Another little piece on mental labels.

The disorder and disease thing.

Yesterday or the day before I read a post from a guy who was totally elated to finally know what he was suffering from, mentally.

There were several official disorders he’d recently received, and the most interesting, at least to me, was one that’s called NOS.

NOS stands for Not Otherwise Specified, and ‘it is used to note the presence of a condition where the symptoms presented indicate a general diagnosis within a family of disorders (e.g. depressive disorders, anxiety disorders), but don’t meet criteria established for specific diagnoses within that family’.

The new term for NOS is ‘unspecified disorder’.

This means, if I loosely translate it, ‘you have a couple of symptoms but they don’t officially add up enough to form a ‘real’ disorder’.

You’re sort of depressed.

Or kind of anxious.

Really?

Because these seem to be things that every human being experiences now and then.

And putting a label on something that doesn’t fit the existing collection of labels (that were totally made up by people anyway), feels very, very off to me.

As if you’re sorry that you can’t truly and officially classify the person’s experience, and now they get something for comfort.

One of the things that REALLY struck me was when the guy said ‘Now all of the pieces of the puzzle start falling into place, and many of the things that happened in my life finally make sense!’.

Uh.

Okay.

Well, if it’s helpful, if it’s soothing: why not, right?

But let me explain what really happens here, and why this is absolute bullshit, by using a weird example that I’ve used before, but works quite well.

Let’s say you walk into the kitchen and you haven’t cleaned up in a while.

A couple of weeks, even.

There are used pans and crusty plates everywhere, empty jars, smelly old pieces of bread, rotten fruit, moldy shit, raunchy cups, and lots of flies and ants.

Now let’s say, for the sake of this argument, that very important Kitchen Organization and Layout Specialists have decided to call this collection of disorderly, dirty things ‘Shnoocks’.

Still with me?

Shnoocks.

Now, if anybody would call you and asked ‘Can I come over for dinner?’, you could say ‘Nah, not a good moment, I have Shnoocks’, and they’d get the picture.

Shnoocks is the random name for a sum of randomly identified things, and we’re used to that and have learned to agree to it.

So, kinda helpful.

But nobody in their right mind would say that the warzone in your kitchen is CAUSED by Shnoocks.

Right?

That would simply be a weird case of completely flipping the situation.

Still, that’s exactly what happens when people are labeled with a mental disorder or affliction.

Just imagine the kitchen therapist asking you about your situation, checking off the different elements.

‘Crusty plates? Check.’

‘Empty jars? Okay, check.’

‘Flies AND ants? Check.’

‘Well, hm, it’s obviously a case of Shnoocks.’

And you’d be sitting there, scratching your head, relieved, saying ‘NOW it makes sense, all the time it was Shnoocks! Yes! I see that a couple of years ago I had many moments of mild Shnoocks, my parents used to have episodes of Shnoocks, but for me, it’s gotten out of hand, and it’s SO obvious now!!’

This is somewhat ridiculous, I know.

But this is also exactly how the mental health system works, how we got it backward, and how the names for things transform into the CAUSE of things.

That’s like saying that Shnoocks created the mess in your kitchen.

(By the way: I’m not talking about personal responsibility here; this example is purely to paint a visually helpful picture).

Using this way to go about stuff, to ‘explain’ things, you can make literally anything work.

Just pick a random selection of things in the world, give it a name, and then, when one of the things from the selection occurs, you can now claim that it’s the result of the name.

This is pure mental trickery.

It’s ridiculous to give a bunch of random things a specific name, and then all of a sudden make that name responsible for the appearance or creation of those things.

It creates things and causal connections that don’t really exist but are used to build a whole fucking paradigm.

This is not about the denial of suffering or misery or confusion or darkness: this is about seeing it how it is.

It’s about natural mental resilience, the acceptance of normal human experiences, and working from health instead of sickness.

This is the opposite of creating afflictions that are not biologically induced, that often turn against us when we start to believe they’re part of who we are, and open up a whole world of dubious pharmaceutical solutions.

Most of the present mental health methods and models are aimed at killing monsters, suppressing monsters, or learning to cope with monsters.

What if we recognized that those creatures don’t even exist?

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(Photo by @dbmartin00, for Unsplash)