[…] rash of diagnostic claims and self-labeling that have swept the internet and mass-market publishing, creating a space where confessional zeal and memeified pseudoscience – sometimes abetted by therapists who should know better – have become almost routine.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/14/trauma-mental-health
Also see: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/a-posthumous-shock-trauma-studies-modernity-how-everything-became-trauma/ - Harper’s “How everyting became Trauma”
“I shall be advancing the heretical notion that trauma as we now understand it is not a timeless phenomenon that has affected people in different cultures and at different times in much the same way, but is to a hitherto unacknowledged extent a function of modernity in all its shocking suddenness.”
Another big one is the “#DIDTok” trend, in which TikTok (and increasingly Instagram) users feign Dissociative Identity Disorders, often claiming “Systems” of literary or pop cultural characters. A whole subculture inside this subculture “hosts” alters related to Naruto, Harry Potter, or Dune.
“”Recent global popularity of social media content about dissociative identity disorder (DID) has coincided with increased self-diagnosis among children and young people who have formed large online communities and presented in clinical settings seeking to affirm their self-diagnoses.”
This development is not unique to DID; it has been documented in relation to other psychological conditions, including tic disorders, autism spectrum disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder, and bipolar disorders (BPD). DID self-diagnosis based on social media information has been the subject of extensive media commentary, but relatively little published clinical writing to date.
