Diagnosis can provide understanding, acceptance, and community, but letting it define identity can do harm.

Over-identifying with a disorder can limit growth, reduce agency, and constrain an evolving sense of self.

Diagnoses should be integrated into the self, not be allowed to engulf it.

We are living in an age where psychological explanations are prioritized above all others. Indeed, therapy speak has permeated everyday life. It has taken over conversations and relationships, leading people to claim boundary violations, accuse others of gaslighting, or see narcissists everywhere they go. Armchair diagnosing is no longer frowned upon and, in fact, seems encouraged. People are spotting symptoms and claiming disorders without sufficient evaluations or neutral clinical opinions. Pop pathology—the tendency to interpret everyday experiences through a clinical lens and pathologize them—is becoming increasingly common.

And while there is some good that comes from increased access to mental health knowledge, we are also seeing harm stemming from this trend. People are increasingly over-indexing on psychological interpretations, reducing themselves and others to diagnostic labels rather than allowing room for nuance, change, and other explanations. Therapy language has become defining and limiting instead of elucidating and liberating.

Over-Identifying with a Disorder Can Be Problematic

One reason we should be concerned with the modern obsession with psychological language is that people are making disorders their identities. Whereas in the past, people would hide any mental health issues, now they become overly attached to them. Not everyone, of course, but there is a significant trend of diagnoses engulfing self-concepts so that a disorder........

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