych language, they are seizing an opportunity to ask for help without being laughed at. Self-help fads allow people to discuss pain without feeling abnormal, and to avoid the shame of sickness even as they admit they’re not doing well. Those fads are not a substitute for medical care, nor are they equivalent to real community support for mental illness. They allow hucksters to come in and make bank off human distress. Telling people to shut up, though, will only exacerbate the problem. People wouldn’t have to use all these words to explain themselves if they could just tell us they were in pain.

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