In the world of mental health, there is a lot of discussions around the role/importance of diagnosis, today we are going to talk only about how anyone with experience with a mental health problem may see it.
One argument is that diagnosis makes what you are experiencing valid, a common element of a mental health problem is that people feel like they are going “Crazy” so to have a mental health professional put a label to what you are experiencing may make it easier to understand and deal with as it gives reason to your experiences.
Others believe that diagnosis is harmful in that it dehumanises the individual. This means that a person is arguably seen more like a mental health problem or a patient/sufferer rather than a human being. This may mean that a person struggles more with a loss of identity amongst many other things on top of what they are already living with.
That is a very brief description of a couple of examples of these conversations but here are many others, if you would like to read more into this, visit websites such as http://www.adisorder4everyone.com/
What I think is important for you to take from this is that, you can look at your mental health in whichever way you want, if you want a diagnosis and believe that you will be empowered by that, then go ahead! But if you don’t care as much about or disagree with diagnosis then that’s completely fine too!
Everyone’s experiences with mental health will be completely unique to them, and so you have to do whatever best suits YOU!
If you need any help or resources regarding your or somebody else’s mental health then check out our get help page
*This blog is made up of unfiltered opinions from several young people and doesn’t represent Platfform4YP’s opinion as a whole*