Don’t Cope with your Mental Disorder Diagnosis. Disqualify It.

Healing as diagnosis disqualification

You receive a mental disorder diagnosis when your mental processes are such that they inhibit your ability to do what you want to do severely and chronically. Stated otherwise, you qualify for a mental disorder when your psychobiological processes have strong negative (i.e., goal-regressive) effects for an extended of time.

Mental disorders are social constructs. This means they are categories that track material processes and convey cultural-personal meanings. The social construct “strike” is a category that conveys where the baseball went (tracks material processes) and means the batter doesn’t get to take a base (conveys cultural-personal meanings). Similarly, the social construct “clinical depression diagnosis” is a category that tracks certain neurobiological processes and conveys that a person’s ability to fulfill cultural-personal goals is obstructed by their system’s functioning.

Mental disorder diagnoses are often externalized in an unhelpful way. We tend to conceptualize our diagnoses as things that are “part of us, but not us.” If you externalize a diagnosis – in other words, if you think of it as a thing that is not you but in you – you increase the probability that you will become alienated from yourself. This self-alienation occurs when you fail to take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Diagnosis externalizers attribute the responsibility of things they do to their diagnosis and not themselves. They say things like, “That’s not me talking, it’s my depression” or “It’s not that I can’t focus, it’s that my ADHD prevents me from focusing.” This attribution only makes sense if a diagnosis is conceptualized as a separate entity living inside them.

But that’s not what diagnoses are.

Diagnosis externalizers also define healing as coping with (i.e., neutralizing the negative effects of) their diagnosis. To heal under this view is to accommodate the diagnosis, to learn to “live with it” such that you can still do what you want to do. When diagnosis externalizers improve their condition, they still think that their diagnosis “exists within them.” Improvement is regarded as taming the diagnosis, the invisible psychic monster.

But that’s not how healing works.

Diagnoses are not “things within,” they are categories that communicate bodily processes and their cultural-personal effects. While they refer in part to material things, diagnoses are not material things themselves. They are like colors. “Blue” in part refers to a material process of visual light perception, but blue does not exist as a material thing because it is a culturally meaningful mental categorization of material things. If the material process that led me to categorize the pen as “blue” changes such that the pen looks black, I will recategorize the pen as “black.” If culture changes such that the word “blue” is socially replaced with “florp,” I will recategorize the pen as “florp.”

In the same way, if a set of material processes and their negative (i.e., goal-regressive) cultural-personal effects previously categorized using a mental disorder diagnosis like “Major Depressive Disorder” change, the category may no longer fit. If you “rewire” your system such that your distress is no longer chronic or severe, then you disqualify yourself from the diagnosis. Alternatively, if you make a life change that affords you the opportunity to apply your existing “wiring” in a positive (i.e., goal-progressive) way, thus eliminating or reducing the negative cultural-personal effects of that “wiring” to subclinical levels, you disqualify yourself from the MDD diagnosis.

Healing is not coping with a mental disorder diagnosis; it is diagnosis disqualification.

The goal is to disqualify yourself from the category.

We completely recognize this reality for many ailments regarded as purely or mostly physical. If someone heals from a broken leg, we do not say that they have “learned to cope” with a broken leg. Their leg is fixed so it’s no longer broken; the disorder is now in order. If this healed person attributes their embarrassing trip over the curb to their “broken leg,” those around would rightfully call bullshit. It would be patently obvious the person is attempting to exculpate themselves from the embarrassment of tripping by blaming their “broken leg.”

Mental disorders work the same way.

I’m confident that, in my relatively undisciplined periods, I would qualify for an ADHD diagnosis. I go to extreme lengths to harness my attention. When I was working on my thesis in graduate school, I would wake up at 4am so I could focus on researching and writing because I found it so hard to concentrate later in the day. I take a militant approach to deadline setting and time blocking so that I can do what I want to do. If I don’t maintain my good habits (sleeping, exercising, planning, eating right, restricting phone use, minimizing time on social media, etc.), I exhibit all the telltale signs of ADHD and even engage in vices common to those who have received the clinical diagnosis (e.g., excessive stimulant use).

However, most of the time, I disqualify myself from an ADHD diagnosis by practicing the habits that afford me the ability to better harness my attention. Habits that help you disqualify yourself from a mental disorder diagnosis come in all varieties. They can include maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, drinking coffee, exercising in between work bouts, taking medication, speaking with a therapist, and so on. You disqualify yourself from a mental disorder when you change your environment such that it interacts more goal-progressively with your system and/or change your habits such that your interactions with your environment are more goal-progressive.

If I was a diagnosis externalizer who received a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, I would be more likely to attribute moments of attentional difficulty to “my ADHD” rather than to my failure to perform the habits that help me focus. I would be less likely to take responsibility for my attention and act upon that responsibility. Instead, I would blame my diagnosis. I would think of my ADHD diagnosis as a thing that is not me but in me, tell myself that my failure to harness my attention is due to that thing over which I don’t have control and for which I don’t bear responsibility. This is a dangerous way of thinking because, by exculpating myself from the responsibility of my actions, I diminish the chances I will change my habits in a positive way. ADHD is not a “part” of me because it is not a material thing. I don’t “have ADHD.” ADHD is a name for when internal processes operating a certain way have certain external effects over time. If the internal process start operating in a different way and/or if their effects start to change, the name may no longer fit.

Mental disorders are commonly thought of today in the same way people millennia ago described demons and angels. They are conceptualized as “agents within” who “act through us.” But there is only ultimately us. Everything we do is our doing. There are no Depression Demons, no ADHD Apparitions, no Broken Leg Bogeys, there are only people acting out their habits of thought, feeling, and behavior within their environments.

Instead of fighting imaginary sprits, work at cultivating habits that help you accomplish your goals.

Instead of coping with your diagnosis, disqualify it.