Recognition or Diagnosis
This is something many people might be familiar with - you’re scrolling social media when someone on a video names an inner experience you know well. Suddenly you have a small jolt of recognition I know that feeling and immediately a narrative begins to form.
Influencers have become especially skilled at creating this effect as they speak with fluency, confidence, and a narrative offering explanation Here is why you are the way you are. For many, it lands with uncanny accuracy. Even for those who know, clinically and personally, that that diagnosis is not their story, something in the language can feel disarmingly familiar.
Taking ADHD as an example, much of what circulates online under the banner of ADHD is not, in fact, ADHD‑specific. It’s the stimulation of modern life: distraction, mental noise, procrastination, emotional intensity, the friction of ordinary executive functioning. These are common experiences, but when framed as symptoms, they take on a diagnostic inevitability. The listener feels ‘seen’ even when the category is a poor fit.
Influencers often describe these states vividly and with coherence turning scattered moments shared by many people at times into a storyline, speaking with a certainty that clinical language — with its caveats, differentials, and contextual thinking — rarely permits. And certainty is seductive.
Many of us long for our inner life to be named and understood. So when someone online offers a unifying explanation it can feel like relief as it gathers disparate experiences into a single frame. But recognition is not the same as diagnosis, and resonance is not the same as truth. What these videos often touch is a psychological longing to have our complexity mirrored back in a language that feels organised, compassionate, and narratively satisfying.
Clinical work is slow, textured, and contextual whereas online content flattens context into symptom lists. In that flattening, many people find themselves reflected because the net is cast so wide.
Psychotherapist’s don’t diagnose but if a video feels uncannily resonant, what we can do is explore what part of you feels named. Perhaps it touches the part of you that feels overwhelmed, or the part that carries a lifelong sense of being different or wrong, or the part that longs for a quieter mind. In psychotherapy these are worked with as psychological experiences, not diagnostic revelations. And we seem them as needing attention but not necessarily a label.