EDITOR’S CORNER
As human beings, we’re built to name — to label — the world around us. We see or hear otherwise sense something. We decide what it is, defining its presence as best we can. We assign a word to it, using the language itself to frame and understand and classify a sports car, a book genre, a feeling, a flower.
Usually we use old words; sometimes we come up with new ones. Maybe it’s a newly discovered species of orchid that’s just different enough to merit its own label. Maybe it’s some fresh brand of heavy metal. But maybe it’s something that isn’t actually different. Something that hasn’t actually changed.
Human emotion, for instance. Who feels what and why: Since the dawn of history, that hasn’t changed. But how people are viewed, whether with understanding or judgment? That has. Those we once saw as “worry warts” now get diagnosed with “generalized anxiety disorder.” Those once seen in “mourning,” who perhaps wore black for years, now get labeled with “prolonged grief disorder” — which was introduced in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). The history of the DSM and its many editions is packed with newly contrived disorders and some deletions, too (e.g., homosexuality, once pegged as a “sociopathic personality disturbance”), all of which only emphasizes the lack of hard science underscoring it.
These days, with the omnipresence of social media and the viral trends that overtake them, diagnoses and other clinical terminology have flooded the mainstream — and kids and teens are especially susceptible. This is why self-diagnosis has become a major concern, a subject I touched on in my most recent Editor’s Corner and Zoe Cunniffe tackled in her first deeply reported article on campus mental health.
But even beyond the DSM, new language is constantly emerging in conversations around mental health. Faux-clinical concepts are everywhere. As psychologist Naomi Fisher describes in her new piece for the British Psychological Society (which I excerpted as an Around the Web), the shifting narrative includes “peri-psychiatric” terms and disorders that aren’t listed anywhere in the DSM or ICD (the International Classification of Diseases).
One such concept is “RSD,” or “Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria,” a term coined by psychiatrist William Dodson in the 2010s to describe some of his clients with ADHD — and “spread like wildfire” among people who were eager to find a reason, a name, for their emotional states. “The only problem was, of course, that it wasn’t actually a reason,” writes Fisher, who says the word kept popping up in her own practice with adolescent clients. “Dodson described something he saw in his clients, but that didn’t mean that he had discovered the reason why they felt that way.”
But this is why labels stick: because we are always on a quest to not merely comprehend ourselves but to convey that comprehension to others. Some people turn to them and at times even feel empowered by them, because everyone wants to be understood. And diagnoses, disorders, labels, words — they seem to offer a way.
In evolutionary terms, all of this makes perfect sense. How can we communicate with each other without descriptive language? How can we identify ourselves? How can we tell stories about who we are, what happened to us, how we felt, and what we need? This is how humans function, whether sitting around a fire during the Ice Age or under bland fluorescent bulbs today. “I am a hunter. I killed a mastodon. It is too heavy for me to carry alone, and I need help dragging the carcass.” Hunter. Mastodon. Heavy. Help. “I am a mother. My child has a broken arm. Please set it.” Mother. Child. Broken. Set.
I know I’m stating the obvious, here. But the obvious frequently gets sidelined within the current psychiatric paradigm and the dominance of its language in the culture at large. Long ago, my mom fabricated a word to describe fabricated words: “made-upsky,” which was a made-upsky itself. The DSM and broader narrative are full of made-upskies — terms that are created and defined by committee, then slapped on people in distress.
The problem is that such language doesn’t encourage listening. Instead, it influences how adults and children alike are seen: As disordered. As bipolar. As borderline. As OCD. As fill-in-the-blank. Too often, the labels matter more than the emotions and the experiences behind them. Someone wounded by life might say: “I was abused, and I hurt” or “I fought in the war, and I’m shaken” or “I buried my wife, and I’m sad.”
But those words carry less weight — in way too many contexts — than the words that come with diagnostic codes, particularly in an era when trends sweep the internet and persuade people, youths especially, that something’s wrong with them. Such words have far more power than they merit or anyone needs.
We’d all be better off without them.
—Amy Biancolli, Family Editor
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