05/08/2025
A Facebook Post is not a Diagnosis.
“Scroll with compassion. Comment with care. Diagnose with credentials.”
“He’s such a narcissist.”
“She must be bipolar.”
“Ugh, classic BPD behaviour.”
“She’s so toxic—cut her off.”
You've heard it, even said it. Mental health buzzwords are everywhere—comment threads, reels, TikToks, and captions.
It’s tempting, isn’t it?
To make sense of someone’s "weird" behaviour with a single label. Especially when mental health language is so widely used.
Here’s the thing:
A Facebook post is not a diagnosis.
It's encouraging to see mental health topics like trauma, boundaries, attachment styles, and healing being discussed more openly. Increased awareness is a positive shift. However, there's a downside—people are casually diagnosing others based solely on what they see online. Awareness is great, but labelling is not.
Diagnosing mental health conditions requires more than a snapshot—it requires a professional, nuanced assessment that considers a person’s full history, cultural background, context, and current functioning over time, as well as many other complex assessments.
Yet in comment threads and captions, words like "toxic," "narcissist," "bipolar," or "manipulative" get thrown around with ease. While these terms might feel accurate in the moment, misusing them can lead to mislabelling and misunderstanding.
Assigning a label can also be a way to distance ourselves—from discomfort, from complexity, or even from examining our own role in a dynamic. True understanding requires more than a quick judgment.
By no means does this dismiss the real and painful impact of specific behaviours—or deny the existence of conditions. These struggles are real, and they can make life incredibly hard for everyone involved. Assigning a diagnosis without context, training, or consent doesn't lead to healing—it leads to harm. For all involved.
Here’s why we must tread carefully:
• Context matters.
Human behaviour can only be understood in its full context—cultural, relational, and situational. What seems “abnormal” in one setting might be expected entirely in another.
• People are complex.
Our feelings and behaviours are shaped by many moving parts: stress, trauma, physical health, relationships, hormones, lack of support, environment and history. No one is reducible to a single label.
• Stigma causes harm.
Labels can stick. They can shape how others treat someone—or how someone sees themselves. When applied without care or accuracy, they can cause significant harm.
• Social media is a highlight reel.
It can’t reflect tone, trauma, diagnosis, or intent. It rarely captures the whole truth of someone’s inner world.
• Therapy is sacred.
Real assessment requires consent, confidentiality, deep listening and many other modalities. That can’t happen in a scroll, comment section or video on the subject.
So next time you find yourself about to label someone based on a post, pause.
Choose curiosity over conclusion—compassion over categorisation.
The truth is, most of us are just trying to be seen and understood, and we are all deeply complex beings. Yes, that includes you reading this right now, and me writing this.
So, before you label, think about this one...
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung
Be gentle with your words—
They shape worlds.
xx
