Emo Scene Community

I think one of the most important topics to me is the subject of self diagnosisng and how much hate it receives. When I was 9 years old, I began to be depressed due to problems with my mother's treatment towards me and body image issues that she only encouraged. At 14 I was suicidal and self harming, to this day I keep relapsing and bruising myself sometimes. But, what helped me was the self diagnosing community. In that community, I was one of the many people who couldn’t afford or wasn’t able to seek help. In my case specifically, I was dependent on my parents and they disliked the idea of therapy or psychologists, they thought that if I went then it might reflect badly on them, cause more money problems to arise, and my mom in particular to this day is afraid that I’ll say something about her that will get her in legal trouble. With self diagnosing, I was able to put words to what I was going through and find people like me, support groups, healthy coping mechanisms, and sites like 7cupsoftea.com to get myself as much help as I could. Of course, because it’s not being diagnosed by a doctor, I had no legal means to getting medicated, but it helped a lot just to have my issues heard. There’s a lot of people who hate it though, that say that it’s "appropriating the struggles of people with ~real~ mental health problems." That if you aren’t physically, financially, or for any other reason able to go get a professional diagnosis then there is no possible way you can have any disorder and you don’t deserve to have access to coping mechanisms, therapeutic techniques, and groups of support. To which my psychologist, several psychology students and their professors, the professor who taught my psychologist plus her entire class, and I all reply to with; That is a load of bull. Self diagnosing helped me to save my life. It’s not like we, on a whim, decide that we should just label ourselves with a mental illness. The people in this community have actual reasons behind why they can’t go to a doctor, and those people still deserve help. Almost all of us take weeks to months to come up with a diagnosis, and the DSM-5 and other mental health books are online so that we can refer back to those. We don’t come up with the symptoms just to "feel special" or be "edgy". Granted, there are very few people who may do it for those reasons, but the number is so insignificant that being a gatekeeper does more harm than good. Mental health elitism and snobbery helps no one! Mentally ill people aren’t mentally ill just because a doctor says so. We are ill even before that, all these diagnoses and legal labels are for are to categorize and help us further to find help. Of course, if you’re able to receive help from mental health professionals, I encourage you to take advantage of that and do so! Having a professional diagnosis can open up many doors even if it closes some. But, if you're like past me or you’re in some sort of situation where you can’t, be it abusive household, income troubles, no transportation, etc. then I support you and it’s okay if you have to self diagnose. You aren’t making "real mentally ill people look bad" by doing whatever you can to get help, you’re doing what’s best for you. Besides, self diagnosing is normal! When we're coughing and have a runny nose, so we take pain killers and some medicine, that’s self diagnosis! When we fall and hurt ourselves and come to the conclusion that a muscle was hurt, so we put an ice pack or something on it, that’s self diagnosis! When we decide to buy over the counter medicine for when we're sick instead of going to a hospital, that’s self diagnosis! It’s a part of everyday life and it is not an inherently bad thing. {A message that’s from myself, many people in the psychology field, and my psychologist. The last part in italics is something my psychologist said when speaking about how she liked self diagnosing. And to the "You should just listen to the mental health professionals instead of trying to be special!" people: I listened to several mental health professionals, they agreed with me and even helped me to do it better + encourage me in the field of mental science, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ yeah. I was honestly ready to give up and reject self diagnosing, but they reassured me that I wasn’t what so many people claimed I was for doing it and that it was fine because not everyone has the same situation. If not for the mental health professionals, I would be against it right now.)