Opening doors or building cages? The adverse consequences of psychiatric diagnostic labels

Abstract

Psychiatric diagnostic labels can no longer be considered mere neutral descriptors for mental distress; the weight of evidence indicates that they shape reality, often in problematic ways. Providing accurate information about the scientific status of diagnostic labels helps minimize many of these problems. Academic psychiatry and psychology must therefore learn to resist the temptation to reduce human complexity to fixed labels, provide accurate information when labels are applied, consider to separate diagnoses from experienced distress, recognize patients’ experiences as legitimate perspectives, and, most importantly, develop the conceptual competence to design and integrate alternative human-centered approaches that go beyond diagnosis-centric practices.