No, mental disorders are not adjectives
Psychology and psychiatry are often criticized for reducing people to labels. That is, by try to explain what makes us unique, the mind and our own personality, through numbers, statistical trends and categories relatively rigid.
Of course, if we look to the past it is easy to see the consequences of what lack of empathy and humane treatment can do in psychiatry and in the scientific study of behavior: forced lobotomies, crowding in psychiatric centers that could hardly be called like this ...
However, neither in psychology nor in medicine is it necessary to confuse the person with their illnesses or mental problems in order to work in these areas. Neither mental disorders are adjectives nor the function of psychology or medicine is to translate our essence through a diagnosis.
The use of labels in psychology
Something must be clarified: the use of well-defined categories (or as delimited as possible) in psychology, such as psychopathy or intelligence, it is not something that is bad in itself .
Psychology tries to explain a part of reality scientifically and, for that, must use concrete concepts , that can be understood by the entire community of scientists in that area of knowledge regardless of their cultural context.
In other words, in science it is necessary to escape as much as possible from ambiguous definitions; you have to speak properly. Depression can not be defined as "a state of mental negativity in which vital pessimism is transmitted", but to understand what it consists of, it is necessary to learn a series of very specific symptoms and established by scientific consensus .
That is to say, that psychology works from concepts that speak to us about characteristics of how we think, feel and act from the point of view of an external observer that compares different cases among themselves and reaches conclusions about how a person thinks, feels and acts. group of individuals. The task of psychology is not to define what exists only in a person , but the one to discover the logics that allow to explain the mental and behavioral mechanisms of a multitude.
This means that a psychologist does not treat a person as if he or she were totally and absolutely unique, but rather works from the principles and generalities about the human mind and behavior that they know. In fact, if not, his work could be done by anyone who attributes a special sensitivity when it comes to being "a human soul touching another human soul".
Psychology is not metaphysics
The problem comes when either the patients or the psychologists themselves and psychiatrists believe that the scientific categories that are used in psychology and psychiatry they are direct reflections of the identity of the people . That is, when the names of mental disorders, personality traits or symptoms become synonyms of the essence of people (whatever that may be).
One thing is to agree that pragmatism is going to work starting from well defined and defined concepts, and another is to assume that all of one's mental life is summarized in a diagnostic picture or the result of a personality test. This last option not only does not form part of the normal functioning of psychology, but also supposes an overreaching.
The error is that, sometimes, you come to hold the belief that the task of psychology is capture the identity and essence of people, tell us who we are .
However, as much as the etymology of the term "psychology" is what it is, the purpose of this scientific and intervention field is much more modest than that of revealing the essence of each one; that task is reserved for metaphysicians.
Psychology is content to be useful when it comes to providing concrete solutions to material needs: to improve the objective living conditions of people, to provide models capable of better predicting how collectives act, etc.
That's why the idea of mental disorders and mental disorders, unlike adjectives, they only exist because they are useful within the framework of coordinated efforts that is mental health and behavioral science, and for nothing more. They are concepts that make sense in the clinical field and in certain branches of science to respond to specific problems.
In mental health there are no essences
In addition, it is worth remembering that in psychology almost all mental processes are understood as part of a cycle that unites the person with their environment: we act according to what is happening within our own organism, but what happens inside our organism also depends on what happens around us .
Not even from a scientific perspective can a mental disorder be understood as something that starts and ends in oneself, as if it were part of something intrinsic to one's own being. Each person maintains a connection in real time with their environment and could not exist (neither alive nor dead) apart from this.
This idea, by the way, would not only be good to take into account when thinking about diagnostic concepts, but also when thinking in terms that are used as adjectives beyond mental health.
Disorders as labels
Asking a mental health specialist to capture the essence of a patient through a diagnosis is like asking a gardener to express the rose's rose by pruning.
The scientific categories as those that serve to explain what are mental disorders they only make sense as part of an effort to provide solutions to very specific needs , defined and based on the material, and do not have it as labels that can be used to summarize all the complexity of the personality of a single individual. That is not their function.
