Why Your Identity Does Not Always Need a Diagnostic Label
Why Your Identity Does Not Always Need a Diagnostic Label
Are we overusing therapy speak? Here's why we should stop pathologizing every personality trait and start finding meaning in the mess instead.
I spent four years earning a psychology degree, which mostly resulted in two things: a mountain of student debt and a shelf full of books with messy annotations. If you ever borrow a book from me, you will see my thoughts scribbled in every margin. To me, annotating is free therapy. It is the place where I process the world without needing to fit my feelings into a neat little box.
Lately, I have noticed a shift in how we talk about our brains. We have become obsessed with labels. We use words like executive dysfunction to describe why we are procrastinating on laundry, or we label a simple bad mood as a clinical episode. While therapy speak has helped many people find their voice, I worry that we are losing something important in the process. We are losing the art of being human.
Not every tiny personality quirk or emotive episode needs a diagnosis. Not every heavy afternoon is a pathology. Sometimes, a quirk is just a quirk. Or worse, a phase.
It is a natural response to young adulting that can be quite overwhelming. When we rush to slap a clinical label on a personality trait, we often stop looking for its meaning.
We treat every bit of ourselves like a symptom to be cured rather than something to be observed...
In my annotated books, I find the freedom to be complicated. I do not have to be a set of symptoms. I can just be someone who is struggling with a specific paragraph or a specific memory. Introspection is becoming a lost art because we are so busy looking for a name for our pain that we forget to actually sit with it. Your pain is valid because you are feeling it, not because a manual says so.
If we immediately call it a disorder, we stop growing freely. We let the heavy introspection stop subconscious becoming.
I think we should reclaim the messiness of the human experience. We should allow ourselves to just be without needing a medical justification for it.
You are just living, and that is more than enough.
