If you consider yourself tech-savvy, you are aware of one thing: doomscrolling. Instead of horrible news headlines for me, it was the act of one social media post turning into two, then three, then five hours later, what was once fashion expertise videos turned into, “I wonder what wedding planners’ days are like?”

With this certain “doom” comes the rabbit hole. I made my way down the mental illness route based on one video that I felt spoke to my situation. I then went back and forth in my brain, indecisive on if I had ADHD based on self-proclaimed “experts” on the internet and comment sections going “Wait — I do that..”

After an hour, I became a self-proclaimed victim of ADHD. Then it dawned on me: so was everyone else. Everyone who wanted something wrong with them had ADHD in these comment sections. I soon realized that under any videos pertaining to mental illnesses, this is what it looked like.

Anything that validated their otherness or perceived weird ways stayed, and anything that didn’t they discarded. But it wasn’t just validation; I soon learned that the comments only wanted to be associated with certain mental illnesses.

I consider these to be the “palatable” mental illnesses. The few that get the advocacy they need because having them isn’t too much of a nuisance on the rest of society. They are behavioral or mental hindrances that are looked over or self-diagnosed because they make you “smarter” or “funny” or make a good caption.

I have found that only five kinds of mental illness and disorders get this kind of treatment: ADHD, depression, anxiety, OCD and certain types of autism.

For these certain types of disorders, it’s easy to attach your personality and assume you have them. This is due to:

Sanitizing real disorders

The sanitized version of events you get from people who only know the bare bones of the symptoms these disorders show. As a result, you end up with people inflating regular human emotions or unwanted tasks.

If you don’t want to engage in a conversation, you can blame it on social anxiety. If you’re sad but you want a little extra attention, blame depression. Forgetting someone’s name you met once? That’s actually ADHD. Do you like a clean house? Actually, that’s OCD.

Victim mentality

I believe some people need to be seen as a victim. If you are sick, then people aren’t able to hold you accountable for the things you do or say. Due to the more recent growth of studies of these behaviors, we are now coming around to see how these illnesses affect people’s lives. But the amount of misinformation is still extremely rampant.

You can take the examples I gave before and see just how easily this thinking can harm the people who are diagnosed and undiagnosed with these actual illnesses. Small daily tasks and human nuances are then whittled down into these traits that are almost indistinguishable from the genuine issue.

‘Good’ symptoms

If society can benefit from them, then it’s not as bad. Autism awareness has spiked social platforms due to some people liking things a certain way, and immediately being diagnosed in the comment section. Or the person has the “smart” autism, the one that makes you good at math or knowledgeable about certain topics that people can use.

If it’s just a hindrance, then it’s not worth parading around. I have seen countless TikToks with the same caption of “I have xyz autism, not the one that makes me smart.” As if people are lesser unless we can fully benefit from their existence.

With all of these factors, we walk amongst millions and millions of people that either don’t know if they need to be treated because they don’t believe that their symptoms are severe enough, and others that blame any sort of “quirky trait” as the result of their mental state to gain benefits from the already highly stigmatized resources available to actual victims, which therefore makes the illness seem better to live with than it is. We call this glamorizing.

This is why your own research is very important. Talk to a specialist in your area or a trusted source if you feel you may be experiencing any mental illness. Google is very handy, but it’s not fully knowledgeable on the nuances of the human brain.

And though saying you have a blanket-term illness feels right at the moment, there are real people with these real difficulties, and your problem may be more easily solved than you think.

Michaiah Stephens is a 22-year-old english major from Durham, N.c.