On social media, astrology content and mental health diagnosis can work similarly (and sometimes together).

Our experiences incorporate information from both horoscopes and diagnoses.

There is truth to the self-fulfilling prophecy (though it may not make you the luckiest person alive).

“Lucky girl syndrome” was a TikTok trend involving the repeated mental affirmation that one is the luckiest person alive in order to make it so. Explained on social media in terms of neuroscience and spirituality (and sometimes both), this was part of a longer social media trend of manifesting on a platform where it is not uncommon to see users talking about having manifested the very content appearing in their feed.

Media as Mediums and Mental Health Diagnosis as Quasi-Religious

From the telegraph to television to TikTok, communication technologies have suggested access to a realm beyond our senses. Media have been imagined as mediums.

There is a long history of humans ascribing to machines the ability not only to tap into unseen dimensions but also into the electrical impulses of our own brains (and today we have the development of brain-to-text technology). The ideas of computers reading our minds did not start with today’s algorithmic social media or AI, but, as Simone Natale writes, have been integral to our cultural imagination around computers since the 1950s and attached to other media technologies for even longer.

Therapy culture, the quest for mental well-being, and psychiatric diagnosis have also been called new forms of spirituality and religion. The DSM has been described as psychiatry’s bible, and not just because it is the go-to professional reference book for diagnosis. Some leading psychiatrists have argued that the DSM has historically leaned more toward revelatory beliefs than scientific evidence. Our contemporary system of psychiatric diagnosis has been hotly disputed since the civil rights era of the 1960s and '70s, as Lucas Richert describes, when psychiatric practitioners, due to........

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