If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews wrote. This can create a self-fulfilling spiral: More anxiety diagnoses lead to more hypervigilance among young people about their anxiety, which leads to more withdrawal from everyday activities, which creates actual anxiety and depression, which leads to more diagnoses, and so on.

Exactly. The vast majority of people who are either formally diagnosed or self-diagnosed as mentally ill are only mildly so or not at all. And for people like this the last thing they want to do is spend a ton of time ruminating about whatever your condition is, watching influencers talk about it, etc. It’ll only make it (if it even existed) worse.

Let me take a second to clarify what I mean when I say they may not actually be mentally ill or their condition may not exist. We have pathologized vast swathes of the normal human spectrum. The article goes into this. Every has anxiety, for example. Dwelling on mild anxiety makes it worse.

Negativity inflation is super bad too, which is why I find a lot of current events news and discourse around it, terrible.

Luckily this is within many people’s abilities to fix, with better news and discourse hygiene.