> Gatekeeping trauma with a broad brush is never good in my mind.

I think this is emblematic of the problem with these clinical diagnostic concepts entering common vernacular: In a clinical context, diagnosing someone with a specific clinical term with a specific set of diagnostic criteria isn’t “gatekeeping”, it’s just being accurate and precise. Improperly diagnosing or over diagnosing a condition is not harmless and can bring its own unintended harms. Clinicians have a duty to avoid giving the label too broadly as this can have negative effects.

When these words escaped into common discussion, the idea of limiting the applicability of a term or questioning someone’s self diagnosis makes a lot of people uneasy. It feels judgmental or like we’re unfairly excluding people.

There is a real problem with the way these terms have been adopted to mean something divorced from their clinical definitions, though. When everyone has trauma, the word stops meaning something so serious and now has come to refer to generic realities of life. Now people suffering from serious trauma are actually underserved by the word, because someone immersed in TraumaTok has convinced themselves that they are in the same boat as everyone else with trauma too.

There’s another problem with the dilution of these words that the autism community has been dealing with for decades: When people start broadly diagnosing themselves with conditions despite not reaching the level of clinical diagnostic criteria, they start to move the window for what is considered representative of that condition. Parents of severely autistic children are starting to encounter problems where others are unprepared to handle or even react to their severely autistic children because the popular understanding of autism has shifted to include even self-diagnosed people who may have some slightly quirky behaviors or social skills a few grade levels behind their peers. It’s sad to encounter situations where people encounter a severely autistic person and actually reject autism as the explanation and insist something else must be going on because they’ve come to believe that autism is a relatively mild condition after encountering so many self-diagnosed or over-diagnosed people with autism.

Even clinical providers and educators are getting overwhelmed with parents trying to force TikTok diagnoses on their children. When finite budgets for special needs students have to be spread across 1/3 of the class despite only 1-2 children having actually significant handicaps, it’s not hard to see why “gatekeeping” these popular diagnoses is actually a good thing for those suffering from the conditions.