Psychiatric Labels Confine More Than They Clarify, Researchers Argue

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.”