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A few days ago, I came across this video from the NY Times, which I found extremely interesting and relevant. In it, a psychologist tries to draw attention to the proliferation of online content about mental pathology spread by amateurs with no experience in this field. One of the examples used is High-Functioning Anxiety, mentioned in the title. In this case, the definition perfectly applies to the generation of the most active social media users, who constantly need to be doing, seeing, hearing everything at once, causing high levels of anxiety. Not wanting to dismiss this process, because I agree that this is one of the main reasons for current anxiety, along with the difficulty of adjusting expectations as we constantly compare ourselves to thousands of people whose lives we have "filtered" access to through these networks; the video highlights the fact that this disorder is not an effective clinical diagnosis, but rather a hashtag. And it is mainly the people mentioned who will be more susceptible to this. The fact that there is a large amount of easily accessible information, not filtered by professionals, ends up increasing the likelihood that the less critical users will identify, at times, with possibly incorrectly classified disorders; or even those that do not fit their situation, leading to not only an actual diagnostic error but also to high and unnecessary levels of anxiety on top of an already potentially high base level. In a time of misinformation like this, it is easy to fall into some of these traps, and with this short video, the NY Times provides a great service with a very well-done warning and explanation. Have a great week! João Pedro Neto, MD
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