The Modern Bell Jar

When I was 14 years old, I was admitted to an inpatient facility.

Once there, I was told by a male counselor who asked me less than 20 questions about myself and my life that I had Bipolar Disorder and likely Borderline Personality Disorder. Though he said I was too young at the time for him to properly diagnose me, since I wasn’t an adult yet.

Spoiler alert: I had neither of those two diagnoses.

Instead, I was depressed and deeply struggling with grief over the loss of my best friend, who had died a year and a half prior. Like most American families, my family wasn’t great at holding space for grief, so I learned to repress my feelings.

I learned to use my restriction of food as a way to cope with the emptiness I felt inside and the nagging question in my mind that continued to ask, “What was this all for?”

When that didn’t work, I began cutting, sadly, a popular trend among many teens my age in the early 2000s, which begs the question: Why didn’t anyone think to question this social contagion?

Every girl in my unit was accused of having Borderline Personality Disorder or BPD. Yet, during my week’s stay at the unit, I already knew there was something off about this.

Among mental health professionals, there is a big problem of confirmation bias.

And we are seeing this trend again with how common diagnoses like ADHD have become, especially on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Which leads me to ask the question…when is it a diagnosis and when is it reflective of a larger social pattern?