Rich scholarship in psychology and sociology has conceptualized mental health diagnoses as dynamic, socially constructed and politically embedded. Critical perspectives argue that diagnoses are shaped by diverse interests, their meanings negotiated in everyday interactions. Despite these contributions, the question of how individuals come to seek a mental health diagnosis remains theoretically underdeveloped. In psychological literature, focus has been given to experiences of mental health conditions, discourses of particular diagnoses and critiques of diagnostic systems. Less emphasis has been placed on diagnosis-seeking – a processual phenomenon concerning individuals and unfolding in social and political contexts.

Today, discourses about mental health proliferate on social media, conflicting public narratives about self-diagnosis emerge and barriers to support persist – a background that points to the importance of theorizing the process of diagnosis-seeking. To have a transformative potential, such theorization has to consider individuals’ meaning-making practices and the ways their agency is manifested, enabled and constrained.

This paper presentation outlines a preliminary conceptual mapping for developing a psychological theory of diagnosis-seeking grounded in critical perspectives on mental health. Drawing on scholarship in the sociology of diagnosis and critical health psychology, as well as insights from an ongoing constructivist grounded theory study of adults seeking an ADHD diagnosis, I propose conceptual avenues centered on: (1) issues of individual agency, (2) the processual aspect of diagnosis-seeking and (3) the role of digital spaces in this process. I argue that advancing theory in this area can enrich psychological understandings of how individuals construct meanings of diagnoses and navigate contemporary mental health systems.