I love social media and I spend some time on TikTok watching mindless videos. Something I have noticed as I scroll through is a trend that I don’t like. As a mental health professional, using clinical terms to describe someone demeans people who actually suffer from those mental health disorders and the professionals who work with them.

Examples:

• Using the word depressed to describe normal sadness.
• Talking about having anxiety to describe normal nervousness.
• Expressing one has OCD when someone has normal habits.
• Referencing one is bipolar when someone expresses that they have different moods.
• Overuse and abuse of the word narcissist!
• Insinuating someone has ADD when they are distracted.
• Assuming everyone who is different has autism.
• Presuming that violence is caused by mental illness.
• Loosely stating, “Go kill yourself.” or “I’m going to kill myself.”
• Labeling someone as “mental” when you don’t like them.

Mental health professionals go through years of education, supervision, licensing, testing, practice, and continuing education to be qualified to work in this field. There are specific clinical criteria that have to be met before any mental health diagnosis can be made. A person can have some symptoms without meeting the clinical criteria of a diagnosis; however, that doesn’t mean that we should slap people with labels or diminish anyone who has mental health struggles.

People who have struggled with their mental health disorders for years and have worked very hard to manage and treat them don’t deserve to be invalidated or demeaned because someone thinks a word should be a trend. It’s discriminatory to use someone’s struggle for entertainment. It’s not funny and frankly it’s downright insulting!

People who struggle with their mental health and choose to get treatment are the strongest people I know. They deserve love, compassion, empathy, and support. Every human has mental health, and every human struggles; however, not everyone has diagnosable or diagnosed mental health disorders.

So, the next time you have the urge to use mental health issues for entertainment or try to self-diagnose or diagnose someone else, think again and just don’t!