I'd hazard a guess that every single person who is reading this article has been to a doctor to seek treatment for some sort of ailment. Whether it be some sort of infection, injury, or mental illness, you can trust the information and advice your physician has to offer. This is obviously the case. I mean, decades of rigorous education and training in the field of medicine should mean your doctor knows what they're doing.
Yet some with illnesses do not like to wait for the doctor to diagnose them. Well, not necessarily do they not want to wait, many just simply do not have the choice. Physicians may be extremely overbooked, or certain specialists one would have to see are too far away or cost too much to see on an immediate basis.
But there is one doctor that is available within a matter of seconds: Google. That's right, a search engine has all the information one could need on the symptoms, epidemiology, and lethality of practically every illness known to man! Don't call its qualifications into question, though, you won't win that battle. Out of all the services that offer tools for determining what your illness might be, WebMD is certainly the most prolific, and definitely the easiest to use.
The problem with this website is that while the initials MD are within the name, that does not necessarily mean that the website can accurately diagnose an illness without an in-person consultation. That is because many diseases or syndromes have signs and symptoms that may overlap with those of tens of other potential maladies. Without actually seeing the patient, there is no way to discuss the nuance behind the topics patients would have to bring up.
Yet if you ask a doctor who has spoken with at least one patient, you will hear tales patients coming in and metaphorically pounding their fist on the counter, demanding to be treated for an illness they themselves diagnosed; more than likely, all of these rather pushy people cite WebMD as their primary source.
This website is a scourge on the medical community. Not only to patients obstinately demand that they have disease X and demand treatment for disease X, they refuse to listen when the physician gives them information on disease X that shows that the patient actually has disease Y. By doing so, these patients are wasting the time and money of both them and their physician, all while making people like myself cringe in the process.
WebMD is not the only source of the harms that come with the package of self-diagnosis. In fact, I would argue that it is definitely not the most insidious. Behold: Tumblr!
Many of you who are reading this do not know what this website is; others will shutter at the mere mention of it; the rest will be fuming about the obvious critique of the social media giant that is coming up. It is well known that Tumblr is a common choice for those who are a part of an advocacy group. Log on to the site and you will find communities of people advocating for the rights of women, racial minorities, the LGBT community, body positivity, etc. In regards to all communities both on and off the internet, as long as they do not resort to radicalization and self-segregation, I do not mind. I will, as a matter of fact, support you. The mental health community is no exception to this rule. Providing a means of disseminating information about mental health in the normal flow of a blog's feed is quite beneficial, in my opinion. The problem arises when these illnesses begin to become glamorized.
What I mean by this is that we seem to live in a culture that values victim status. The more labels one places themselves that connote being oppressed or disadvantaged, the more praise one receives. While labels of gender and race are very hard to ascertain and do not really stack on top of themselves, mental illnesses do not have either roadblock. Well, as long as you are your own psychiatrists.
As a person who has suffered from several legitimate mental illnesses that have significantly impacted my life over the years, I start to fume when I read people list off a smorgasbord of various illnesses that are not only self-diagnosed but are completely impossible to be together. Take the picture on the left for example. For ethical consistency, I am citing the link to the website I found the picture, but you don't need to click on it. Instead, focus on the following points:
1. The gender-neutral pronouns, Zara's various other identities and their weekly changes. If you have no clue what some of those labels are, welcome to my nightmare.
2. Whatever is in the last nine lines or so.
3. The fact that Zara's 8+ mental illnesses and personality disorders indicate to me that . . . zym? . . . would need some rather significant and immediate treatment. While some like PTSD, DID, and schizophrenia are rather simple to deduce, the fact that Zara has NPD would indicate that negative labels probably would cause her mental anguish.
Or would it?
I mean, I would joke around that the only disorder Zara has is a histrionic personality disorder, but I honestly do have some speculations. But herein lies the problem: they are not necessarily credible. The validity of Zara's numerous conditions elicits not only suspicion but a fairly significant amount of empathy from me almost instantly. That urge to come to Zara's aid is not only a bit uncomfortable (since this person is only known through a meme) but, in my eyes, rather problematic. It shows why these people do this on their own. They take a single sign of a personality disorder or mental illness or whatever and then assume—without the opinions and analyses of experts who are trained to do so—that they have said conditions. Then they go about social media and are praised, pitied, and given the attention they crave.
That's not to discount every single person on the internet who cannot see a doctor. Like I said earlier, it is only when they shut out the opinions of experts and parade their "conditions" around like a badge of honor that I begin to see a problem.
While I could go much further on the matter, I will refrain for now. After all, this narrative extends much further beyond the psychiatric.
