Should Mental Disorders Have Names?

By that logic, we shouldn't name species either.

A substantial portion of the things we refer to as "mental illness" are the after-effects of trauma. When you break your leg and you can't walk for 6 months afterwards, people don't say you have a "leg illness". It's not some unspecified thing which caused your leg to stop performing like most people's legs. It's a fracture. If set properly and given time to heal, it will resume normal functioning. If it's never set, or if it gets reinjured, it may lead to a permanent disability.

Minds can be broken as well. Any one who has ever experienced an abusive relationship knows this. Survivors of child abuse know this. A "mental fracture" isn't primarily physical, like a fracture of the leg, but it has a similar effect in terms of impairing the organ to perform its role correctly.

But mental injuries can be "set" and healed, just like physical ones. Perhaps not 100%, perhaps there will always be scar tissue or some version of impaired mobility where the injury occurred. But injuries heal with time, given proper care.

I am aware that this concept is fairly at odds with the western conception of mental health with its myriad disorders, all of which are unexplained and presumably lifelong diseases. I attribute this entire weird world of DSM pseudoscience with its gargantuan and ever-growing list of labels to the massive social pressure against dealing with the actual problem of trauma and abuse.

Correctly diagnosing someone with a "mental injury resulting from trauma/abuse" would lead to some extremely difficult conversations, which most people (even the ones experiencing the abuse) would prefer not to have.

So your father broke your arm at age ten. And broke your arm annually every year thereafter because he's an abusive asshat. And doctors decided to label you with some bizarre form of osteoporosis that must be the underlying cause of your frequent and mysterious fractures. And when you finally smack dad in the head with a hammer as an adult in self defense, it goes in your file that you are not only crazy but also dangerous and violent, even though you've never been violent with anyone else ever.

Better solution: You need a restraining order on your father who should not see you without court supervision while he finishes up his jail sentence for assault and battery and child abuse. He goes to therapy. You get put in a safe environment with adults who don't break your arm annually while claiming it's you that's defective.

I do wonder if we're absolutely fucking up the minds of a generation of people by giving more and more people the made up labels. They come hand in hand with stigma and insecurity. We've been loosening diagnostic criteria continually on the dubious grounds that we "better understand" mental illness in the past. When it gets down to brass tacks we just decided as society labelling more people as "different" and treating them differently was for the best. Beyond the concern I have for individuals more and more people are qualifying for disability assistance every year and its unsustainable financially.

I do wish we had a model of mental health that was more focused on addressing more granular individual strengths/weaknesses and one less prone to just saying a broad swathe of people who are nothing alike are part of the same "spectrum".