A new open-access review in Current Opinion in Psychology argues that psychiatric diagnoses are not neutral descriptions of distress. Instead, the labels can fix experience into rigid categories that alter identity, public perception, and clinical practice.
The article, by Lars Veldmeijer, Gijs Terlouw, Nynke Boonstra, and Jim van Os, draws on systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and cohort studies to show how diagnostic terms influence identity, public perception, and clinical practice.
“Psychiatric diagnostic labels can no longer be considered as mere neutral descriptors,” they write. “Instead, it is safe to say that diagnostic labels shape reality in problematic ways.”
“The initial goal of designing and maintaining labels was to facilitate research and standardize communication in mental health care. In the article, we have also established that, given the highly complex nature of mental distress, psychiatric diagnoses instead have become rigid constructs that define and confine human experiences.”
The paper opens with a familiar analogy. In 1933, a newspaper described a “whale-like fish” in Loch Ness. Once it was called a “monster,” perceptions shifted, sightings multiplied, and the myth hardened. Psychiatric labels, the authors argue, do the same in psychiatry when ambiguous signs of distress are fixed into rigid categories that take on a reality of their own.
Current systems, such as the DSM, describe experiences in binary terms. Yet research consistently shows that distress is gradual, dynamic, and multidimensional. Without empirical foundations, categories risk becoming static constructs that “do not carve nature at its joints.”
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I’ll take “things we definitely already knew from logic and didn’t need ANOTHER study on” for $600.
Oh, it’s paywalled, how good that must look to people just starting on their antipsychiatry path (the only people who would find this helpful). Good thing they can just search on the website and find probably at least a dozen other articles that said the exact same thing years ago. Or they can pay for exactly the same information today.
My god, please do better MIA, you’re stepping over actual survivors in preference to the “professionals” and “science” that tortured us. NO ONE wants to hear from these professional evildoers going “wow, am I maybe actually hurting people?” while we’ve been excommunicated from greater society and often imprisoned, raped and tortured for having learned this firsthand years ago.
This site is really just for psychiatric evildoers (all of them) to jerk each other virtue signalling until they feel like they’ve solved psychiatry by doing everything they were already doing except asking “what happened to you?” instead of “what’s wrong?”
ALL of the research on this site should point toward the natural conclusion that searching for drugs to fix life’s problems basically only ends in unfathomable tortures, and that PSYCHIATRY MUST BE ABOLISHED.
That’s the only conclusion one could draw if they were truly focused on social justice, but this website isn’t. It exists to defend psychiatry’s legitimacy as a “science” by gathering all these “professionals” who are just intellectually honest enough to acknowledge the truth that psychiatry isn’t working because it isn’t a science, but are too selfish to accept that this means their profession fundamentally cannot exist ethically.
No one who’s been tortured by these people wants to hear them trying to “rethink psychiatry” in whatever way lets them keep their jobs at all costs. MIA cares more about the feelings of “professionals” than the people whose lives they’ve ruined and I’m fucking sick of this, this should be OUR space to organize a revolution against psychiatry, not a paywalled garden for “professional” torturers to circlejerk each other about improving the torture profession because they’re such good, enlightened, ethical people, so much better than those professional torturers who DON’T accept that they do torture.
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If I’m not incorrect, anyone can become a “subscriber” on MiA for a $20 dollar donation. But I do agree, Dead Soul, “NO ONE wants to hear from these professional evildoers going ‘wow, am I maybe actually hurting people?'” including the scientifically “invalid” psychologists.
But please give everyone a little respect, including a possibly trying to be honest American psychologist, who is married to Mr. Whitaker. Who is probably terrified by the enormous systemic fraud, deceit, and lies of her industry, which have destroyed the entirety of her industry’s credibility, not to mention our entire nation.
I know that’s why I had to leave my ex-religion – “that’s me in the spotlight losing my religion” – due to their too paternalist psychological / medical / religious industries’ faustian “partnership.”
We aren’t the crazy ones, those trying to maintain Satan’s and Western civilization’s “bad systems,” that many American’s families risked life and limb to move away from, but unwisely brought with us, are the problem. But we are older and wiser now, so hopefully, we are the solution, as well.
We are the one’s who want to save American society, by ridding ourselves of the bad globalist systems … so hopefully, we are the solution, as well as the one’s who pointed out the too paternalistic bad systems. A little respect for the women is in order, boys. Pray to God.
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Dead soul, The link is provided in this article to read the review in full.
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About time someone “in the know” figured this out.
But they don’t have a good alternative system, do they?
It’s kind of like a known liar finally admitting he’s a liar. So what? We all knew it already.
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Laura, Thank you for your article covering this review on the harmful and lasting consequences of psychiatric diagnoses. While I was in cancer treatment, going through a hellish time with severe adverse effects of chemo, gushing nosebleeds, vertigo, tinnitus, prolonged insomnia from chemo drugs and the steroids, and a traumatic head injury due to dizziness, I was sent to psychiatrist under the pretense I would get “help with sleep meds”. I had always remained calm, stoic and respectful to all doctors, just trying to make it through the ordeal, but this young, arrogant, egotistical psychiatrist instead threw the DSM bible at me. Unbeknownst to me, at age 56 she gave me 4 major and severe psych ‘diagnoses’ (I had never been given before) and published a VERY defamatory psych ‘report’ to widespread electronic records. I would only discover these damaging labels and the absurd, false accusations about 2 years after cancer treatment ended when I began to question why I was being treated like a monster by all health care providers and was repeatedly denied health care services. I finally obtained a copy of this psych report and was shocked by what I read. I have been paying a high price for these false accusations and damaging labels for 15 years but the privileged psychiatrist remains on her high horse and refuses to amend or correct her unfounded, delusional ‘opinion’. I had hoped to warn others by putting a truthful review on RateMD’s but each time I posted a review it was strangely removed by ‘someone’. Also thankful for these psychiatrists in the Netherlands for speaking out on this matter.
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