Harms and Benefits of Self Diagnosis

Many people are familiar with the idea of medical or health anxiety, often referred to as hypochondria. I’m no stranger to it myself. I tend to let one little thing snowball into bigger and bigger problems. I may have a simple cold, but with enough googling I’ll find something to worry about. This habit forced me to find a way to hold myself accountable. My roommates and I created a money jar to counteract bad habits, so when I googled my symptoms, I would owe money to the jar. As simple a task as this is, it did help. The less I looked things up, the less I got targeted ads about weird signs of illnesses. For me this was a great development because the less ads I saw that were titled things like “Do you have these 3 symptoms? It may be worse than you think,” the less I thought about actively searching out other symptoms. If you are prone to this same spiral of googling health problems, I urge you to try setting up some sort of “jar” technique or another method to keep you accountable. This health anxiety and “money jar” technique had me basically lecturing people on how horrible self-diagnosis can be for people and their mental health. 

But the truth is…it can be super helpful in today’s age of technology. We have never had more healthcare information available to us so instantaneously. There just has to be a balance between self diagnosis and informing yourself. For me, one of the more helpful things, as odd as it may be, was TikTok. For those who aren’t familiar,it is a social media platform that creates a curated For You Page based off of other things you like and interact with. At first I noticed I was getting a lot of ADHD related videos and my first reaction was actually to laugh a bit thinking the algorithm must be off, until I noticed that all the things that these videos were covering were things I had complained about. In my own life, most of these things had always been met with phrases like, “that’s just life,” or “you’re just overreacting.” After being bombarded with these videos and nine times out of ten having them perfectly align with “weird” things that I do or problems I have daily, I had the courage to actually reach out to a medical professional for help.

I am not suggesting that these videos, or any internet self-diagnosis, can at all replace one done by a medical professional. These videos were not necessarily showing me definitive diagnostic information, but the problems presented were enough for me to push past my previous ideas of, “this is just how life is,”and get the help I needed. Now I am happy to see other videos of people with ADHD talking about problems they face and ways they manage their symptoms. It helps me to know that I am not alone and also that there are ways to work through these issues. If I had avoided looking up ADHD after seeing those videos, I would never have reached out and gotten my diagnosis.

Technology is a hard thing to navigate. It can be challenging to find a balance somewhere between overdiagnosing yourself, and acquiring information about a problem you may be having. Never be afraid to use the constant resources available to you, be that google searches or social media, if you have questions and concerns. I know that I would not be on the same path of treatment if it hadn’t been for some videos from the internet.