Mental Health Overdiagnosis: 7 Dangerous Signs
Something’s been bothering me lately, and I think it’s time we talk about it honestly. As a father of six kids (five girls and one boy) and an Air Force veteran who’s seen more than his share of real struggle, I’m watching a troubling trend unfold in our culture. We’ve swung from one extreme to another—from stigmatizing mental health to potentially over-pathologizing every difficult emotion. 💭
Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful we’re finally talking about mental health openly. My generation grew up with the “suck it up” mentality, and that wasn’t healthy either. But somewhere between breaking the stigma and today’s mental health overdiagnosis culture, we might have overcorrected in ways that aren’t serving our kids—or ourselves.
This isn’t about dismissing real struggles. It’s about finding the sweet spot between awareness and dependency, between support and resilience. 🎯
📊 The Numbers Tell a Complicated Story
Let’s start with some hard facts. 1 in 5 U.S. adults experience mental illness each year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. That’s significant, but here’s what caught my attention: In the year from April 2023 to 2024, 3.8 million people were in contact with mental health services in England alone—that’s 40% higher than before the COVID pandemic.
The increase is staggering, especially among young people. One in five 16-year-old girls is in contact with services. 🚨 Now, this could mean we’re finally catching people who needed help all along. But research suggests something more complex is happening.
A total of 8.6 million people were prescribed antidepressants in England in 2022-23—the number has almost doubled since 2011. The numbers are climbing faster than actual prevalence rates can explain, leading experts to question whether we’re dealing with genuine increases in mental illness or what psychologist Lucy Foulkes calls “prevalence inflation.”
📱 The TikTok Generation: When Self Diagnosis Social Media Becomes the Norm
Here’s where things get really concerning. My kids spend hours on social media, and I’ve noticed something: TikTok mental health content has exploded. Adolescents are increasingly self-diagnosing mental health conditions after engaging with TikTok, driven by identity exploration and limited healthcare access.
One study found that 52 percent of teens said they use social media to diagnose others’ mental health conditions, including 11 percent who say they do so “all the time”. Think about that—more than half of teenagers are playing amateur psychiatrist based on 60-second videos. 😳
I’ve seen this firsthand. One of my daughters came home convinced she had three different disorders after watching creators describe their symptoms. As one mother told CNN: “Every week, she would come up with another diagnosis. If she sees a hint of herself in someone, she thinks she has it, too.” This experience mirrors what countless parents are dealing with.
The problem isn’t that kids are seeking answers—it’s that they’re finding them in the wrong places. TikTok’s format, favoring brief content, often cannot capture the complexity of medical conditions, potentially leading viewers to an incorrect self-diagnosis.
🏷️ When Normal Becomes Pathological
Here’s something that really bothers me: we’re medicalizing normal human experiences. The first edition of the DSM, published in 1952, was 100 pages long. It now runs close to 1,000. We’ve created diagnostic categories for what used to be considered ordinary human struggles.
Someone who would once have just been considered shy might today be diagnosed with “avoidant personality disorder” according to the CDC. We’ve started pathologizing what Freud called “ordinary human unhappiness.”
As an Air Force veteran, I’ve seen real trauma and genuine mental health crises. I’ve also raised six kids through teenage years, middle school drama, and all the normal chaos of growing up. There’s a difference between clinical depression and being sad about a breakup. There’s a difference between having social anxiety disorder and feeling nervous before giving a presentation. 💪
The danger lies in teaching our kids that every uncomfortable feeling needs a label, a treatment plan, and potentially medication.
🎖️ The Military Example: When Real Problems Get Lost in the Noise
Let me share something from my military experience that illustrates this perfectly. The veteran suicide crisis is real—the suicide rate for veterans is around 33.9 per 100,000—much higher than the civilian rate, and more than 1.5 times the rate for non-veteran adults according to VA data.
But here’s what’s troubling: modern service members actually have far more mental health resources and outreach programs than any previous generation. The stigma is lower, the help is more available, yet the numbers remain stubbornly high.
Some experts wonder if our constant focus on mental health struggles might actually be making things worse for some people. When you tell someone to constantly monitor their mental state and watch for warning signs, you might inadvertently create the very anxiety you’re trying to prevent. 🔄
This isn’t unique to the military—it’s happening across all sectors of society. We’re creating a culture where people expect to struggle and look for problems rather than building confidence in their natural coping abilities.
💪 Building Resilience Building Instead of Dependency
Here’s what I’ve learned raising six kids and serving my country: resilience isn’t built by avoiding discomfort—it’s built by working through it. Psychologists have identified four key ingredients to developing coping skills for resilience: connection, wellness, healthy thinking, and finding meaning.
The problem with our current mental health awareness culture is that it sometimes teaches people to expect life to be free of distress. But mild anxiety and stress are part of being human. They build character, problem-solving skills, and emotional maturity. 🌱
Research from Johns Hopkins shows that resilient individuals approach challenges with a proactive attitude, seek solutions and take strategic steps to address issues. This prevents them from feeling overwhelmed or defeated by normal life challenges.
The goal isn’t to eliminate struggle—it’s to build the capacity to handle it effectively.
🚨 The Real Danger of Mental Health Overdiagnosis
Don’t misunderstand me—I’m not saying mental health struggles aren’t real. They absolutely are, and people suffering from genuine disorders deserve help and compassion. What I’m concerned about is what happens when we pathologize normal human experiences.
Studies found significant evidence of overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children and adolescents. With more time at home and more idle time for social media apps like TikTok, which boasts 2.4 billion views, experts have seen an unusual spike in mental health cases in hospitals and behavioral health facilities across the country.
The consequences are serious:
- 📉 Young people lose confidence in their natural coping abilities
- 🏥 Healthcare systems become overwhelmed, making it harder for those with serious conditions to get help
- 💊 Over-medication of normal emotional responses
- 🎭 Creation of a victim mentality instead of an empowerment mindset
When we tell kids that feeling nervous, sad, or overwhelmed automatically means something is “wrong” with them, we’re actually making them less resilient, not more supported.
👨👩👧👦 Teaching Our Kids the Difference
As parents, we need to help our children distinguish between normal discomfort and genuine dysfunction. A mental health experience refers to the range of emotions and psychological states that individuals encounter as part of their everyday lives—a spectrum of normal emotions. A mental health disorder involves a pattern of symptoms that significantly disrupts daily functioning.
My wife, who’s a middle school math teacher, sees this daily. Kids come to school convinced they have disorders when what they’re experiencing is normal adolescent anxiety about fitting in, performing well, or navigating social situations. 🏫
We need to teach our children:
- ✅ Not every uncomfortable emotion is a disorder
- 💪 Resilience is built through facing challenges, not avoiding them
- 👩⚕️ Professional help should come from qualified professionals, not social media influencers
- 😊 It’s normal to feel anxious, sad, or overwhelmed sometimes
The difference between helping and enabling is crucial. When my daughter comes home upset about friend drama, I don’t immediately wonder if she needs therapy. I help her process the experience, learn from it, and develop strategies for similar situations in the future.
🎯 The Social Media Echo Chamber Effect
Here’s something particularly concerning about self diagnosis social media trends: algorithms create echo chambers. When a teenager searches for mental health content on TikTok, the platform feeds them more of the same content, creating what experts call a “mental health wormhole.”
Research shows this creates several problems:
- 🔄 Reinforcement of self-diagnosis without professional input
- 📱 Increased anxiety from constant exposure to mental health content
- 👥 Identity formation around disorders rather than strengths
- ⏰ Delayed professional help due to false confidence in self-diagnosis
As one study noted, “TikTok’s algorithm bases what users see next on the content they’ve already engaged with.” If a student thinks they might have bipolar disorder, they quickly wind up seeing constant videos about the condition—even if their initial hunch was completely wrong.
⚖️ The Path Forward: Balance and Wisdom
Whether you are building your resilience as a preventative measure or seeking to add to your resiliency skills in new ways, there are many approaches. The key is finding balance between awareness and over-pathologizing.
We need to:
🤝 Validate without pathologizing. Yes, your teenager’s social anxiety is real and uncomfortable. No, it doesn’t automatically mean they have social anxiety disorder.
🧠 Teach coping skills early. Problem-solving skills and resilience are closely intertwined. Research from Mayo Clinic shows that resilient individuals approach challenges with a proactive attitude, seek solutions and take strategic steps to address issues.
👪 Model healthy responses to stress. Our kids are watching how we handle life’s challenges. Do we immediately reach for a diagnosis, or do we demonstrate healthy coping strategies?
🤗 Create real connections. Connecting with individuals or groups reminds us that we’re not alone in facing challenges. But these need to be real relationships, not just online communities centered around shared diagnoses.
🚩 When Professional Help IS Needed
Let me be crystal clear: there are times when professional mental health support is absolutely necessary. If you or your child are experiencing:
- 📅 Persistent symptoms that interfere with daily functioning for weeks or months
- ⚠️ Thoughts of self-harm or suicide
- 📚 Inability to maintain relationships, work, or school performance
- 🍺 Substance abuse as a coping mechanism
- 🔄 Extreme changes in behavior, sleep, or appetite
These warrant professional evaluation. Mental health professionals are trained to properly assess symptoms, considering various potential causes and conditions—something a 60-second TikTok video simply cannot do.
The difference is significant: professional diagnosis involves comprehensive assessment, family history, ruling out medical causes, and understanding the full context of someone’s life. Self diagnosis social media provides none of this crucial context.
🎖️ The Military Teaches Us About Real Resilience
My military experience taught me something valuable: the strongest people aren’t those who never struggle—they’re those who struggle and keep going anyway. We called it “embracing the suck.” Not everything needs to be comfortable or easy. 💯
Research on building personal resilience breaks down five core components to creating better stress management habits. But notice it’s about managing anxiety, not eliminating it entirely. The goal is competence, not comfort.
The military has always understood that you build strength by progressively increasing challenges, not by removing them. The same principle applies to mental and emotional strength. When we shelter our kids from every difficulty or immediately pathologize their struggles, we’re actually weakening their resilience muscles.
👪 A Father’s Perspective on Mental Health Balance
Raising five girls and one boy in today’s world means navigating this balance carefully. I want my kids to know they can talk to me about anything—and they do. But I also want them to develop the inner strength to handle life’s inevitable difficulties. 🏠
When one of my daughters came home crying because a friend was mean to her, my first instinct wasn’t to wonder if she had depression. It was to help her process the experience, learn from it, and develop strategies for similar situations in the future.
That’s not being unsympathetic—that’s building resilience. There’s a massive difference between dismissing someone’s pain and helping them develop the tools to handle it effectively.
🌟 Creating a Healthier Culture Around Mental Health
We need to move beyond the extremes. Mental health stigma was wrong, but so is our current tendency to pathologize every difficult emotion. The answer isn’t to go backward—it’s to go forward with wisdom.
As noted in research on over-medicalization, “it is conceivable that the focus should be on prevention and the importance of non-medical support rather than overdiagnosis.”
We can create a culture that:
- 🧠 Takes mental health seriously without medicalizing normal human experiences
- 💪 Teaches coping skills alongside awareness
- 🌱 Builds resilience while providing support for genuine disorders
- ⚖️ Encourages professional help when needed while promoting self-reliance when appropriate
The sweet spot is helping people understand that strength and struggle can coexist. You can acknowledge difficulty without immediately assuming pathology.
🔮 Hope for the Future
Despite my concerns, I’m optimistic. As one expert noted: “Gen-Z is one of the greatest generations when it comes to their mental health.” They’re more aware, more willing to seek help, and more open about their struggles than any generation before them. 🌈
The challenge is channeling that awareness in healthy directions. We need to teach them that strength comes from facing difficulties, not avoiding them. That growth happens in discomfort. That not every hard day needs a diagnosis.
This generation has incredible potential—they just need guidance on how to build on their awareness without falling into the trap of mental health overdiagnosis.
🎯 Taking Action as Parents and Communities
Here’s what we can do to address the self diagnosis social media trend while maintaining healthy mental health awareness:
🏠 At home:
- Have regular conversations about emotions without immediately pathologizing them
- Teach problem-solving skills and coping strategies
- Model healthy responses to stress and disappointment
- Limit social media exposure to mental health content for younger children
- Encourage real-world activities that build confidence and resilience
🏫 In our communities:
- Support evidence-based mental health education in schools
- Advocate for proper training of educators to distinguish between normal struggles and clinical issues
- Create environments where kids can face age-appropriate challenges safely
- Push back against the normalization of mental health labeling in casual conversation
🪞 For ourselves:
- Question whether our own anxiety about our children’s mental health might be contributing to the problem
- Develop our own resilience building skills to model for our kids
- Seek professional guidance when genuinely needed, but not for every parenting challenge
- Be skeptical of social media mental health content—even when it seems helpful
🎖️ The Wisdom of Balanced Strength
As someone who’s served our country and raised six kids, I’ve learned that true strength isn’t the absence of struggle—it’s the ability to struggle well. That means:
- 💭 Acknowledging difficult emotions without immediately assuming they’re pathological
- 🤝 Seeking support when truly needed while building self-reliance
- 📚 Learning coping skills instead of just collecting diagnoses
- 🌱 Growing through challenges rather than avoiding them
This isn’t about returning to the “suck it up” mentality. It’s about finding a middle ground where we validate experiences while building capacity to handle them.
🏁 The Bottom Line
Mental health awareness is important. Breaking stigma was necessary. But we’ve overcorrected to the point where we’re potentially harming the very people we’re trying to help.
The healthiest approach is balance: validate suffering, but also encourage coping, resilience, and a clear distinction between disorder and discomfort. 💪
As a father and veteran, I believe our job isn’t to eliminate all struggle from our children’s lives—it’s to give them the tools to handle whatever life throws at them. That means building resilience, not dependency. It means teaching coping skills, not just offering labels.
We can do better. We can create a generation of young people who are mentally health-aware without being mentally health-obsessed. Who know when to seek help and when to dig deep and push through.
That’s the kind of mental health awareness culture I want to leave for my kids—and yours. One where strength and support coexist, where we face our challenges head-on, and where we build people up instead of breaking them down with unnecessary labels. 🌟
The goal isn’t perfection—it’s resilience. And that’s something worth fighting for.
Common Questions About Mental Health Overdiagnosis
Is this article saying that mental health issues aren’t real?
Not at all. Mental health struggles are very real and deserve compassion, professional care, and honest discussion. This article is about finding balance—supporting those with genuine mental health needs while recognizing that not every difficult emotion or stressful day requires a clinical label or medication.
Do you think people should stop seeking help for mental health?
No. If you or your child are experiencing persistent symptoms, struggling with daily life, or having thoughts of self-harm, you should absolutely seek help from a qualified mental health professional. The goal is to encourage wise use of support—knowing when to seek help and when to practice healthy coping skills.
Are you blaming social media for mental health problems?
Social media isn’t the sole cause, but it plays a big role in spreading self-diagnosis trends, misinformation, and reinforcing identity around mental health labels. It’s a tool—sometimes helpful, sometimes harmful. The key is to use it wisely and not rely on it for professional guidance.
What’s the difference between normal stress and a mental health disorder?
Normal stress, sadness, or anxiety are a part of life and often pass with time, support, and experience. A mental health disorder involves ongoing symptoms that seriously disrupt daily life, relationships, work, or school. If you’re unsure, consult a professional—not just social media or internet checklists.
Why do you focus so much on resilience?
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficulty, not the absence of struggle. It’s a skill that helps people thrive in the face of challenges. By teaching resilience, we empower our kids (and ourselves) to handle life’s ups and downs without always needing outside intervention.
Doesn’t talking about mental health reduce stigma?
Yes—and that’s a good thing! But as a society, we need to avoid swinging so far that we see every discomfort as a disorder. The healthiest approach is honest awareness, balanced with real coping and problem-solving strategies.
What if my child insists they have a mental health disorder?
Listen with empathy, ask questions, and observe. If their symptoms persist, worsen, or seriously affect daily life, seek a professional evaluation. But also encourage them to develop coping skills, face age-appropriate challenges, and understand that not every tough day means something is “wrong.”
Where should I go if I’m worried about mental health in my family?
Start by talking openly as a family. If you’re still concerned, contact your primary care provider, a school counselor, or a licensed mental health professional. Avoid relying solely on advice from social media or influencers.
Remember: Balance is key. Support real struggles, build resilience, and trust qualified professionals for guidance.
References:
- CDC – Anxiety and Depression
- NIMH – Any Anxiety Disorder
- Mayo Clinic – Resilience Training
- Johns Hopkins – Social Media and Self-Diagnosis
- National Alliance on Mental Illness
Remember: If you’re struggling with persistent mental health symptoms that interfere with your daily life, please seek help from a qualified mental health professional. This article is meant to encourage balance and resilience, not discourage appropriate care.
More from the Blog:
Motherhood Myths: 10 Phrases That Sound Helpful (But Aren’t) ✋🍼
7 Powerful Truths: U.S. Flag Is a Symbol of the United States 🛡️📜
Discover More From My Blog Network
If you found this post helpful or thought-provoking, I invite you to explore my other blogs—each one created to inspire, encourage, and support you on your journey.
Lifetime Family Journey
Find practical tips for marriage, parenting, family health, and daily life with a big family. From positive mindset habits to home organization and real-world parenting advice, Lifetime Family Journey is here to help your family thrive.
👉 Visit Lifetime Family Journey
Mountains Will Move
Looking for honest, faith-based encouragement? Mountains Will Move is dedicated to strengthening your spiritual walk, providing Bible-based guidance, personal stories of faith, and practical resources for Christian families and individuals.
Thank you for reading and being a part of this community!
If you enjoyed this post, please share it—or let me know what you’d like to see next in the comments below.