We are living in an age where psychological explanations are prioritized above all others. Indeed, therapy speak has permeated everyday life. It has taken over conversations and relationships, leading people to claim boundary violations, accuse others of gaslighting, or see narcissists everywhere they go. Armchair diagnosing is no longer frowned upon and, in fact, seems encouraged. People are spotting symptoms and claiming disorders without sufficient evaluations or neutral clinical opinions. Pop pathology—the tendency to interpret everyday experiences through a clinical lens and pathologize them—is becoming increasingly common.
And while there is some good that comes from increased access to mental health knowledge, we are also seeing harm stemming from this trend. People are increasingly over-indexing on psychological interpretations, reducing themselves and others to diagnostic labels rather than allowing room for nuance, change, and other explanations. Therapy language has become defining and limiting instead of elucidating and liberating.
Over-Identifying with a Disorder Can Be Problematic
One reason we should be concerned with the modern obsession with psychological language is that people are making disorders their identities. Whereas in the past, people would hide any mental health issues, now they become overly attached to them. Not everyone, of course, but there is a significant trend of diagnoses engulfing self-concepts so that a disorder is the primary (or only) way a person understands themselves and presents to the world.
There is some undeniable good in integrating a mental health issue into your self-narrative. Doing this can lower stigma and help people better understand and accept themselves. It can infuse people with hope and bolster their recovery by having an explanation for their struggles and possible ways of addressing it. Also, being a part of a group, such as “neurodivergent,” gives a sense of social belonging, provides community, and can improve self-esteem. There are many appealing parts of having a disorder instead of amorphous, non-pathological struggles or suffering.
However, over-identifying with a diagnosis can also do harm. Those who internalize a disorder as a central part of their identity instead of seeing it as a part of their experience can actually have poorer well-being and outcomes because they see their disorder as permanent, expect their symptoms to persist, view themselves with more stigma and negativity, and attribute other personality traits ot the disorder.
People who let a disorder overshadow all other aspects of themselves may find themselves constrained instead of freed by the diagnosis. They unknowingly limit their growth by putting themselves into a category and seeing every thought, feeling, and action as stemming from their disorder. It’s essentially identity foreclosure, where people prematurely commit to an identity or role without enough exploration, limiting flexibility, preventing them from an evolution of self-understanding, and reducing their openness to new interpretations.
We Must Move Past the Clinical Lens
Therapists are taught how to assess clients using a clinical lens, and then they are taught how to stop. They learn that a psychological disorder is a beneficial way of viewing someone when it increases understanding and informs a treatment plan, but that it is only one way of viewing a person. Therapists are reminded that every client is unique with their own history, hobbies, quirks, and patterns, and that we shouldn’t only see them as a diagnosis, lest we reduce their individuality.
Many people are not moving past the clinical lens. In a diagnosis, there is relief, community, and identity, and, understandably, people don’t want to let go of those benefits by deprioritizing a disorder in their self-concept. But a rigid grip on a fixed sense of self does not support mental wellness or personal growth, especially when the identity in question is dependent on having a psychological struggle.
Those with a mental health issue should certainly recognize, accept, and integrate it into their self-understanding, but they do not need to amplify it to the sole defining quality of their personality. Because in doing so, they risk reducing themselves to a list of criteria, where everything about them is a result of their disorder instead of arising from the broader psychological, relational, and developmental forces that shape every human being.
A Better Way to Accept and Integrate a Diagnosis
Instead of overcommitting to a diagnosis as an identity, people should view themselves as a whole person who also has a disorder. Identity integration expands the self; identity engulfment constrains it. It narrows self-concept instead of expanding it, reduces agency and the sense of change, and shapes expectations of functioning that can ultimately become self-fulfilling.
When people allow a mental health issue to engulf their personality, it limits a sense of agency, makes them feel change is not possible, and creates self-fulfilling expectations where, because they believe they’ll have a symptom forever, they ultimately do. Yes, some disorders are lifelong, but many can be well-managed so that symptoms don’t cause as much distress or functional impairments, and when people view disorders as fixed identities, they are likely to see symptoms as immutable, thus underestimating their own capacity for growth and change.
We want people to move away from, “I have ADHD, and that explains everything about me, from feelings to actions.” And move toward, “I have ADHD, and it explains some experiences and patterns, but it is not the only thing that defines who I am as a person.”
Just like how we should allow people in our lives to be complex and nuanced, and not define them by a clinical word, we should give ourselves the same space to be unique, evolving, and more than a diagnosis.