In this Universe, all people run on the same common denominators (matter, energy, space, time, thoughts, location, form), but the interrelationships of these things and one’s personal experiences create unlimited combinations.
Never forget that a label is a convenience for communication, it isn’t the thing itself. Labels are a necessary thing in the field of communication. They are a symbol used to represent some real thing, such as one or more of these common denominators.
Labels only really become an issue when one confuses the real thing with the label and thinks they are the same.
Labels are also an obligatory element of psychiatric diagnoses. The psychiatric billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), is the standard handbook of “mental illnesses” as determined by a show of hands at the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
Through psychiatrists’ false diagnoses, stigmatizing labels, easy-seizure commitment laws, brutal, depersonalizing “treatments,” thousands of individuals are harmed and denied their inherent human rights.
Using the DSM, a psychiatrist need only label the patient with a “mental disorder”, prescribe a drug and bill the patient’s insurance or Medicaid. The psychiatrist with the DSM in hand can try various labels on the patient as if they were different sizes of apparel until he finds one that either fits the patient’s symptoms or comes close enough to allow him to bill the patient’s insurance.
With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and labeled them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. Even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific or medical validity to these “disorders.”
Why do we say psychiatric labels are stigmatizing?
Well, what is a stigma? A common definition is a mark or characteristic indicative of a history of a disease or abnormality. Is there a stigma associated with mental distress? First of all, the psychiatric manifestation known as “mental illness” is not a disease, it’s a symptom. And let’s face it, what a psychiatrist calls “abnormal” is just a label for something they don’t like.
The questions to ask are: Do any of these “disorders” or “mental illnesses” actually exist? Does the DSM have any relationship to a patient’s actual condition, or is it just a convenient and simplistic method of compartmentalizing symptoms without actually working to isolate the true cause of the patient’s real problems?
Since there are no clinical laboratory tests for these “diseases,” making lists of behaviors, applying medical-sounding labels to people who engage in them, then using the presence of those behaviors to prove they have the illness in question is scientifically meaningless.
Thus we call the DSM a fraudulent mechanism for falsely diagnosing symptoms as diseases so that a drug to suppress those symptoms, rather than cure them, can be prescribed and billed — making a patient for life, as the root cause has not been found and treated.
The real stigmatization is coming from those that benefit from labeling behaviors as diseases to be “treated” despite the complete lack of medical or biological evidence to support them.
Psychiatric labels themselves are the stigma.
Moreover, the campaign to “stop the stigma” of mental illness is a pharmaceutical marketing campaign.
Fraudulent diagnoses perpetrated by the DSM obscure the role of family, drug abuse, undiagnosed and untreated medical conditions, nutritional deficiencies, stress, illiteracy, and other factors contributing to mental distress. The result is often further stigma, discrimination and social exclusion.
Recommendation
Government, criminal, educational, judicial and other social agencies should not rely on the DSM and no legislation should use this as a basis for determining the mental state, competency, educational standard or rights of any individual. Contact your local, state and federal officials to express your viewpoint about this.
