tl;dr: get yourself a therapist who understands that the most important questions for you w/r/t to your mental and emotional well-being are
not whether you ‘really have’ social anxiety, or whether autism ‘really is’ just a disorder, or whatever.
> However, if having social anxiety becomes part of your identity, it becomes the lense that you see the world. TikTok makes it easy, but social media as a whole is identity obsessed by its nature,
I think this is as much a feature of that stage of personal development as it is of social media. Adolescence and early adulthood are periods in life when there's naturally a lot of focus on identity formation. I think the issue with diagnosis being taken as identity formation comes out of that background more than it does the nature of social media or out of medical diagnoses themselves.
It also (imo) comes from a scientistic approach to psychology: it starts with the premise that the diagnostic categories one finds in diagnostic manuals all correspond to real conditions in the world (realism) which divide the population into kinds of people (essentialism). But that forgets the purpose of those diagnostic manuals and their contents (to help mental health clinicians guide treatment plans) and the nature of the science and clinical practice here, which is driven almost exclusively using hypothetical entities we can't directly observe. The DSM's purpose is not to provide an ontology, or to identify essential features of the human mind, and certainly not to do so in a way with any kind of finality.
The other thing to think about is the kind of profound validation and relief that can come with gaining a ‘label’ for one's struggles, a framework for thinking about them, and references to communities where you can learn from other people dealing with the same things. That is huge, and it's really important to a lot of people when they first get diagnosed (whether with mental health or a chronic physical condition, for that matter). And it's natural for that to push one to see their diagnosis or the label associated with it as defining part of who they are.
That said, there are psychologists and psychiatrists who are also troubled by this, who are critical of ontologizing or essentializing approaches to their own fields. Go in with an attitude that you're looking for labels that are useful regardless of whether they're true, with an understanding that mental health exists not just in the patient but in their social relations to the whole of their society, that our diagnostic categories in 10 or 50 or 100 years will likely be quite different from the ones we have now, that many conditions with similar symptoms may be related or distinct in ways we don't yet understand, that as you work on things you might shed just enough symptoms of this or that thing to go from qualifying for diagnosis to no longer qualifying (despite the clear continuity in who you are, your personality and traits, etc.) and so on. You can find therapists who are comfortable taking an anti-realist, anti-essentialist approach which resists that mental habit of reification.