As someone who’s clinically diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses, it used to rub me the wrong way when someone would self-diagnose themselves.
For a long time, I thought that by someone self-diagnosing they were invalidating my own mental illness. I had the incorrect assumption that their illness couldn’t be real without “proof.” In the end, I realized this is just another way of gatekeeping diagnoses from people who are not as fortunate as I am.
Who am I to say someone doesn’t have a specific illness just because they don’t have a piece of paper certifying their diagnosis?
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