Just imagine a doctor telling you what ICD code you have. There's nothing wrong with classification and labeling things. I think society is getting a little carried away with such topics. Personally, I think it's a phase that collectively we'll pass and reflect on how extreme we took things in order to try and obtain balance.
There's a difference in calling someone "crazy" vs saying they have a mental disorder. The meaning of "crazy" has changed over the years due to the abusive context it's been used in more and more. A lot of words got redefined over the years, so this isn't new, but the idea of dropping labels or trying to eliminate well established scientific and testable classifications is new.
To future generations, I hope you don't create a culture in which you're continuously stressed out about how others will label you publicly. When I was younger, a kid that was bullied in school could escape it by coming home. These days, you have no escape because of social media. I hope you learn to adjust and navigate these new times. Even older folks struggle with how things are currently.
For me one of the issue of the current names is that their definition change too much depending on the context and the person interpreting them.
For instance if you say someone your arm is 'broken', they understand something is deeply damaged (not just fissured). They might not know the specifics on how it broke, where exactly, how you are healing it or how it impacts you, but they know the basic criticality of it.
If you say you have "depression", they don't know if you'll take your week off to recover or actually need extensive professional follow up with a long term medication. There is no common sense of how bad it is 'broken'.
From there people all have their anecdotes, visions of how they solved "depression" and come with a very personal idea of what your issue is that most of the time will have nothing to do with your actual diagnosed issue.
In that sense the word doesn't work that much as a conveyor of information, they'll just know you have "something". I see the reasoning behind getting rid of a word in medical context if it doesn't bring any viable information with it.
This is a total tangent, but I find it funny, everyone uses bone breaking as an example, but a broken bone is a unique injury. It can totally disable your limb. If you don't immobilize it, it won't heal properly. If you immobilize it, it'll heal back stronger than ever in a few weeks. Mental illness seems more similar to a soft tissue injury. There's a much wider range of severity, it can be asymptomatic, cause instability, or be completely disabling. There's much debate over the right treatment in many cases (surgery isn't always the best option, but sometimes it is). People disagree on whether certain ligaments and tendons can heal.
>If you say you have "depression", they don't know if you'll take your week off to recover or actually need extensive professional follow up with a long term medication. There is no common sense of how bad it is 'broken'.
I think that's primarily because severe and enduring mental illness is still strongly stigmatised.
The public conversation about mental health is dominated by what I call "the narrative". We see a succession of successful and healthy people talking about how they had depression or anxiety, they plucked up the courage to ask for help but now they're OK. Our conversations about mental health are dominated by brief episodes of illness in the past tense.
That's not a terrible narrative and I'm sure it has encouraged a lot of people to seek treatment, but it's a very selective image of mental illness. We don't hear from people in the throes of severe illness. We don't hear from people who have struggled for years or decades and haven't found an effective treatment. We don't hear from people whose lives have been blighted by unmanaged schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. We don't hear from people who know they need treatment, but can't access it for financial reasons.
"There are effective treatments and you don't have to suffer in silence" is an important message, but so is "some people can't access treatment, some people don't benefit from treatment, so we need to work as a society to improve the quality and availability of treatment and help people with unresolved mental illness to live fulfilling lives".
I think what you're doing is comparing medical vs layman usage. A doctor will tell his patient they have a "broken arm" due to past experiences in speaking with patients using medical terms. e.g, fracture or distal radius fracture in the case of a broken wrist.
When it comes to mental disorders, it can be very difficult to accurately classify the severity. It reminds me of how doctors prescribe blood pressure medication; it's guess work. e.g, They will prescribe what they think will work and have you come back later to see if it's working properly. In my mom's case, the first prescription made things worse.
Depression can be rooted in chemical imbalances, diet, sudden loss of a job or family member, etc,. It's not like taking a walk will solve everyone's depression. In most cases, it's much more complex than that. That's why there's psychologist and psychiatrist. In some cases cognitive therapy works, some a good diet + workout routine works, and other cases medication is required. There are different levels of depression and they are properly classified by professionals. The word "depression" is like a doctor telling you that you're arm/wrist is broken. e.g, Bipolar Disorder is a type of depression that's treated with medication.
It's a terribly complex thing we're talking about and telling professionals how to define their own vernacular is pretty foolish. It would be like my mom telling me that engineers should drop the phrase "eventually consistent" and just say "consistent". :)
I'm afraid you are giving the psychiatric profession way too much credit.
Most DSM disorder categories don't perform well on measures of inter-rater reliability. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-rater_reliability). One implication of this is that the categories can't be assumed to be well-defined scientific entities. Now, the DSM could be a shadow of some more complete, correct taxonomy of mental disfunction—certainly it's based on observation of genuine distress, so it's not completely arbitrary—but by scientific or medical standards, it's very shaky.
Here's an article about the situation in relation to the DSM:
It's not uncommon for people who haven't looked seriously at the mental health field to assume that the so-called medical model of mental illness meets the same high standards of intellectual rigour as other areas of medicine, or other endeavours such as engineering. I put it to you that you are in exactly that position: the very basic point you are making ("This is as complex as engineering! Leave it to the experts!) indicates that you are unaware of the unique flakiness of psychiatry. This is contested territory, and many professionals are invested in a certain dubious framing of the situation.
Could the same not be said of a broken arm? - for instance, an incomplete fracture may heal on its own after being immobilised for a few weeks, whereas a severely comminuted fracture may require surgical intervention.
From a technical standpoint, ICD codes are intended primarily for financial and reporting purposes. When you need more nuanced clinical data a different coding system such as SNOMED CT might be more appropriate. It allows for multiple post-coordinated qualifiers including severity and other dimensions.
There's a difference in calling someone "crazy" vs saying they have a mental disorder. The meaning of "crazy" has changed over the years due to the abusive context it's been used in more and more. A lot of words got redefined over the years, so this isn't new, but the idea of dropping labels or trying to eliminate well established scientific and testable classifications is new.
To future generations, I hope you don't create a culture in which you're continuously stressed out about how others will label you publicly. When I was younger, a kid that was bullied in school could escape it by coming home. These days, you have no escape because of social media. I hope you learn to adjust and navigate these new times. Even older folks struggle with how things are currently.