and to clarify i absolutely don't blame young teens for trying to find labels for their experiences. growing up fucking sucks and it can make you feel like you're losing your mind; wanting to have answers for why you feel the way you do is totally understandable. i think the issue mainly falls in how the current social media landscape amplifies it and leads to people using illnesses as identity, even if they end up not actually having said illnesses. i've seen people say it felt impossible to back away from it because admitting they were wrong or confused led to people labeling them as a liar and enacting harassment campaigns, when it isn't lying or malingering to just be confused and jump to a conclusion that's incorrect. overall it's just really sad to me :-(
One issue I haven't seen tackled hard enough about young teens self-diagnosing themselves ( & why I, as someone who stands for educated self-diagnosis, can agree with those against ) is how powerful labels can be. For something as heavy as a PD, I've yet to see it realized that it's a comfortable box into stunting & molding your emotional, mental, and ego growth.
You have this label to box your behaviour into, a community to fall back on, possible explanations for disorganized behaviour. & then, say, for example, if a teenager is no longer in an environment that demands those traits, & no longer exhibit the criteria to meet diagnosis into their adulthood ( e.g. to paraphrase, " a pervasive, persistent pattern of behaviour across multiple settings. " ) can it be so easily accepted that they're no longer disordered, or " worse " ( because their identity has been attached to being disordered ) didn't have it at all?
I apologize for the yap session, & obviously there's so much more nuance to this than i can hope to describe in this length.
TL;DR : I haven't seen anyone mention how young teens can attach their identity to being disordered &, when that's in the context of a personality disorder, can stunt/mold ( if unconsciously ) their sense of identity further.
when people realize self-diagnosis is the path to diagnosis i will be happy
i agree with this a lot because i've done the exact thing too before 😭 even though i didn't necessarily have the disorder, relating to some of the description of the symptoms made me feel understood — making me want to cling onto that information i found because i had nowhere else to receive proper support. through self diagnosing and identifying with those disorders, it felt like it validated the issues i was going through. which was not the right thing to do but yk finding ways to help yourself can sometimes be limited