Turning psychiatric labels into identities

Lars Veldmeijer & Jim van Os (2026) express concern that people are increasingly turning to psychiatric diagnostic concepts, such as autism and ADHD, to provide a reason for their personal struggles and challenges in life, and with which they therefore come to identify. As they say, “people’s pre-diagnostic self-conception differs from their post-diagnostic one”. To use Ian Hacking's terminology, human kinds are created by such identification with psychiatric labels, which Hacking has called 'making up people' (see eg. Meerman et al (2026)). Advocacy groups further create what Hacking calls a ‘looping effect’ by making human kinds interactive, reflexive and self-promoting.

Such human kind diagnoses are often misunderstood as biologically grounded conditions residing in the brain, or natural kinds, which is a category mistake, as such diagnoses are merely descriptive (see eg. Faerje et al (2026) and previous post). The relief afforded by such a diagnosis, therefore, becomes dependent on a ‘life-lie’. The ever expansion of mental health services, with such services tending to offer overly simplistic panaceas, such as psychotropic medication and short-term counselling, is reinforced by such biomedical thinking. Such psychiatrisation of society has not really been dealt with by the UK government's Independent Review into Prevalence and Support for Mental Health Conditions, Autism and ADHD (see another previous post). Veldmeijer and van Os end their article with the question, "Are we, as a society, ... still capable of talking about and making sense of human suffering without relying on diagnostic concepts?". Any change, I think, will involve challenging advocacy groups, which the Review was not prepared to do. Their epistemic authority has tended to be supported by institutional power (see eg. another previous post).