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.