Self-diagnosis : Feeling, fiction or function?

There is a curious moment happening in UK culture where people seem more confident diagnosing their own minds than ever before, the symptoms can be vague, the tests non-existent, and yet the conclusion is firm: “I have ADHD,” “I have anxiety disorder,” “I’m on the spectrum.” What interests me is not the truth of these claims but what the act of claiming them says about the way we now think about the mind. Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers give us two very different ways of understanding what’s going on, and both lead us to some uncomfortable conclusions.

You may remember from an earlier blog that Daniel Dennett thinks we place too much emphasis on 'the self' and thinks that much of our percieved consiouisness is a manufactured fiction of model cxreated by the brain. Dennett would tell you that the whole thing is a storytelling exercise. Human beings are compulsive narrators, and the mind gives us a user-interface to keep track of our behaviour. You don’t see the machinery; you see the icons. When someone announces they “have” something, Dennett hears them reorganising their inner desktop. If the label helps them navigate life more smoothly, then good. If it becomes an excuse or a fixed identity, then the story has overreached. For him, the danger isn’t dishonesty but mistaken metaphysics: treating a narrative shortcut like a neurological fact. The mind becomes confused about its own functonality and starts to model the world around it based on a false conclusion about its own perceived 'mental health'. For Dennett the real risk is that we create a self fulfilling prophesy when we self diagnose.

Chalmers hears something different. When people self-diagnose, he thinks they are trying to articulate the feel of their own conscious life. A person reaches for a label not because they’re fashion-driven but because their inner world has a certain texture that demands recognition. The problem, in his view, isn’t that people tell themselves stories; it’s that the vocabulary we have is far too crude for the richness of human experience. If someone says they have anxiety, he’s inclined to believe they’re groping for a concept that almost fits but doesn’t quite capture the actual phenomenology humming beneath it. Where Dennett sees overinterpretation, Chalmers sees underdescription.

This difference matters because it shapes how each philosopher thinks self-diagnosis affects agency. Dennett worries that turning a behavioural frustration into a disorder invites a kind of moral outsourcing. “I can’t do it because of my ADHD” is, to him, the mind surrendering before it has even fought the battle. He’s not being heartless; he’s warning that a story that feels comforting today may become a cage tomorrow. Chalmers takes the opposite tack. Understanding your inner life, even imperfectly, is the beginning of taking charge of it. Naming experience gives you leverage over it. For him, the real trap is forcing people back into generic categories like “lazy,” “sensitive,” or “disorganised,” when what they are actually wrestling with is the raw fact of conscious suffering that needs its own vocabulary.

So you end up with two portraits of the modern self-diagnoser. Dennett sees a person trying to manage their behaviour through narrative tools, sometimes well, sometimes badly. Chalmers sees a person trying to give voice to the undigested quality of their internal life. Dennett wants to audit the story; Chalmers wants to defend the experience. And the contemporary landscape, with its online symptom lists and algorithmic self-help, sits right in the middle of their disagreement: are we narrating ourselves into disorders we don’t have, or are we finally finding the language for mental states that have always been there?

The truth, as usual, probably borrows from both. The stories matter. The experiences matter. But whatever else you think about the trend, it is striking that the two leading philosophers of mind can look at the same cultural moment and see entirely different phenomena. Maybe that is the clearest diagnostic of all: whether you lean Dennett or Chalmers determines whether you think the problem is that people know too little about their minds, or that people are being seduced into thinking they know too much.

While I was writing this blog I went down a rabbit hole and pondered on where AI sits in this discussion. People use AI to self-diagnose but could an AI diagnose its own responses and determine that it has mental health issues. If this interests you I have written an additional blog Which will be published here in a few days time.