Can psychiatric labels be abolished?

They will be one day. They will no longer exist because psychiatry's suppression and subjugation of human types will no longer exist nor will their be a need to homogenise the human race. Human difference will no longer be a cause of distress or disability.

Until that day a labelling system is necessary, perhaps. I'm so tired of thinking that I'm barely thinking straight. I can't think of another possibility but a scientific one, one which requires labels to assign the right 'truth' but perhaps this is a sign of my simplicity and the internal wasteland of my mind.

Unhappiness is, after all, a mental health label which makes it pretty much a psychiatric label or should be. It is effectively medicalised by psychiatry but isn't recognised as this, especially in the diagnosis of depression. When people need to label their misery they label.

The shapes and sizes of misery are the human types which have been identified as psychiatric labels using brain studies. These show different human types and different stages in people's lives. My misery is wanting death so I'm a suicidal type. Take this label away doesn't remove my identity nor does it say much about me other than I want to die. I am not unique in this respect and I am unique as me.

So why abolish the label? Well some people don't like them. They are sensitive to self stigma. I was once. Other people can be prejudiced about mental health labels too. They can also not know how to treat someone who is suicidal. They may end up treating them with 'kid gloves' rather than treat them like a human being.

This is why labels are a problem. They can stop people treating other people as human beings and equally. This is a sad state of affairs.

This is the reality of today but there is another reality. Doctors - or anyone seeking to treat a human being - need a label to direct their activities and make them meaningful. "Human being" is an important but irrelevant label for treatment because the right treatment can't be assigned for the individual.

The mental health system and psychiatric science is deeply flawed even beyond the fundamentals. This doesn't constitute a reason to make the system less scientific nor to abolish labels to assign the right treatment for an individual, not unless there is a mental health panacea which can be offered by the formal mental healthcare system. Unconditional love, for example, is not available on prescription.

There's the rub really. There is no panacea and without a one solution fits all there need to be labels. The ultimate labelling system would refine the label down to single label: the name given to the individual. The technology of mental health is far from getting close to being able to provide this sort of solution, let alone the solutions to my deathwish.

In the interim there still needs to be those stinking labels of human difference and pain.

Sent from my smartphone