You’re welcome — keep the posts coming!

I’ve been pondering the idea of language and power since I read your reply a couple days ago. My first thought was that the power in oppressive/stigmatizing language comes from the authority figures (and surrounding system) that have created it and perpetuate it. (i.e. medical doctors and counselors define mental health vs mental illness, diagnoses, and treatment and their assumed expertise gives all these definitions their power.)

Which made me wonder if creating a new language/jargon would only be powerful if the group creating it was already assumed to have authority. I’ve seen examples of groups of people taking the destructive power out of language, usually taking words intended to be insults and owning them with pride (the best example I can think of at the moment is ‘queer’ being adopted with pride in the LGBT community which took the ‘sting’ away from it being used to insult/berate people).

So now I’m intrigued by the idea of adopting new language/jargon. My guess would be that fueling the movement with pride and a sense of community/belonging would be the most effective. But I’m curious to see what you had in mind!

While there are undoubtedly people who benefit financially from our current system of diagnosis and medication (ranging from pharmaceutical companies to insurance companies to individual mental health providers), I believe the vast majority of these people are well-intended and not malicious. But, as you pointed out, being well-intended doesn’t mean what is offered is inherently helpful.

I agree with your observations about the magical thinking engaged in by clinicians in diagnosis and treatment (I’ve found myself falling into that way of thinking at times!). This confirmation bias in mental health treatment is unscientific at best and self-fulfilling (in a potentially harmful way) at worst. If clinicians start with unproven assumptions (e.g. diagnoses are caused by underlying brain/biological dysfunction) and look for evidence/examples that confirm this assumption while explaining away evidence/examples that aren’t consistent with the assumption, then this skews perception of reality.

More importantly, if patients are told repeatedly that they are broken (different terms are usually used like ‘chronic illness’ and ‘underlying brain disorder’ but when combined with telling them there’s no cure and it’s often lifelong, that message gets across) and treated like they are broken, they are more likely to believe they are broken and to act/think in ways that reinforce the idea that they are broken.