Pop Pathology: The Modern Obsession With Diagnosis

Why our fixation with clinical labels is hurting us more than we realize.

Key points

• Pop pathology is the cultural trend of using clinical terms to explain every experience and relationship.
• Overuse and misuse of therapy terms fuels misunderstanding, disconnection, and misdiagnosis.
• Therapists must guide clients toward curiosity and context, not just labels or diagnoses.

Her ex is a narcissist. Their girlfriend has borderline personality disorder. That last relationship was so toxic, riddled with red flags. You lose your keys so often, you must have ADHD. Everyone is violating boundaries, love bombing, gaslighting, sociopathic, neurodivergent, bipolar, delusional, clinically depressed, insecurely attached, and anxious.

We have a false sense of competence when using these labels, which has led to an epidemic of therapy speak, where we lean on clinical terms to define our every experience. We are quick to pathologize, and we are much less open to reconsidering our quick clinical assessments, even when evidence suggests we should.

I call this pop pathology: our cultural habit of using clinical language to explain every emotion or conflict, often ignoring context and contrary evidence. Pop pathology is the modern desire to use clinical terms to explain every painful or frustrating experience, and it’s a big problem.

We’ve learned just enough about these diagnoses to feel like experts. We are inundated with short, captivating videos on social media that make it seem like it’s not that hard to have a grasp on disorders such as narcissism or bipolar, even though they are complex and have criteria that are often not mentioned in these posts which are intended to get as many views as possible. Why do we think we can accurately self-diagnose after a deep dive of TikTok reels, when research shows that 83.7% of mental health content on the app is misleading?

While these disorders and terms are real and represented in the population, it is certainly not to the extent that one would believe when looking online. For example, did you know that only about 1% the population meets the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder? And that, according to the World Health Organization, at most, only 3.4% of adults live with ADHD? However, when you scroll through TikTok, you’d think it was 70% or higher.

But in reality, these disorders are complex, informed by context and history, and harder to diagnose than social media would lead you to believe. Plus, harm is being done by our collective tendency to confidently ascribe labels and armchair diagnose ourselves and others.

People are turning inaccurate diagnoses into their identities

People are seeing others (and themselves) as disorders instead of complicated beings, and avoiding the hard work of self-growth by hiding behind therapy terms. We are forcing every experience to be a symptom that reflects a disorder’s diagnostic criteria, and, in this way, we have erased the wide spectrum of “normal” functioning.

These therapy words are so tempting to use, and every therapist can understand this instinct. After all, when we clinicians go through graduate school, we often go through a phase of seeing ourselves and others through an overly clinical lens. Suddenly, we had a new way to understand difficult emotions, situations, or people; it’s not just a hardship, it’s a mental health issue.

But just as clinicians are trained to diagnose, we are then trained not to. We are reminded that people are unique individuals who deserve more than a quick label or category, and we should view people in our lives, especially our clients, with nuance and flexibility. We are taught that diagnostic definitions change over time, are imperfect, and are guidelines, not clear-cut, rigidly defined categories. We also learn that perhaps we don’t even need to assign a disorder to understand someone’s suffering and help them.

Therapists Need to be Part of the Solution

I’ll admit, therapists have a complicated role in pop pathology. We were gatekeepers of clinical terminology, but technology has allowed us to spread this information far and wide, which is largely a good thing. People are more educated and aware and can make better choices as a result. But, while clinicians have tried to help clients see themselves or their relationships more clearly by suggesting labels when clinically appropriate and helpful, it seems to have gone too far.

Too many therapists are diagnosing people they’ve never met or assessed, and too many therapists are letting inaccurate or destructive therapy speak go unchecked with their clients. Fearful of a therapeutic rupture, clinicians nod along with their clients’ armchair diagnoses and casual assignment of clinical terms. And therapists must now take up the mantle to gently but directly encourage clients to let go of these words and examine themselves, their relationships, and their lives with more nuance and curiosity.

More Nuance, Less Labeling

It’s very hard to scale back our reliance on these terms. They have exploded out of the therapy room and entered the cultural zeitgeist. They have become ways people create community and belonging, for example, by being part of the ever-growing neurodivergent population or by sharing relatable memes about anxiety. And understandably, people don’t want to lose this source of connection and identity.

However, over-reliance and inaccurate use of these words cause harm. We are over-pathologizing ourselves and others, making everyone seem or feel like a clinical mess when, in fact, they are probably well within the normal range. In doing so, we leave little to no room for people to mess up, go through difficult phases, or fail in some ways, without stamping a label on their forehead and viewing them that way forever (including ourselves).

Let’s all be more mindful of our tendency to engage in pop pathology, of ourselves and of others, so that we can start viewing the world through a more nuanced, generous, and less-pathological lens. It’s what we all need and deserve.

References:

Hudon, A., Perry, K., Plate, A.-S., Doucet, L., Ducharme, L., Djona, O., Testart Aguirre, C., & Evoy, G. (2025). Navigating the maze of social media disinformation on psychiatric disorders: A mixed‐methods analysis of 1,000 TikTok videos. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 27, e64225. https://doi.org/10.2196/64225

Phillips, L. (2022, March). Self-diagnosis in a digital world. Counseling Today. Retrieved from https://www.counseling.org/publications/counseling-today-magazine/article-archive/article/legacy/self-diagnosis-in-a-digital-world