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.”

Meanwhile, our society’s therapeutic approach to personality, obstacles and troubles, and life itself has gradually and subtly slipped into the culture at large, affecting our language and our notions of character, virtue, and romance.

Who and What Are You?

Freya India is a young, whip-smart UK writer with her finger on the pulse of her generation. In her essay “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore: We Are Products with Labels,” she begins with this bold pronouncement: “Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.”

India goes on to explain that our therapeutic language derives from the modern urge to name and explain habits and personhood. We strip away mystery and eccentricities and replace them with labels, many taken from pop psychology books and magazines. “We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people,” she writes. “Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses.”

Once-admired personality traits also fall victim to this bastardization of language. “We can’t talk about character either,” India says. “There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious.”

That old sweet song of love, romance, has also taken a hit from therapy-speak, according to India: “We can’t accept that we love someone, madly and illogically; no, the enlightened way to think is to see through that, get down to what is really going on, find the hidden motives. Who we fall for is nothing but a trauma response. ‘You don’t have a crush; you have attachment issues.’ ... This is the healthy way to think, that previous generations were so cruelly deprived of.”

That’s irony in the last sentence, in case you missed it.

According to India, without giving the matter much thought, we are exchanging enchantment, eccentricity, and wonder for theories, diagnoses, and labels.

Psychobabble: A Lighter Look

In her satire “Therapy,” poet Mary Jane Myers provides readers with a tongue-in-cheek sampler of additional therapy-speak phrases. The italics are hers:

Help! I can’t stop writing psychobabble! No matter what I pen, it comes out gabble.

I scribble nonsense verses all the time, self-actualize through crafting metered rhyme.

Long past the age of addled, callow youth, I’m still endeavoring to find my truth.

That I’m quite co-dependent is a worry. Perhaps I’m borderline? My self seems blurry.

“Sit down, be quiet!”: my elders’ sovereign word. I soothe my inner child. She’s seen and heard.

“You mind your manners,” Mother lectured me. Now mindfulness refers to Buddha’s knee.

Priests taught hellfire’s the price for mortal sin. No. Merely my bad choices do me in.

My kin who push my buttons when they’re rude have issues. Calmly, I assay each mood.

My cousin—feckless drunk—supposedly (I must be kind!) is in recovery.

I’ve always known that gossips cause great hurt. They’re toxic people: stay on high alert!

Before, a liar had his pants on fire. Today, he gaslights like a suave vampire.

I stuff my feelings at huge psychic cost. A primal scream might clean my mental fust.

These couplets are a game of hit and miss. Applaud me, please! Then I can claim my bliss!

If we make even the slightest effort to listen to everyday conversations, we certainly see this corruption of language at work. Who has not heard the word co-dependent used to describe a mother-daughter or spousal relationship that in an earlier time we might have envied? Or how about a friend or relative announcing they have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), a term once reserved for soldiers suffering mentally and emotionally from the hell of combat?

In my teaching days, at least once a year a parent would tell me that her son—it was usually a boy—was OCD because he kept his room tidier than his siblings. Not so long ago, an acquaintance of mine in his 60s informed his fellow workers that he couldn’t send out emails or keep lists because he’s ADD (attention deficit disorder), a condition that apparently occurs only when he’s on the job.

Labels Lay the Bricks for Victimhood

Some of us may smile at this reckless usage or brush it aside, but in “Rethinking Mental Health: Challenging the Dangers of Labels,” Padraic Gibson warns:

“Labelling individuals with mental disorders can be harmful. ... This can include stereotypes and stigmatizing terms, which can lead to biased psychological labelling. Negative or limiting language perpetuates stereotypes and creates harmful labels that influence how individuals are perceived and treated by others. ... Labelling can overshadow understanding and lead individuals to adopt the identity of a mentally ill patient, even when their experiences are entirely normal given their life situations.”

When we plaster these labels on ourselves or on others, we erase some of the mystery of being human—and create victims.

Other therapists have likewise encouraged people to avoid therapy-speak in everyday conversation. In his YouTube video, “Psychiatric Labels Become Gen-Z Identify,” Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring explains why youth are so prone to describing themselves and others with these taglines and why they showcase their condition on social media, and warns them of the perils of these self-revelations. A number of articles at “Psychology Today” shed light on the damage done when psychiatric terms like bipolar, narcissist, or borderline personality disorder are casually attached to friends or family members or referenced in self-diagnosis.

Embrace the Mystery of You

Freya India writes: “There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. ... We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads.” She also makes clear that the rest of us, to one extent or another, are also snared in this dangerous web of words and feelings.

Having set forth the damage done by therapy-speak, India delivers a way of escape from this with blunt clarity:

“So free yourself to experience, not explain. Be brave enough to be normal. Do not offer up your feelings and decisions and memories to the intrusion of the market, to the interpretation of experts, to be filed as deviations from what the medical industry decides is healthy. Leave yourself unsolved. Who knows; it’s a mystery. Written in the stars. From somewhere unknown. Holding on to your personality is a declaration that you are human. A person, not a product. No other explanation needed.”

“Leave yourself unsolved”—that’s the essence of Frey India’s message to her contemporaries and to the rest of us.