With the knowledge of mental health and diseases that has been discovered and is out there today, it is much easier to recognize, diagnose, and treat mental illness and help those afflicted by diseases such depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, etc. However, sometimes people's understanding of these diseases can be misconstrued and used in the wrong way. With new knowledge of these mental illnesses people believe that is enough to look at whatever their problems are and diagnose themselves based on the limited set of facts they have gathered. Now a days plenty of people attribute a bad mood or a bad day as a result to having some sort of mental illness. They'll blame their reaction to something on anxiety, or that they're "so bipolar". It's seen almost everywhere now. On television shows and movies, online, and still in person.This is walking a fine line here. What it is is just throwing around these terms giving them almost a very loose definition. When people do this they don't realize they're crossing the line.
Self- diagnosing you're mental illness is hurtful and can be offensive to a lot of people, either people living with mental illness themselves or people who know someone that they're close with who has a mental illness. For example,it is not fair to just say that you have depression because you felt really sad for a day or two. Depression is a serious illness and it's much more than just feeling a little down. It is so incredibly insensitive to just throw it around like a toy. Anyone can literally say "I have depression" but that doesn't mean that you should. If everyone said they had serious anxiety any time they get really nervous and start panicking, then there would be a lot of people misdiagnosed and on anxiety medication. Mental illness is serious and saying that you have one when you don't makes those that have one feel like even worse because it decreases the severity of their situation. Their problems and obstacles they face everyday are real and dangerous, and self-diagnosing is essentially trivializing those problems faced by these people.
Which brings up another point of self-diagnosing. It can lead to a misdiagnosis over something else, over diagnosis, and taking medication when you don't need it. Before you seek some sort of drug or treatment, it is crucial to understand whatever problem you are facing and where it stems from. Trying to treat these problems without the full understanding can further jeopardize your health.
