We do a lot of categorizing when it comes to mental illness. Many acronyms are involved: BPD, MDD, OCD and, oh, a hundred more. Sometimes we use the names, which range from general to specific: anxiety, schizophrenia, type two bipolar disorder--and that's just three of them.
These labels are useful. Medical information gets accumulated and tagged according to label--xyz drug works on people who fall into file 1 and file 2, but this other drug works for people in file 3. And it's not just drugs; therapeutic techniques and the like are similarly profiled. Overall, that information gets used to predict which treatment is most likely to work for which individual.
But we forget that diagnoses of mental illness are different from diagnoses of bodily illness. Diagnoses of mental illness are guesses that a person's behavior and experiences best fit a certain profile rather than another. Diagnoses of mental illness are wholly socially constructed--the idea of insanity itself is a social construct. That doesn't mean it's not real or important, but that does mean it's different from pneumonia or a staph infection.
I wish that diagnoses of mental illness were treated as descriptive rather than categorical; that they were regarded (correctly) as mutable, fallible, and all those other human things.
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