It is worth acknowledging how far we have come; we now have awareness months, community training, corporate wellness programmes, celebrity confessionals, TikTok therapists, and so on. By every measure of visibility, mental health has never been more discussed. The silence that once surrounded suffering has, for the most part, broken. That matters. For all the conversation though, the numbers are not improving. Suicide rates, anxiety and depression continue to climb, particularly among young people. Something is not adding up. ALSO READ: Why Africa must invest in brain and mental health Here is the unpopular opinion: talking about mental health is not fixing it. Algorithm-driven mental health content does not reward recovery, it rewards engagement. And nothing drives engagement like identification with suffering. The result teaches people to locate their identity in their diagnosis, to catalogue symptoms as personality traits, and to treat every difficult emotion as evidence of a condition. ALSO READ: After years of treating trauma, a psychiatric nurse faced her own Scrolling through symptom checklists every night is not helpful. It is a different kind of harm. There is a clinical concept known as symptom amplification, where intense focus on a symptom can heighten the experience of it. The mental health content machine is conducting a mass experiment on some of the world’s most vulnerable people and calling it support. ALSO READ: Kwibuka 32: Seeking mental health care is not a weakness The conditions being claimed are not random. Depression, anxiety, trauma, and ADHD have become the most commonly claimed of the internet's self-diagnosis era. Each is real. Each is serious. Each is being casually applied to experiences that, while genuinely difficult, do not meet clinical threshold. ALSO READ: Echoes of remembrance: Nurturing mental wellness during Kwibuka Depression is not a bad week or a season of low motivation. It is persistent and functionally debilitating; it robs people of the ability to feel pleasure, maintain relationships, or get out of bed for weeks. ALSO READ: Trans-generational trauma: Why we should be on the lookout Clinical anxiety is not nervousness. It is disproportionate, uncontrollable, and disrupts daily life even in the absence of a real threat. Trauma is not a hard conversation or a disappointing childhood moment. Trauma is the nervous system's response to an overwhelming event it could not process. It lives in the body and reshapes how a person experiences safety. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition present since childhood, involving chronic impairment in attention regulation, impulse control, and executive function across multiple settings, not a distraction from a phone or boredom during meetings The gap between clinical reality and social media language matters because when everyone has depression, the word stops carrying the weight of the people who are actually drowning in it. Borrowing these diagnoses to describe ordinary human struggle does not build solidarity with people who are suffering. It quietly erases them. This is not about gatekeeping pain. Hard seasons, stress, burnout, and grief are real. None of those need a clinical label to be valid or deserving of care. But when we reach for a diagnosis instead of sitting with what we are feeling, we trade honest self-knowledge for a borrowed identity. If we are serious about mental health - not the brand, but the actual human suffering underneath it - then the work must look less like campaigns and more like policy. Therapy and psychiatric care should be covered by insurance the same way treatment for a broken leg is. Schools should have qualified counsellors who are actually accessible. Employers should be held accountable for psychologically unsafe workplaces. Psychiatric patients should not be discharged into isolation and uncertainty, because leaving a hospital without follow-up care is not treatment; it is postponement. And we need to check on people privately. A direct message or a phone call to someone who is struggling matters so much. We have to be willing to be inconvenient about this, loudly and consistently, until something truly changes. The writer is a psychiatric nurse, exploring the emotional landscapes we rarely talk about.
