The Risks of Overdiagnosis or Self-Diagnosis in the Digital Age

Unexpectedly, more people use the Internet to find health-related information. According to a number of studies, 81.5% of American adults look up health-related information online. While some use the information as a guide to seek proper care, others use it to assign diagnoses and treat themselves.

The issue with this is that online resources vary greatly in quality. The largest and most popular reference source in the world is regarded as Wikipedia, which is frequently cited for inaccurate health information. Other online sources, especially many on social media, might intentionally mislead a person.

Diagnosing several medical conditions from symptoms alone is extremely difficult or sometimes simply impossible for any good clinician. If the misdiagnosis involved a serious condition, then adverse consequences may follow. Using social media for self-diagnosis could create misunderstandings regarding their mental health and conjure undue stress and anxiety.

This may place barriers in seeking appropriate interventions, leading to worsening of the individual or making them feel something is wrong when they are functioning at a typical level. They may also label their experience incorrectly, adopting a label/diagnosis that does not fully reflect their symptoms/experience.

Read More: Misinformation in Your Feed: When Social Media Becomes a Mental Health Risk

Why Are So Many People Self-Diagnosing?

Nowadays, more people are focused on our health than ever and there are a lot of reasons for this worrying trend. One of them is that COVID-19 changed the way we view our health, and many people are scared to get the virus or potentially suffer other side effects from the pandemic.

Essentially, many people are dealing with health anxiety. This is not a diagnosable state where we feel sickly all the time or worse, feel obsessed with the idea of feeling sick. In the past, health anxiety was called hypochondria. On one hand, it is okay to be concerned about your health, especially with the pandemic still being a factor. We need to care for our bodies and minds, but the problem is that too many people rush to online resources.

Once online, individuals quickly search their symptoms and look for websites, like WebMD, which “validate” the possibility of a major medical issue. The rise of social media is also causing many young people to seek medical advice while using apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc.

The Hidden Dangers of Self-Diagnosing Online

Counsellors are aware that diagnosing mental health disorders is a difficult process that takes years of research, education, and training for a professional to have a nuanced understanding. Social media tends to oversimplify the procedure and sometimes reduces psychological theories or disorders into a couple of catchy and funny statements.

With these kinds of posts, the complexities of mental health, along with some new information for that matter, are never approached-things such as how attachment is a pattern and not a fixed state, according to Ilyse Kennedy, an LPC and licensed marriage and family therapist. Kennedy pointed out that it took her years, multiple years of study and reading around 10 books on attachment disorder before she could understand her own attachment style.

The algorithms of social media, which filter content for each user according to his or her interactions with content, can also be behind an incorrect self-diagnosis. The first thing a person witnesses when opening any social media is a stream of chosen videos or, in other words, the For You page. If the person in any way “liked” a particular post, then the For You page would also contain more such videos.

Fleming explained that this has a self-fulfilling prophecy nature, because the person gradually begins to feel they were “meant” to view the videos. Collazo elaborated that this misinformation can produce a “nocebo effect” where a person experiences some harmful side effects or symptoms because of expecting or believing they will occur. To put it another way, someone may believe they have a condition or act in a manner that reinforces the condition after viewing a post on social media stating that individuals with these specific symptoms have it.

Read More: Predatory Loopholes in Social Media Algorithms and Vulnerable Users

How Self-Diagnosis Can Sometimes Help

Positively, social media does create a sense of community and belonging that some people are seeking regarding answers about their mental health. Finding online videos and communities of other people with similar symptoms and difficulties, especially regarding stigmatised diagnoses such as bipolar disorder, can be validating and motivating, explains Kennedy, who is the creator of Austin, Texas’s Moving Parts Psychotherapy group practice.

Counsellors have valuable insight into the inner lives of their clients, and one of the great advantages of self-diagnosis is that, hopefully, the prospective clients will act on it and find help, and how they interpret their experience, Kennedy states. She’s noticed there’s lately been a lot of female customers engaging with social media material about ADHD, partly because until now, people have only just begun to mention that the diagnosis can present differently in women versus men.

There’s a fine line when it comes to doing online mental health research; in fact, McMickle labels it “a slippery slope.” People could find helpful information about what is happening to them, she says, “but then you can go down a giant rabbit hole with any disorder or any medical issue”, and almost obsess over the many things that it could be instead.

She also cautions that there is a difference between genuinely thinking, “Do I have this disorder?” and obsessively finding all the ways a diagnosis has influenced parts of your life. People’s understanding of anxiety and depression has historically been hazy, but Kennedy claims that social media has made it possible for people to talk more about trauma and neurodivergence, including stigmatised conditions like OCD and autism.

Read More: What Science Says About Self-Help And Why It’s Not Enough

Conclusion

The growing trend of self-diagnosis is of major concern due to the inaccurate information consumers rehearse. Regardless of any concern that social media and the internet have done well in normalising a dialogue around mental health, this self-diagnosing behaviour is ethically troubling.

The distortion and oversimplification of information on the internet, including misrepresentation of actual mental health issues, affects clients. Clients have shown they can mislabel themselves, needlessly cause themselves anxiety related to mental illness, or worse, delay getting professional help.

Self-diagnosing helps advisors to understand how clients view and perceive themselves. That is an extremely important part of therapy. However, self-diagnosis does not replace professional and expert evaluation. The challenge is to strike a balance in the digital space between using online materials to build awareness and education versus having an official evaluation and treatment from a qualified, trained, and licensed professional.