A psychologist thinks we are too quick to label everything. I agree:
Children and adults are diagnosed with mental disorders based on their behavior in a fast-paced world, and not on their personal internal world. One much-discussed scenario occurs when a child acts up in school, and the teacher or other school personnel suggests that the child has attention-deficit disorder and needs medicine. The ADD diagnosis is so prevalent today that it’s losing its reliability as a useful diagnosis.This sloppy labeling is arrived at from observing someone’s behavior. Yet, this process avoids any in-depth critical assessment and establishes a superficial picture of the person, ignoring the fact that every individual is a complex social being.
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There’s always a small wave of articles about diagnosis-abuse, but the juggernaut crushes forward.
Having practiced psychiatry for 20 years now, I have observed this as well.
Paul Chodoff, with the perspective of 20 years of practice, has called what is going on now “furor diagnosticus”.
Though most of my practice, I redirected patients from thinking about diagnostic labels, explaining that they are tools for the doctor to use, but don’t always enhance self-understanding and should not be adopted as an identity or seen as a defect. Now people want to know the diagnosis, are led by the media and internet to greatly overvalue the signifgicance of the label seeing it as a reflection of a precisely identified pathophysiology instead of the rough sorting of symptomatic syndromes that it really it. They then assume that x diagnosis equals y drug and all will be well. It usally doesn’t.
One might think this would be more true in psychiatry than psychology but unfortunately it is not true. Psychological testing is likewise vastly oversold, and people get a test that “proves” or “reveals” ADHD and that is it, the explanation for all–when in fact it is a diagnosis made on history. The same is true with bipolar disorder, but based on a mania scale, kids get put on expensive drugs that make them fat and diabetic, but don’t solve the behavioral problems that require patience and a full court press of psychosocial intervention.
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