Swipe, scroll and self-diagnose: How Instagram turned healing into a hashtag

Written by Dr Ranjini Krishnan for The New Indian Express

Scroll through your Instagram feed and you'll find it: words like boundaries, trauma, anxious attachment, and healing splashed across pastel carousels. Your inner world is trending. Mental health has gone mainstream—and that's mostly a good thing. We talk more openly about therapy, normalise vulnerability, and share resources that once felt taboo.

But there's a quieter shift underneath this wave—one that philosopher Jan De Vos calls psychologization. It's what happens when psychological language stops being a tool for understanding and becomes a cultural default—a way of describing or pathologizing everything. Every friendship, breakup, job, and mood get filtered through a psychological lens until we start to speak, think, and even feel in therapy-speak.

From the Couch to the Feed

De Vos, in his book Psychologization and the Subject of Late Modernity, describes psychologization as the way modern societies manage people—not by repressing them, but by encouraging endless self-analysis. Instead of asking "What’s wrong with the world?", we're trained to ask "What's wrong with me?"

Social media supercharges this. On Instagram, self-understanding becomes content. The line between introspection and performance blurs— suddenly, your healing journey has a colour palette. The "therapy aesthetic"—all beige tones, candles, soft fonts, and talk of boundaries—is soothing, but it also flattens complexity. Healing looks tidy, branded, even monetizable.

The era of self-diagnosis

Enter the age of the self-diagnosing subject. The hashtags say it all: #ADHDTok, #AnxiousAttachment, #NeurodivergentCulture, #InnerChildHealing. The internet offers a language of explanation, and people grab onto it. For many, this is deeply validating—finally having words for what they feel. But it's also a slippery slope. What begins as self-awareness often morphs into self-pathologizing.

"I'm so avoidant" replaces "I'm scared of closeness." "My inner child is triggered" replaces "That really hurt me."

The danger isn't in having language—it's in getting stuck there. As De Vos might put it, we become "psychologized subjects"—constantly diagnosing, narrating, and correcting ourselves, as if we were our own therapists and patients. This splitting and doubling of self and constant deployment of diagnostic gaze is tiring us. But we have to do it as it is trending.

When the self becomes an algorithm

Instagram's algorithm thrives on emotional relatability. The more a user engages with mental health content, the more it feeds them similar material. The Instagram algorithm has a knack for figuring out your psyche faster than you can. Watch one video on burnout, and your feed fills with content about people-pleasing, inner children, and emotional neglect. This isn't coincidence—it's design. The more you engage, the more the algorithm feeds you similar emotional states. Your sadness, anxiety, and curiosity become data points.

When psyche becomes data, it gets quantified, categorized, and targeted. The subject is not only psychologized but also 'datafied'—their moods and vulnerabilities monetized through engagement metrics.This is the platformization of the psyche, where emotions become content, and introspection becomes engagement. It's not just that we consume mental health culture—we perform it. The language of therapy becomes the grammar of self-branding.

Trends like #MentalHealthCheck, #TherapyTok, and #SoftGirlHealing perform wellness as lifestyle. Yet this constant self-exposure risks collapsing the distinction between healing and performing.

The "authentic self" becomes a content strategy. The language of trauma is aestheticized, stripped of context, and recycled as emotional capital.

Healing or hustling?

There's a quiet pressure underneath all this: the pressure to always be working on yourself.

Healing becomes another productivity goal—measurable, postable, monetizable.

But what if healing isn't about constant introspection? What if we're allowed to just be—unoptimized, unbranded, un-analyzed?

Psychologization turns social issues into private problems. When burnout becomes "poor boundary management" instead of a symptom of exploitative work culture, or loneliness becomes "anxious attachment" rather than social fragmentation—the system stays invisible while the self takes the blame.

Towards collective care

Maybe the antidote to psychologization isn't more therapy-speak but more community-speak.

Because true healing has always been political since the wounds we carry are not only personal but shaped by power, inequality, and history. To heal, in a deeper sense, is to reckon with the systems that made us unwell—the extractive labour cultures that burn us out, the patriarchal ideals that make us shrink, the capitalist rhythms that confuse rest for laziness.

We need to reinvent the language of therapy without letting it cage us. We can know our patterns without becoming them. Reclaiming therapy means returning it to its radical roots—not as a mechanism for adjustment, but as a space for awakening. This is a practice of collective clarity, tenderness, and refusal to normalize what hurts us. We need mental health practice that is aware of the importance of community and context to remind us that psyche is not a brand and healing is not performance.

(The author is the founder of Sradha Culture Lab, a knowledge initiative that works on questions around Gender, Culture and Psychology.)