@catatonic-plateau wrote: ”No one is here to deny your pain or to say that your case is any less special and should be neatly categorized in a box. These labels as you call them are diagnosis aimed to bring understanding, to help bring healing to those who do not understand or have a face to their pain. No one is trying to bring you down, to invalidate your situation, or say you're messed up because of "this or that". This is the best we have to help the majority”
I don’t have a “case” and I’m not quite sure how this is a reply to what I wrote. The main difference, I think, between your argument and mine is that I start with opposition to the idea that I can decide for a majority what’s best for them. Or that anyone can decide that for anyone else. “There are many things that can be done to people against their will, helping is simply not one of them.” (Rest in Power Ms. Chamberlin)
Of course many people are saying I’m messed up, which they should and which I don’t mind at all.
The face of our pain is our own face, or the faces of those surrounding us, or the face of an ancestor or whatever. If you want to understand non-diagnostic ways of addressing people’s psycho/social needs or emotional suffering, there are thousands you could study, from Mad and psychiatric survivor movements, to “dark night of the soul” reflections, to the recent U. of Liverpool study on the utter scientific meaning-less-ness of the DSM, to feminist psychology or to narrative therapy, or to simply believing that unruly noncompliant survivors screaming against their jailers are also engaged in communication and direct action. But the issue isn’t really whether-or-not the diagnostic insult is applied - keep it if you want - we just need to keep a couple things in mind.
1. Let’s not confuse descriptions with explanations - let’s not pretend a new name identifies anything causal,
2. We do not pretend to know anything about an individual based on a psy-professional calling them a name, we do not make assumptions about their development, their thinking, or how what they’ve survived in the past compares to what they’re surviving right now.
Edit to clarify: I’m not reblogging the quote from @thesaddestchorusgirlintheworld just because I don’t want that kind of stereotyping on my page I look at sometimes, though I recognize it may be a good description of her experience, and the person she’s quoting, and many other people. Healing-justice involves recognizing that the diagnoses given to us are political, people with power can put them on us for any or no reason at their whim, and the lines along which we find common experience with each other won’t be the same as the lines by which the psychiatric system pigeon-holes us.
