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.

Have you tried posting about it? Photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash

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…