A Diagnosis Doesn't Explain Who You Are

Hi! I'm Caroline, a psychologist from Amsterdam. This is my seventh post!
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A Diagnosis Doesn't Explain Who You Are
People are constantly developing themselves and searching for their identity. Whether we’re talking to ourselves in our minds or talking to others, we use language to define and explain ourselves: this is who I am, and this is why. Lately more psychological words are used in this process. There seems to be an increasing amount of people diagnosing themselves and others with mental illness.

If you look up the list of existing mental disorders you can see that there really is something for everyone. Anyone who wants a label, can find one that suits them.

The big mistake here is that a name like ‘ADHD’ or ‘depression’ or ‘PDD-NOS’ doesn’t explain what’s going on. It’s a name for some things that seem to be going on. And what's in a name? Some disorders are so broad that two people can have the same diagnosis without having any symptoms in common.

image by the amazing Jean Jullien

What currently seems to be happening a lot is people labeling others as autistic (usually for showing a lack of empathy), and identifying themselves as having ADHD (usually for having a busy mind). The vaguest one of all is ADHD (more on that in my next post). In many articles online it is written that adhd in adulthood can be more internalised; where children show busy behavior, adults have more of a busy mind and fewer visible symptoms.

Many people think that a psychological diagnosis will explain their symptoms. This is a common mistake, made in the media and sometimes even at universities; that we forget that ADHD is nothing more than a name that a group of psychiatrists in the US gave to a combination of behaviors or traits. It doesn’t explain the cause. Saying that your sense of restlessness is caused by your ADHD is like saying the fact that you’re so tall is caused by your length.

That means that any story about ADHD saying it ‘expresses itself’ or it ‘causes’ something doesn’t make any sense. This misunderstanding feeds a negative way of thinking about ourselves. We’re talking about mental disorders here, where the word disorder makes it sound like it’s a disease you can catch. But it literally means that some part of you or your life is functioning in a disorderly way (probably temporarily). Calling it a disorder also gives the impression that this is now a problem, and that someone else has to do something about it, like a doctor. We are forgetting that some things are nothing more than normal personality traits, normal reactions to a situation, or a combination of both. That doesn’t necessarily make it a medical problem, or even a weakness. We have traits that we or others don’t like; we put a disorder on it; we ask a doctor/psychologist/psychiatrist to fix us. Or our kids: plenty of healthy kids that enter puberty get sent to a psychologist by their parents because they get angry or sad for no reason sometimes.

Will having a louder-than-average voice soon be talked about as ‘having Loud-Voice-Disorder’ or LVD?

Just as ADHD, depression has become huge. The criteria for depression have become less strict since the DSM-5, meaning that if you don’t feel like doing anything, eat and sleep more than usual, feel tired and have trouble concentrating, and you aren’t properly socially functioning because of it, you technically qualify for having something called Major Depressive Disorder, even if the symptoms have only been going on for two weeks.

If you google what’s bugging/worrying you (and who doesn’t?) you will stumble across countless online test for mental disorders that prize themselves as being really quick (some tests for ADHD consist of three questions for example). These tests have high false positive rates, meaning that even someone ticking boxes for experiencing symptoms ‘somewhat’ or ‘sometimes’, the result is usually a warning signal saying you might have depression for example, and you should seek help. This too encourages the idea: ‘something is wrong with me’.
It also takes away from your responsibility to be the type of person you want to be (or are at least OK with). You already know if you’re okay or not, even before taking the test. Anybody who seriously takes an online test for depression already knows they’re not ok. Uncertainty and fear pull us towards explanations or causes of our suffering that reduce the amount of responsibility we have of it.

image by Vladimir Kush

We seem to be ‘overpsychologizing’ the painful things that are simply part of normal human life. We seem to be increasingly preferring to associate ourselves or others with a mental illness rather than with a character trait that is neither good or bad. Calling it a trait doesn’t mean it can’t change by the way. It just means that it is your job to change it if you want it to change.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you ever wanted to place yourself in a category of mental disorders or found comfort in having done so?