Should You Identify With Your Mental Illness?

All the kids are doing it.

If you’ve suffered from a mental illness, then you know how personal it is. You know how it’s something that you’re forced to deal with alone.

So, if you’re growing up, and this pain is such a significant part of your life and personality, do you identify with it?

Do you base who you are around this problem you have? That’s what teenagers are doing now. But why?

Young People Identifying with Mental Illness

A Tik Tok trend picked up steam recently.

Teenagers have been posting videos of themselves self-diagnosing borderline personality disorder — a serious, but not super common mental illness.

According to USA Today:

Posts with the hashtags, “dissociative identity disorder” and “borderline personality disorder” have been viewed hundreds of millions of times. And some of those videos list possible signs to look out for and encourage viewers to self-evaluate.

Kids want to diagnose themselves with something.

They want to be able to say, “I suffer from this.” Or, “This is what I’m going through right now.”

They’re craving what all teenagers crave — a sense of being unique; a reason to stand out and be seen; an identity.

The identity they seem to be shooting for is someone tragically cursed with a mental disorder. They want other people to acknowledge their pain and treat them like the struggling figures they are.

Here’s where this gets complicated: millions of teenagers are actually suffering from mental illness. This kind of suffering is common, not just for teens, but for the whole western world. That’s a topic for another article.

Be that as it may, part of me still wonders, “If you were really in the acute agony of mental illness, then would you be posting Tik Toks about it?” Obviously, most of this wreaks of phoniness and desperation.

How did mental illness become cool? Being a victim of something didn’t use to make you desirable. It made people feel bad for you, but it wasn’t something you wanted for yourself.

Identifying with a mental illness, even if it’s not accurate, will garner sympathy. It’s like a sign you can wear that will automatically get people to take your pain seriously.

That would mean you were in pain in the first place, and you just wanted someone to recognize it. If that’s the case, then I can understand.

Identifying With Mental Illness Twelve Years Ago

I was a senior in high school in 2010.

We had the typical high school stereotypes and social groups. I don’t really know how that environment has changed since then, but I can tell you that we didn’t have kids rushing to identify with a mental illness and post about it.

We did have something like that, however. Generations before mine had goth and punk kids. They were meant to be rough and dark and offputting. They had pain (or maybe they didn’t), and they advertised it through their appearance and demeanor.

But my generation had an evolved version of that: emo kids, aka scene kids.

Emo kids were like goth kids who admitted they needed a hug. Think more winy and less angry. Less black and more bright.

Their hair was colorful, but they still listened to music about depression, crying, and pain. What stood out about emo kids though, was that they glorified self harm and cutting.

Pain and sadness were part of the emo persona. You could see cutting scars on kids’ arms just below their colorful wristbands.

Calling self-harm a cry for attention would be wrong. But sometimes, wanting to be seen is part of the motivation behind it. Was this an early version of what’s happening now?

Kids who want to be acknowledged so badly that they are willing to damage themselves?

Kids who are willing to harm themselves to seem tragic and lost — which in a way, does make them tragic and lost?

Hard to say. It would come down to the individual, and their relationship with whatever haunts them.

Mental Illness and Self Stigma

Here’s what self-stigma is:

You take the public opinions about a mental disorder and apply them to yourself.

• If you have OCD, you’re locked in constant fear.
• If you’re bioplar, you always fly off the handle.
• If you’re depressed, you’re always depressed.

Self-stigma is harmful, dangerous, and it holds people back from making meaningful progress.

This is the “Illness and Identity Model” that psychologists came up with to describe how negative self-stigma kills an individual’s hope for recovery and what could eventually become self-esteem.

I’m a depressed person. I have X disorder. I’m not “neurotypical.” I’m locked in. This is not what I have, it’s who I am.

The Tik Tok trends are self stigma en masse. If you want the sympathy benefits of being a person with depression, then you need to accept that that’s all you are, and all you ever will be.

And that, in itself, creates more mental illness.

Your Identity and Your Diagnosis

This is complicated, but let’s try to break it down.

Every form of pain, sorrow, and insanity has been classified and given a name at this point. Society has expectations for each.

But, pain is always specific to the individual. It’s a reflection of their background and traumas and genetics and relationships. Two pains might look similar, and have similar symptoms, but they are not.

If you suffer from what could be called a mental illness, then working with that, day to day, is part of who you are and what makes you unique.

It’s part of your identity in the same sense that growing up in poverty would be part of your identity, or not having a Dad. It’s a thing you were forced to deal with.

However:

When you identify with your pain, you bind yourself to it.

You can fall in love with it like someone with Stockholm syndrome. You feel like you can’t beat it, so you join it. And now you get to have people feel bad for you and see you as one of the people who have it “rough.”

It does feel good for people to not reject you for being in pain. You’re finally getting the acknowledgment you’ve been craving. But…now what?

Privilege is an insult now. It’s a way to shame someone. You can become immune from privilege accusations by labeling yourself with a mental illness, even if it’s not really yours.

You’re a victim of something, and in some fucked up way, that has become worthy of praise, or worse, a gateway to acceptance.

Having problems makes you James Dean. It makes you dark and brooding and deep. Maybe it even suggests strength. Please.

Having a problem is one thing, solving one is another.

A Better Mindset

I would never in a million years claim that mental illness was not a real problem. I’ve known it, I’ve seen it, and I’ve felt it. Internal mountains might be some of the tallest.

But identifying with it?

Saying, “This who I am, and this is who I will always be,” is dooming yourself.

The opposite would be choosing not to let this thing define you. To identify with the part of you that doesn’t want to be this anymore, and to challenge your pain to the farthest extent you can.

Maybe you were born a little messed up, or maybe a family member hurt you, and now you’re a little off. You’re like a car with a busted door handle, a cracked windshield, bad breaks, and a slow engine. Everyone else has Ferraris and Lambos, and they blow right by you.

You could stay how you are. You could identify with being messed up. You can’t trade yourself in for a new model, so you’re better off just taking in pity.

But it’s not about that.

It’s about welding steel plates to your shaky doors. It’s about installing an overclocked V8 engine. It’s about spraying Grafitti over the dents and filling the gas tank with experimental fuel. It’s about adding spikes like Mad Max.

And it’s about screaming through the valley with blue flames shooting out the exhaust, in all your glory.

Do you get it now, kid?

It’s about becoming. It’s about getting somewhere. It’s about growing from suffering, not identifying with it.

Strength and wellbeing aren’t a strong social currency now. If you heal, and maybe even become happy, people will be quick to tell you you don’t deserve it. But little will they know how tall those internal mountains were.