If you’ve spent more than a few minutes on TikTok or Instagram lately, you’ve likely encountered someone self-diagnosing with ADHD, autism, depression, or another mental health condition. These videos often come from a place of genuine curiosity and a desire to understand one’s own mind. But while they raise awareness and reduce stigma, they are self-reflections, not clinical diagnoses, and they reveal a much deeper issue: the systemic failure of our healthcare system to provide mental healthcare resources in the first place.
As someone truly fortunate to work every day with incredibly talented and passionate people who focus solely on improving psychiatric care delivery, we pay attention and try to understand, not dismiss, the urge to self-diagnose. When need arises, all of us, through desperation, frustration or both, turn to the internet when the healthcare system becomes too difficult or fails us—when wait times for psychiatric evaluations stretch into months and diagnoses feel inconsistent and too subjective, or are simply misdiagnosed.
In behavioral health, we often talk about access and affordability. Can they find a provider? Do people have insurance? Can they make it physically to an appointment? But parity isn’t just about access, affordability, and so on. It’s about infrastructure. It’s about having the tools, standards, and systems in place to evaluate, diagnose, and treat psychiatric conditions with the same rigor we expect from other areas of medicine. In this respect, behavioral healthcare lags decades behind other sectors of healthcare, and it is continuing to lose ground despite the beyond heroic efforts from clinicians who are oversubscribed, understaffed, and underpaid.
Within psychiatric settings, it is all too common for clinicians to operate without clear, consistent frameworks for measuring patient acuity in order to assign care pathways. It is not unusual for patients with the same diagnosis to receive entirely different treatment plans based on who evaluates them, which unit they’re admitted to, or simply what if any beds are available. Inpatient psychiatric care lacks the standards and clinical operations models we take for granted in cardiology, oncology, and almost every other sector of healthcare.
This lack of standardization affects clinical outcomes and trust. When a person receives one diagnosis from a psychiatrist and a completely different one six months later from another provider, it’s no wonder they turn to social media to make sense of their experience. And sadly, the patients that are brave enough to come forward to seek help, and then leave treatment feeling no better or no closer to understanding their condition, have lost trust and are unlikely to come forward again. So it should not be any surprise that when people feel dismissed, rushed, or misunderstood by the system, they look for answers elsewhere. Today, those answers are increasingly coming in the form of TikTok explainers and influencer checklists.
There’s nothing wrong with seeking community or validation online. But when self-diagnosis becomes a stand-in for clinical care, we’ve got a serious problem. Social media platforms aren’t built to deliver nuance. They incentivize confidence and simplicity, not clinical complexity. They can’t rule out comorbidities or consider family history. And they certainly can’t develop a treatment plan.
I believe that part of the solution lies in giving clinicians the tools they need to close this gap, so they can deliver consistent, evidence-based care that helps patients understand what they’re experiencing and what to do about it. We’ve spent years working alongside hospitals to build that kind of infrastructure. Our technology gives providers a standardized way to assess patient acuity, match individuals to the right level of care, and track outcomes over time.
This is about more than improving operations. It’s about restoring confidence in the system. When patients feel like their experience is being measured, tracked, and understood with the same precision as a broken bone or a heart condition, they’re less likely to rely on self-diagnosis. They’re more likely to stay in treatment, and they’re more likely to get better.
Yes, we have a way to go, and it is a challenging journey. But the need is great and growing, and every time I see another viral video describing mental illness in overly broad or inaccurate terms, I’m reminded that we’re not dealing with a failure of information. We’re dealing with a failure of infrastructure that can provide that correct information. People who are suffering, or are trying to help family or friends who are suffering, will continue searching voraciously for answers wherever they can find them. People need hope. We all need hope.
So, as leaders, clinicians, technologists, and policymakers, let’s begin at the beginning and thoughtfully start the journey to build the necessary foundation and do our very collective best to make sure real answers are available and accessible in the right place for all of the future right times.