Most people who know me and my practice (or have read my book: The Human Spectrum) are aware of my belief that diagnoses are destructive, both to individuals and to our society. Sometimes clients are very adamant that they want a diagnosis, which probably reflects why it’s a systemic problem. I express my concern that diagnoses move our focus away from the individual, just like any stereotype, and point to my Kierkegaard quote hanging on my office wall: “When you label me, you negate me”.
I’ve had people respond to this by saying they want a diagnosis to learn more about themselves. This leads to a super interesting philosophical discussion.
I would suggest that we cannot learn more about one thing by enlarging it into a bigger category. We CAN get some general information, but the enquiry takes us away from the individual thing/person.
Consider coming across a tree in the forest that we have never seen before. We would look at all the features of this tree to try to understand it. But what if we Googled “trees”? We would learn a bunch of information about the category that may or may not apply to this specific tree. And if this tree was the only one of its type, we might miss its idiosyncrasies because they weren’t delineated in the broader category.
We are each the only one of our “type”, by virtue of being human.
This often comes up with culture. If I know I am seeing someone who is from Sudan, I can spend hours researching Sudanese culture. It will give me LOTS of information, but I will have ZERO idea if it applies to this individual until I meet and get to know them. And if I go into that meeting with pre-conceptions because of the category, I am doing a disservice to the individual. I am stereotyping them. I am negating them.
We are all magnificent in our individual differences and the only way to know/understand ourselves and each other is to learn and celebrate those individual differences that make us who we are.
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