Ten Reasons for Not Using Psychological Labelling

1. This approach hasn't worked to keep people healthy; it focuses on a illness or difference narrative.

2. Professionals are trained as agents of difference-making, delineating and defining differences as dysfunctions: from what? and why is that useful? to who?

3. It robs identity because selected eople are given an alter-ego, a co-joined twin, that accompanies them everywhere called ADHD, or ASD, or OCD which impacts on responses from others and leaves then functioning from a punctured and fragmented sense of personal agency with impacts that I don't think are understood adequately by psychology professionals.

4. The labels belong to a profession that is embedded in a cultural way of understanding what 'others' are i.e. accustomed to claiming the authority to ascribe role or identity meaning on others.

5. Labelling continues to assume that a person is a separate, discrete entity with a cluster of attributes that can be mined from within them.

6. Labels last too long, holding people to an ascribed identity embedded within an assumption of 'something is not quite right'.

7. The practice of labelling is an arid process using a limiting repertoire of connection to the human condition that trains and constrains compassionate people into functioning within a narrow range of professional responses to the wide range of human behaviours that we encounter each day.

8. Labelling people is functioning as a monopoly.

9. The term 'mental health' looks remarkably unhealthy in the language that it uses and in the authority that is exercised in the relationships between client and practitioners.

10. A labelled behaviour, a diagnosis, immediately claims agency that enables it to function as a 'reason for' behaviour, not as a description of behaviour.