Researcher, Diagnose Thyself

A teenager scrolls through TikTok and finds a video explaining ADHD. Something clicks. "That's me!" she announces to her parents. "I have ADHD." When they suggest she see a professional, she bristles. "I don't need some therapist to tell me what I already know about myself. I've done my own research! I'm not going to let the medical establishment gaslight me."

She thinks she's resisting the system. She doesn't realize she's already been captured by it.

This is the strange paradox at the heart of our current self-diagnosis epidemic. People are rejecting therapeutic gatekeeping while fully accepting therapeutic categories as the authoritative framework for understanding human suffering. They're rebelling against the priests of psychology while worshiping at the same altar.

Christians are doing this too, perhaps especially Christians, because we sense something is deeply wrong with how our culture has psychologized the soul. However, we haven't been given alternative categories to name what we're experiencing. So we try to maintain distance from the secular psychological while still speaking the only language our culture has taught us.

Don't read what I'm not saying. I'm not dismissing real suffering. Mental anguish is real. Neurological differences are real. Some people genuinely need medical intervention. The church has often been cruel and dismissive toward those struggling with psychological pain, telling people to "just pray harder" or “well, God is sovereign,” while ignoring treatable conditions.

However, both the therapeutic establishment and those rebelling against it through self-diagnosis share the same fundamental error. They both accept that psychological categories are the ultimate lens through which to understand the human soul. The problem is not that psychological categories exist as limited descriptive tools, but that they have been promoted from clinical descriptions into totalizing interpretive authorities that claim to explain who we are.

The Rebellion That Accepts the Premise

Over the past several decades, we've witnessed what Philip Rieff called "the triumph of the therapeutic," the complete psychologization of human experience. What previous generations understood through moral, spiritual, or circumstantial categories has been systematically translated into psychological diagnoses.

The therapeutic worldview has colonized nearly every area of life. Schools diagnose children at astonishing rates. Churches bring in therapists to the pulpit rather than pastors teaching Scripture. The assumption underlying all of it is that psychological experts possess authoritative knowledge about the human soul that the rest of us lack, knowledge often treated as inerrant and challengeable only on its own terms.

Here's what makes this regime particularly powerful. It presents itself as liberating. "Finally," it says, "we can understand suffering without moral judgment. You're not bad, you're sick. You don't need repentance, you need treatment." But this "liberation" comes with a cost. You must submit to the experts. You must accept their diagnoses. You must adopt their framework for understanding yourself.

Many people, especially young people who've grown up watching their peers medicated into compliance, sense that something is deeply wrong with this arrangement. So they rebel by self-diagnosing. They claim the power to label themselves without institutional approval.

Self-diagnosis represents an attempt to democratize therapeutic authority while leaving the therapeutic framework completely intact. The self-diagnoser says, "I reject your gatekeeping. I don't need a psychiatrist's permission to know I have ADHD. I can recognize these patterns in myself without submitting to your institutional control."

But notice what's not being questioned: whether ADHD, trauma, anxiety disorder, depression, and the rest of the DSM categories are actually the right framework for understanding human suffering in the first place.

The self-diagnoser has accepted the fundamental premise of therapeutic culture. Psychological categories are authoritative. Human struggles should be understood primarily in therapeutic terms. The proper response to suffering is diagnosis and accommodation. They're just insisting they can apply this framework themselves.

This is why self-diagnosis doesn't actually free people from the therapeutic regime. It just multiplies therapeutic authorities from one centralized expert class to millions of individual self-interpreters, all still speaking the same language, all still reducing the complexity of human souls to diagnostic categories invented in the last fifty years.

Christian young people especially have been raised in a culture saturated with therapeutic language. From elementary school onward, they've been taught to understand themselves through psychological categories. Their teachers use them. Their parents use them. Even their pastors use them, having absorbed therapeutic language as the "loving" way to talk about struggles.

At the same time, these same young Christians often sense, rightly, that something is off about the therapeutic worldview. It doesn't fit with what Scripture says about human nature. It seems to explain away sin. It makes them passive recipients rather than moral agents responsible before God.

But they haven't been given an alternative vocabulary. They know therapeutic categories don't quite fit, but those are the only categories they have. Scripture talks about the heart, about sin, about spiritual warfare, about sanctification, but these don't translate neatly into the struggles they're experiencing, at least not in ways anyone has taught them to see.

So they accept the therapeutic categories but insist on applying them without institutional mediation. They self-diagnose. They claim the labels but resist the gatekeepers. What they don't see is that they've already surrendered the most important ground: the right to understand their souls in biblical rather than therapeutic categories.

The Real Issue is Authority

Self-diagnosis is not primarily dangerous because it's often wrong, though it frequently is. It's dangerous because it claims interpretive authority that Scripture says belongs to God and is mediated through His church.

The fundamental question isn't "Do you have ADHD?" The fundamental question is "Who has the authority to interpret what your struggles mean, to name your identity, and to determine what you need?"

Scripture is unambiguous. We are not self-interpreting beings. Jeremiah 17:9 tells us the heart is deceitful and desperately sick. Who can understand it? We need the Word of God. We need the Spirit's illumination. We need the wisdom of mature believers. We need time, testing, and communal discernment.

Self-diagnosis short-circuits all of this. It says, "I can understand my heart. I can name my condition. I can interpret my suffering. And you must accept my interpretation without question."

This is not a Christian posture. It's not humility, and it's not wisdom.

When therapeutic categories, whether self-applied or professionally diagnosed, become the primary lens through which we understand ourselves, they function as rival authorities to Scripture. They claim to tell us who we are, what's wrong with us, what we need, and how others should treat us. That's the job of God's Word, applied by God's Spirit, in God's community.

Some conditions involve genuine biological impairment that limits agency. Scripture recognizes this category under weakness and affliction, not guilt. The danger is not recognizing impairment. The danger is universalizing impairment as identity.

When someone says "I have a broken leg," they're describing a temporary condition that doesn't define who they are. When someone says, "I am someone with depression" or "I am ADHD," the category has moved from description to essence.

Once a diagnostic category becomes identity, several things happen. Patterns that Scripture identifies as sin requiring repentance are reframed as symptoms requiring accommodation, without spiritual discernment or moral examination. Habitual worry becomes Generalized Anxiety Disorder without asking whether there's sinful distrust of God's provision. Lack of self-control becomes ADHD without considering whether undisciplined habits might be contributing factors. The diagnostic framework removes moral agency and replaces it with victimhood.

When your diagnosis is your identity, change becomes threatening rather than hopeful. If you are anxious, then becoming less anxious means losing yourself. The goal shifts from Christlike transformation to comfortable management of a permanent condition.

When diagnostic labels become primary identity markers, they eclipse our fundamental identity as image-bearers redeemed by Christ. Diagnostic identities require constant validation and protection. Identity in Christ is unshakeable because it is based on God's action, not your psychological state.

When individuals claim final authority to name their own reality, the community loses its ability to form people toward maturity in Christ. Formation requires being wrong about yourself and being corrected. It requires friction, challenge, and refinement. But if your self-diagnosis is final, you're insulated from the very process God uses to grow you.

Biblical Categories for Human Suffering

The alternative is to recover biblical categories as primary for understanding the human soul, and to let therapeutic categories, when useful, serve in a strictly limited, secondary role.

Scripture gives us rich categories for understanding suffering. Sometimes you're not sick. You're experiencing the normal weight of living in a world corrupted by sin, death, and futility. That's not a disorder. It's the human condition requiring hope in Christ's return. Scripture recognizes that our inner lives are complex, that we're often blind to our own motivations, that we need external input through community, time, Scripture, and the Spirit's illumination.

Sometimes what looks like purely psychological struggle involves spiritual attack or demonic oppression. This does not negate biological factors, nor does it excuse us from careful pastoral discernment, but it reminds us that reality is larger than the therapeutic frame can account for.

Scripture expects us to struggle, to face trials, to wrestle with remaining sin, to grow gradually through suffering. Not every difficulty requires a diagnosis. Some of it is just the normal Christian life of being transformed through tribulation.

When we recover these categories as primary, therapeutic labels might occasionally serve a limited purpose. But the diagnosis never becomes your identity, never explains everything about you, never removes moral agency, and never functions as an unfalsifiable claim that shuts down spiritual formation.

For pastors and leaders, stop allowing diagnostic categories to function as conversation-enders. When someone presents a self-diagnosis, respond with compassion but also with biblical categories. "I hear that you're struggling. What does Scripture say about your concerns? Are there ways you're not trusting God? Are there sins you need to repent of? Let's look at this together through Scripture first." Create a church culture where biblical categories are primary.

For those who've self-diagnosed, I say this with genuine care. I know you're suffering. But consider whether the categories you've adopted are helping you or trapping you in a framework that can't offer real hope. Consider submitting your experience to mature believers who can help you understand it through Scripture. Fight to keep your identity in Christ as primary. You are not fundamentally "someone with depression" or "someone with ADHD." You are a child of God, united to Christ, being conformed to His image.

If Scripture does not have interpretive authority over your suffering, then Christ does not have lordship over your life.

That's the logical conclusion of accepting therapeutic categories as the ultimate framework for understanding yourself.

When you insist, whether through self-diagnosis or uncritical acceptance of professional diagnosis, that psychological categories are the authoritative lens through which to understand your soul, you've made a choice about who interprets your reality. You've chosen therapeutic authority over biblical authority. You've chosen the DSM over Scripture. You've chosen your own insight over the wisdom of God mediated through His Word and His church.

The modern world wants you to believe that therapeutic categories are neutral, scientific tools that exist alongside your faith. They're not. They're rival interpretive authorities that make comprehensive claims about who you are, what's wrong with you, and what you need.

You must choose which authority you will submit to.

Will you understand yourself primarily through categories invented by people who reject biblical anthropology, categories that have no room for sin, no category for spiritual warfare, no concept of sanctification, and no recognition that your fundamental problem is alienation from God?

Or will you understand yourself primarily through Scripture, through categories rooted in the eternal wisdom of your Creator, who knows you better than you know yourself, who made you for Himself, and who is transforming you into the image of His Son?

You cannot have it both ways. One must be primary.

The question is not whether you should ever seek medical help or whether biology matters. The question is which framework has final interpretive authority over your soul.