Stop Reducing Yourself to Mental Health Labels

From romance to identity, labels can shrink us. Real connection starts when we see people—not diagnoses.

Social media amplifies the trend of self-identifying through psychiatric labels, but real connection thrives when we see each other as whole people instead of case studies. Biba Kayewich

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

In her 2024 book “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up,” investigative journalist Abigail Shrier turns a spotlight on the mental health industry and the unintentional harm it has inflicted on adolescents and teens. Psychologists, school counselors, teachers, and parents all looked to therapy as a way to produce happy and emotionally healthy children. Instead, Shrier argues, their well-meaning efforts have brought record-breaking numbers of young people being diagnosed as “challenged,” traumatized, suicidal, and anxious, among other emotional and mental problems. She writes, “Forty-two percent of the rising generation currently has a mental health diagnosis, rendering ‘normal’ increasingly abnormal.”