Before TikTok began explaining your personality to you, Tumblr had helped make being unwell into an aesthetic. In parts of its 2010s culture, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders acquired a recognizable vocabulary, a visual style, and communities organized around them. You could find people who understood your unhappiness, then gradually come to understand yourself through the unhappiness you shared. A label became an identity signifier. In their account of this history, Gayathiri Rajkumar and J. D. Haltigan describe a “pseudo-normalization” in which mental illness acquired social appeal and recovery could recede from view. Being troubled had become a way of being somebody.
The vocabulary has since become more adventurous. Today, you can join a “BPD Baddie Club,” giving borderline personality disorder the branding of an exclusive social circle. You can discover that you are a “dark empath,” a research-derived personality label that has acquired an online life considerably more glamorous than its scientific beginnings. The name alone suggests that your relationship difficulties deserve a film adaptation. Then there are videos treating sleeping with “T-rex arms” as evidence of ADHD. Apparently, even your wrists have something to confess. Psychiatric disorders, neurodevelopmental conditions, and nonclinical personality labels end up displayed together, each offering another way to reveal what sort of person you are.
A sound diagnosis can explain difficulties that have troubled you for years, help you obtain appropriate care, and relieve considerable shame. Finding people with similar experiences can also make life less lonely. Those benefits help explain why the labels carry such force. The glamorization of mental illness as a social identity takes that appeal further: a condition becomes a recognizable persona, complete with a manner of speaking, an account of your past, and a community prepared to recognize you on sight.
You can see the attraction, especially if your answer to “who are you” has become a little uncertain. A ready-made identity supplies an explanation for your feelings, a vocabulary for your difficulties, and people who share your experience and offer additional insight about it. You can introduce yourself with a few letters and feel that something substantial has been communicated. Much of the interpretive work appears to have been done for you. You belong somewhere, your experience makes sense, and your peculiarities have acquired the reassurance of a category. That is quite a lot to get from a label.
Working out who you are through the particulars of your own life is a painfully slower business. You have to examine what you want, what you value, which loyalties you inherited, what you resent, and why you keep making certain choices. The answers interfere with one another. You may value independence and arrange your life around being needed; enjoy solitude and feel wounded when people leave you alone; pursue an ambition whose achievement would oblige you to abandon something else you love. A useful understanding of yourself has to accommodate all of this. A tidy description is considerably easier to manage.
Social media is exceptionally good at providing these tidy descriptions. A creator lists a handful of familiar experiences, gives them a clinical name, and invites you to recognize yourself. The distinction between describing one person’s experience and making a claim about everyone with a condition can disappear in seconds. A 2025 study of popular ADHD TikToks collected in 2023 found that fewer than half of the symptom claims matched DSM criteria; acknowledgments that the experiences could occur in people without ADHD were rare. Most creators who stated a credential cited lived experience, and half of the creators were selling something or otherwise seeking financial support. Expertise was optional. An audience offered rather more tangible advantages.
The invitation is seductive because recognition feels like understanding. You see a description that resembles you and experience the pleasure of being explained. Yet a resemblance leaves plenty to investigate: how often something happens, under what circumstances, how much it affects your life, and what else might account for it. A video can offer a useful starting point. The trouble begins when the starting point becomes your finished account of yourself, and every subsequent experience is recruited to confirm it.
Once other people recognize you through that account, the attachment can become social as well as personal. Clinicians Jane Harness and Hayley Getzen called attention to a “sick-role subculture” on TikTok. The phrase captures an uncomfortable possibility: illness can become a role through which you gain membership, attention, and social capital. A disorder identity can make you distinctive enough to be interesting and familiar enough to belong. That combination has always had a market.
Such performative mental illness carries many risks. An audience can shape sincere distress. If certain accounts of your experience receive recognition, you may learn to emphasize them, repeat them, and notice more of the experiences. Rajkumar and Haltigan propose that these incentives can also encourage exaggerated symptom presentations. Social rewards shape behavior. Being recognizable to your community can start to govern how you describe yourself, until the performance helps decide which parts of you receive attention, including your own. You can become quite practiced at being the person everyone has agreed you are.
My concern is the narrowing that can follow. If you organize your identity around a disorder, the features that fit it can become disproportionately important, while your other interests, capacities, conflicts, and possibilities receive less consideration. You may begin to treat a difficulty as a permanent statement about what you can do. An improvement can even become socially awkward if your friendships and your place in a community depend heavily on a shared account of being unwell. You have acquired an explanation, and now you have reasons to preserve it.
What you lose in this arrangement is your individuality. You set out to explain what makes you particular and end up describing yourself in language shared by thousands of strangers. Even an accurate diagnosis leaves most of your personhood unexplained. It says little about why a particular compliment embarrasses you, why success sometimes disappoints you, what you hope another person will notice, or which desires you can admit to yourself. These details matter because they concern the way you actually live. They are also considerably harder to put in a bio.
Developing an identity of your own requires sustained acquaintance with those details. You begin with plenty of material: your temperament, history, relationships, culture, and the roles you have already learned to occupy. The work involves understanding what you have inherited, discovering what you have overlooked, and deciding what you want to continue. Your account of yourself changes as you learn. You can become clearer about what matters to you while remaining capable of surprise, contradiction, and revision. That flexibility gives your identity room to develop with your life.
This is the kind of exploration we undertake in psychoanalytic conversations. We begin with your experience and follow its particularities: a reaction that puzzles you, a recurring wish, an association, an incident you keep returning to. I bring psychological knowledge, questions, and interpretations; together, we examine how the details connect and what those connections might mean. If you describe yourself as someone who always avoids conflict, for instance, we can look at the conflicts you avoid, the people involved, what you expect would happen if you spoke, and the occasions when you are quite capable of arguing. The familiar description starts to acquire some useful complications.
I use psychoanalysis outside the clinical framework for this work of self-knowledge; clinical care has its own place whenever it is needed. In our conversations, you have time to develop an understanding of yourself that can hold more of your experience, including the parts that make your preferred explanation inconvenient. You participate in forming an identity you can understand, question, and revise. It takes longer than recognizing yourself in a video. You do, however, get to have a say in who you become.
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