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At my roommate’s birthday party recently, I noticed a set of tapered dinner candles flickering dangerously in the breeze from an open window. When everyone headed upstairs to the roof, leaving the apartment empty, I suggested we blow them out. My roommate waved me off, but I decided to do it anyway — just to be safe.

Later that night, one of her friends pulled me aside.

“Do you think you have OCD or something?” she asked. “No,” I replied. “What makes you say that?”

“Well... because of the whole candle thing,” she said.

If this had been an isolated incident, I probably would have shrugged it off. But over the past year, I’ve been handed a surprising number of armchair diagnoses by friends, family and acquaintances.

Reassuringly, it’s not just me: a colleague tells me about her Pilates teacher who enquired if she had ADHD; a friend was asked on a first date if she has anxiety. These types of conversations — well-meaning, often casual, but increasingly reliant on medical terminology — have become an inescapable part of life in the post-therapy-speak era.

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Now that people are armed with a lexicon of therapy-speak, the language of mental illness is being used more casually — and often inaccurately. It’s common to hear people use it to describe their own behavior or moods. More recently, though, I’ve noticed that language being turned outward, with strangers, acquaintances, friends and colleagues increasingly handing out diagnoses ranging from narcissism to anxiety.

Each time it’s happened, I haven’t been offended by the suggestion that I might be neurodivergent or have a mental illness. What has bothered me is that someone unqualified, who barely knows me, feels entitled to assign me a medical diagnosis.

It seems that as therapy has become more common, so too has our confidence in using its language — often without any clinical knowledge. In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, psychiatrist Dr. Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell wrote that she had noticed more young women coming into her office and announcing their own diagnoses with conditions such as ADHD, OCD, anxiety and depression, before she had had a chance to examine them. She said that the women would float around these terms “almost before telling me their names.” Dr. Garfinkle-Crowell wrote that the patients had arrived on her couch having “researched their symptoms on Instagram; they’d taken TikTok quizzes about them; they had cross-indexed their conditions with those of their friends.” According to a 2025 survey conducted by Thriveworks, it is estimated that 95 percent of Americans encounter therapy speak daily, and more than 1 in 3 of those people encounter it on social media.

Georgia Kulok, a psychotherapist at Madison Square Psychology in New York City, believes the phenomenon has come from our human need to label things. “It's just how our brain works. It's basic psychology,” she says. “It’s easier to label people to try and understand them, and say, ‘You fit nicely inside the bubble.’”

Kulok says that labelling people this way often “reduces a person down to their behavior” when “we're so much more than one thing we've done.” Even with her experience, the therapist will hesitate to diagnose people until she’s really gotten to know a patient and completed a thorough assessment. “Just by knowing someone, you only get one snapshot of who they are in this moment right now,” she says. “And even if you know someone really long term, you don't know their inner thoughts and what's going on underneath it all.”

While many of these interactions are well-intentioned, diagnoses can also be weaponized to shut people down or make them feel abnormal. “You see it a lot in arguments, when people decide ‘oh he or she is a narcissist’ and it’s a way to end that interaction,” says Kulok. “It’s a dangerous game.”

Sadi Fox, a therapist and owner of Flourish Psychology, a private practice in New York City, agrees that this dynamic can become “dangerous, judgmental and unfair.” “When you don't know a person, and you're making a sweeping accusation, it’s doing exactly what we don’t want in the field, saying ‘there’s something wrong with you,’” she says.

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One term Fox hears frequently is “borderline,” used colloquially to refer to either Borderline Personality Disorder or Bipolar Disorder, particularly during periods of interpersonal conflict. “People will suggest someone’s bipolar because their mood goes up and down, but that is a very human trait,” she says. “It’s a very, very serious condition that often requires medication, and it’s not something to joke about. Telling someone they have a personality disorder feels overblown and unfair.” Often, Fox adds, it’s a way of saying, “I don't want to go there with you, so I'm just going to give you a label.”

There can, however, be something positive about these conversations when they come from a place of genuine empathy. Finding common ground with someone through the shared experience of a matching diagnosis can give people a way to connect and feel less alone. “People [sharing diagnoses] and connecting and having empathy and creating closer relationships because of it, great,” says Fox. “Maybe they’re talking about a shared experience of anxiety, or the emotional changes related to PMDD [Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder].”

The growing comfort around mental-health language is, in itself, a sign that the stigma surrounding it is shifting. That stigma certainly hasn’t disappeared, but people are increasingly willing to talk about their feelings and seek help — and that can only be a good thing. The problem comes when greater awareness gives us too much confidence in our own ability to diagnose what’s going on.

Fox sees both sides of that shift in her examination room. “Sometimes clients will come in with a pretty good roadmap of where they've been, what's bothering them, and where they need to go.” Others, however, have gone down a rabbit hole of misdiagnosis. “It can be tough when somebody comes in with a diagnosis for themselves and you don't really see it yet, or you don't agree with it,” she says. “You don't want to be against their client story, and you want to support and acknowledge the symptoms that are true for them. But I think it can go wrong when they come in with an overdiagnosis and start catastrophizing.”

People may also reach for a diagnosis out of genuine concern when they see a friend struggling. Kulok says there are circumstances in which raising concerns can help someone recognize that they might benefit from professional support, but she cautions against making a diagnosis based on a hunch or something you’ve read online.

“If you’re really close with someone and you’re coming from a place of, ‘Oh you should check this out; it could help you, then it may be OK,’” she says. “If you’re just diagnosing for the sake of diagnosing, then people should stop and ask themselves, what is the point of this? Am I trying to help? Am I trying to open a conversation or close one?”

Looking back, I don’t think my roommate’s friend meant any harm when she unofficially diagnosed me with OCD. Maybe she was just trying to make small talk; after all, therapy-speak is very much in the colloquial dialect. Whatever the intention behind her comments, the interaction has stayed with me, and I now often wonder whether my ordinary impulses are being microanalyzed by others. I just hope that the next person who decides to start their psychiatric evaluation of me leaves the diagnosis up to the professionals.