Life: a medical condition

I don't see any problem with classifying and labeling aspects of our behavior and experience that we might not like. We claim to accept that nobody is perfect, yet we cling desperately to the idea that only a small minority of people should be described as "defective." We would very much like to believe that our defects, though they are known to us, cannot be publicly identified and named.

When I think about it that way, it seems utterly bizarre that people feel threatened by labeling and classifying common personality traits as pathological. Yet, the fear is reasonable for four reasons.

First, mental health practitioners have the power to stigmatize a condition merely by naming it. The stigma is a relic of the past and will probably change when people realize that utterly trivial conditions can be recognized and named. Severity and degree of social undesirability are illogical distinctions that psychological thinkers simply cannot maintain, any more than physicists could have maintained an arbitrary distinction that "heavy" things have something called "weight" which can be measured, but "light" things do not have any weight at all.

Second, giving something a medical name creates the presumption (at least among laymen) that it requires expert treatment. Doctors know better, but many of them are not above exploiting this impression to manipulate a patient into accepting treatment.

Third, the creation of a label creates much more than a psychological diagnosis with a clinical definition. Laymen and experts alike fill in the gaps with assumptions and best guesses to create a complete stereotype, a story with a beginning, middle, and end. People will speculate about the underlying logic, original causes, and inferable consequences, and they will assign far more weight to these speculations than is justified by scientific evidence. This is obviously bad, but I don't think it is any different from how people have thought since time immemorial. These prejudices will just fall into place next to existing prejudices about race, gender, astrological sign, and hair color. If you think things can possibly get any worse in this regard, you don't understand how people currently think ;-)

Fourth, the diagnosis of a "mental disorder" gives government an opening to intervene and an alibi for doing so. In the United States, freedom is a sacred thing and the most popular reason for circumscribing government power. If the government can claim it is intervening in a matter where a citizen already has no freedom then it has already dispensed with the most powerful objection against government interference.

An aside: This is rather a puzzle for people like me who regard free will as a religious belief (for me, free will is my religion, my only possibly antiscientific conviction) and who balk at introducing religion into politics.

The powers-that-be have long ago declared that the non-medical use of any drug is "abuse." Thus, coloring the problems of everyday life as medical conditions is the only way people have been able to fight back against this restriction:

http://www.etfrc.com/ChemicalImbalances.htm

The idea of "perfect health" - especially in a society which forces us to live in ways we are not evolutionarily adapted to (i.e. externally imposed sleep schedules, processed foods, on-demand performance) - is entirely mythical. There are drugs which make the modern condition more bearable, and millions of people have decided that hacking the medical profession in this way is an acceptable price to pay for the freedom to control one's body.