Pathologizing is a way of containing and controlling deviations from the norm, which means that anything that seems like a problem to a contemporary society is considered either crime or disease. That's how homosexuality ended up in there. It was deemed harmful to society and the person who had it. In this case, and in others, it is a way to identify, contain, and then punish those who don't obey social conventions.
Diagnoses and labels from the DSM control and regulate what is or isn't worthy of treatment. There was, for example, a major controversy about gender dysphoria being in the DSM because it indicates that gender non-conformity is illness, but takin' it out meant that insurance companies wouldn't relegate funding to people who wanted hormone therapy or reassignment surgery. Its decisions on these things therefore make determinations on resource allocation.
The DSM rigidly defines mental problems as binary, on-or-off. You meet a certain number of symptoms, therefore you have the disease. You don't, so you're fine. Individual details get lost under the broadness and rigidity of labelling and people slip through the cracks or get categorized and treated in ways that don't help them. This is resource allocation again, as well as errors in methodology.
Treating this sort of thing as a question of mental illness, which is to say disease, is in some respects metaphorical. That is, in common language, disease and illness are considered problems of a biological nature with the body which need to be treated to restore the body to a fully functioning state. It doesn't refer to the mind which is sometimes a matter of a chemical unbalance, yes, but sometimes it's environmental damage, sometimes it is not following the standard demonstration of things, sometimes it's habits and behaviors, sometimes it's a state of being that you'd like to get surgery to fix. Pulling all of that together under the concept of disease turns those which are not biological problems into metaphors of biology. It makes pathology out of things that aren't from literal pathogens.
[The main points are not brief. Sorry, Dave. He pauses, then.]
One of the reasons I don't like to term myself 'gay' is because I don't like the idea of being part of a culture that limits and defines me by my sexuality. At the same time, I understand how important it was to identify that way for people in the past. It gave them an identity to form communities with, a way to find each other and to organize for political action. For some people, saying it made it real or helped them understand themselves better. When it came to labelling my sexuality, I've always felt false and caged in, in the manner of needing to live up to certain expectations and requirements. So it isn't a thing that helps me, and it bothers me when others apply that label to me.
I think all the same things about labels in sexuality carry through over. It can be damaging and limiting, and you can lose yourself under generalities and expectations. But. [Dirk looks down. It's still hard to say, and his words slow over it.] It helped when you said I was suicidal? It made it feel more like a valid thing I could ask for help with, instead of just a thing that was fundamentally broken about me because I am in every possible way a failure at being a human being.
no subject
Diagnoses and labels from the DSM control and regulate what is or isn't worthy of treatment. There was, for example, a major controversy about gender dysphoria being in the DSM because it indicates that gender non-conformity is illness, but takin' it out meant that insurance companies wouldn't relegate funding to people who wanted hormone therapy or reassignment surgery. Its decisions on these things therefore make determinations on resource allocation.
The DSM rigidly defines mental problems as binary, on-or-off. You meet a certain number of symptoms, therefore you have the disease. You don't, so you're fine. Individual details get lost under the broadness and rigidity of labelling and people slip through the cracks or get categorized and treated in ways that don't help them. This is resource allocation again, as well as errors in methodology.
Treating this sort of thing as a question of mental illness, which is to say disease, is in some respects metaphorical. That is, in common language, disease and illness are considered problems of a biological nature with the body which need to be treated to restore the body to a fully functioning state. It doesn't refer to the mind which is sometimes a matter of a chemical unbalance, yes, but sometimes it's environmental damage, sometimes it is not following the standard demonstration of things, sometimes it's habits and behaviors, sometimes it's a state of being that you'd like to get surgery to fix. Pulling all of that together under the concept of disease turns those which are not biological problems into metaphors of biology. It makes pathology out of things that aren't from literal pathogens.
[The main points are not brief. Sorry, Dave. He pauses, then.]
One of the reasons I don't like to term myself 'gay' is because I don't like the idea of being part of a culture that limits and defines me by my sexuality. At the same time, I understand how important it was to identify that way for people in the past. It gave them an identity to form communities with, a way to find each other and to organize for political action. For some people, saying it made it real or helped them understand themselves better. When it came to labelling my sexuality, I've always felt false and caged in, in the manner of needing to live up to certain expectations and requirements. So it isn't a thing that helps me, and it bothers me when others apply that label to me.
I think all the same things about labels in sexuality carry through over. It can be damaging and limiting, and you can lose yourself under generalities and expectations. But. [Dirk looks down. It's still hard to say, and his words slow over it.] It helped when you said I was suicidal? It made it feel more like a valid thing I could ask for help with, instead of just a thing that was fundamentally broken about me because I am in every possible way a failure at being a human being.