A mental health diagnosis is a controversial thing. It’s too bad that it is, but it is. I have seen this in the larger culture and I’ve experienced this in my own work as a therapist. Perhaps you’ve personally experienced difficulties with having a diagnosis. There are a lot of reasons why this could be.

One of these reasons is that the beginning of our modern mental health world has been heavily influenced by its desire to be as reputable as the medical world. Like a younger sibling trying to be copy a popular older sibling. This desire has created biases that continue to cause confusion and harm. Biases such as:

• A mental health diagnosis is as scientific as a medical diagnosis, like cancer
• A mental health diagnosis is in the same category as a medical diagnosis
• Mental health disorders operate similarly to medical disorders…hence the use of the word disorder
• Mental health is a type of disease, and can therefore be diagnosed and treated like a medical disease

There are a lot of reasons why these biases are problematic. One of the biggest issues is the nature of consciousness. Until we can make more sense of that one from a scientific standpoint, the foundation of our mental health world is on shaky ground. We have lots of theories about consciousness, but very little good evidence so far. There are other issues, too, with these biases. I am not getting into those today. I want to help you today in a more practical, personal way.

Don’t get me wrong. We do our best to make sense of things while we are still figuring out the truth of these things out, and I empathize with that effort in our current mental health world. But the pressure to create a mental health model just like the standard medical model is not working very well. Many of the powers that be don’t want you to know this. And it may be hurting you or others you care about.

So how about a concept you can use to guide you in this issue in the meantime?

This is a big topic, and I want to keep it simple for now.

Quite frankly, a mental health diagnosis is a tool.

Tools are there to serve you. You are not there to serve a tool.

When you use a tool, you use it when you need it. You use it when it makes sense. You use it when it would be helpful. But you don’t use it when it isn’t helpful. You don’t use it when there are better tools to use. You don’t use it when you don’t need any tools right now. You don’t use it when it would hurt you.

A tool does not define you. It is not a fundamental part of you. It has no life outside of you. The hammer sits there until you decide you want to use it.

But what if the hammer could speak? What if it could boss you around and tell you that you should use it? What if it could tell you that you can’t live without it, or guilt-trip you when you decide a screwdriver would be more helpful? What if it could convince you that good people use hammers and lazy or bad people don’t use hammers? What if the hammer could convince you that it knows best for you and should be in charge of you?

In this thought experiment, you become a slave to the tool. You lose touch with trusting yourself to know when a tool is helpful, and instead attach your identity to the tool and think the tool defines you, directs you, manages you. It becomes your prison.

Certain aspects of the medicalized mental health model, whether intended or not, cause many to view their mental health in just this way. Once you receive a diagnosis, it is your parent, your master. It now has the power to define you. Your identity can become wrapped up in it. Then, all of the cultural ‘shoulds’ attached to that diagnosis begin to create walls all around you.

I am not suggesting that diagnoses are never helpful. There are a lot of issues with them, but they are helpful in many ways. They can bring relieving clarity or even save people’s lives sometimes. The main point of this article is this:

A mental health diagnosis is a tool that is there to serve you. You are not there to serve the diagnosis.

You are the one with the inherent self-worth, not the diagnosis. You are the one who lives in your body, not the people who diagnose you. You are the one who must decide how to use a diagnosis, for only you can live your life.

Having this relationship in the right order makes all the difference. I am not writing this to start an argument of ‘diagnosis good vs diagnosis bad’. I want you to take whatever views you have on this subject, and make sure you remember to stay in relationship to a diagnosis like you would a tool. Love yourself and guard your own life energy, not the energy of the tool. The tool is meaningless without you to wield it.

And a tool has no power to define you.

Search your heart, use wisdom, know your strengths and weaknesses, be honest with yourself, don’t act as if you know it all, love yourself unconditionally. But never buy into the unspoken pressure to put yourself in service to a diagnosis or to a person doing the diagnosing. A useful tool can be wonderful, or it can be harmful. You can use a hammer to build a house or break your own hand.

Regardless of where our mental health diagnostic world goes in the future, I have never seen it become beneficial to anyone who gets this relationship backward.

Use it when it feels like it is in service to you.

Don’t use it when you realize this would be more in service to you.

Feeling imprisoned or defined by a diagnosis will never help you thrive.