Your best friend is manic because she dyed her hair at two in the morning. Your ex is a narcissist. Your roommate is super OCD. And that guy who ghosted you obviously has an avoidant attachment style.
Look at that! Everyone you know has a psychological diagnosis.
Somewhere along the way, the words reserved for therapy offices have bled into our daily doom scrolling. The seemingly endless supply of advice podcasts supplies psychological terminology like there’s no need to get a degree anymore. We throw around words like bipolar, narcissistic, trauma bonding and gaslighting so casually that it’s almost impossible to remember that these terms have specific and life-altering meanings.
Although I study psychology constantly and would like to say I have a strong understanding of diagnostic and clinical criteria within the field, I’m all too familiar with the pop-culture uses of these words. After three years of learning how difficult it can be to distinguish between psychological disorders, I can open TikTok and find someone confidently diagnosing a stranger’s ex-boyfriend after a 3-part storytime.
I can’t help but wonder when we all became so comfortable playing the shrink.
The major appeal of using psychological terminology is how it explains what we don’t understand. We all know relationships are complicated. People behave unpredictably, make selfish decisions, and hurt us without offering a decent explanation. By assigning a psychological label to someone’s behavior, everything starts to make a little more sense.
Your ex didn’t just treat you poorly, he must be a narcissist. Your friend isn’t a neat freak, she must have OCD. The only possible reason he could have ghosted you is his avoidant attachment style.
A label can clarify a confusing experience and feel understandable, even if the label isn’t clinically accurate. Psychologists have long been interested in our desire to find information confirming what we already believe to be true. This phenomenon, referred to as confirmation bias, is shockingly applicable to our obsession with diagnosing. Social media certainly doesn’t make this any less common.
A 30-second reel outlining the “five signs you’re dating a narcissist” might feel like a sign when you’re already upset with your boyfriend. But recognizing a few behaviors in someone you know is not the same as establishing that they meet the diagnostic criteria for a personality disorder.
Sometimes, the explanation is simply that someone behaved in a way that you didn’t appreciate. Honestly, I think this is harder to accept than having a diagnosis to blame.
One of the first things I was taught in my abnormal psychology lecture is that diagnosing a psychological disorder is never as simple as identifying key behaviors. For example, we often associate being organized, having a clean bedroom, or arranging your belongings in a way that only makes sense to you with obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD itself involves obsessions and compulsions that cause significant distress and interfere with your ability to function regularly.
Narcissistic personality disorder isn’t a term to describe someone selfish, arrogant, and inconsiderate. It involves a longstanding pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and antisocial behaviors that need to be professionally evaluated.
And of course, mania isn’t an impulsive shopping trip, a drastic haircut, or calling your ex-situationship after midnight. Manic episodes require distinct periods of abnormally elevated or irritable mood and increased energy that cause functional impairment and may require hospitalization.
When we use these drastic terms as descriptors of ordinary behavior, we actually minimize the experiences of those who actually live with these conditions. We also risk misunderstanding what psychological disorders look like in the first place.
Most importantly, diagnosing someone from a distance can distract us from the behavior we’re trying to comprehend. You don’t need to diagnose someone with narcissistic personality disorder to cope with them treating you poorly. If someone isn’t meeting your needs, you don’t have to assign them an attachment style. People can demonstrate harmful behaviors without them being evidence of a psychiatric disorder.
However, I still think the presence of psychological language in media is a good thing. In many ways, it increases our awareness of mental health and allows us to have conversations about taboos that make seeking professional help more accessible. People who may once have struggled to describe their experiences have an outlet that can help them recognize symptom patterns and seek care.
For some people, social media may even provide the first inkling that their experiences are worth discussing with a mental health professional.
There is an important difference between learning about psychological disorders and assuming we know enough to diagnose them. These same platforms that make mental health information more accessible can also strip the nuance from these conditions and reduce years of clinical research to a few broadly relatable bullet points.
When those bullet points are understood as definitive explanations for someone’s personality or behavior, misinformation is inevitable. We should be able to appreciate the strides we’ve made in discussing mental health without treating every unsavory interaction as an opportunity to make an uninformed diagnosis.
The more I’ve learned about psychological disorders, the more I’ve realized the importance of caution, cultural context, and uncertainty in understanding them.
Human behavior is incredibly complex. Two people can show similar traits for a multitude of reasons, and a single interaction can rarely show us everything we need to know about someone.
I think our obsession with diagnosing each other says less about how much we understand psychology and more about how uncomfortable we’ve become with not having an explanation for everything. Not every difficult person has a personality disorder. Not every uncomfortable, heavy feeling is a symptom. And not every relationship that ends badly needs clinical explanation.
Sometimes, people are just people. Complicated, frustrating, perfectly imperfect people. This may just be the explanation we need to get a little more comfortable with.