Sarah Van Bouchaute
NAMING IN ORDER TO UNDER STAND
Behaviour and Mind Compartmentalised
Categories create clarity of mind: we give things names in order to grasp the world around us. That is useful, but it is also misleading if we risk forgetting that we are talking about artificial construc tions. English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) described the principle as early as 1869: ‘The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own.’ Categories give us grip, but they are still only definitions that evolve along with the historical and cultural context. So they can never be definitive. How do we define the border, then, between what is normal and what is disturbed, and what does this say about how a society functions? When is someone declared mentally ill? When does a grieving process become depression? Why do we say a fidgety child has ADHD? Do we find solutions more quickly by labelling everything? I M P A C T O F T H E L A B E L L I N G C U LT U R E
The Greeks and Romans divided human beings into four types: sanguine or optimistic, phlegmatic or resigned, choleric or pas sionate, and melancholic or gloomy. In the view of Hippocrates and Galen, the balance in the proportions of blood, phlegm and yellow or black bile in the body determined physical and psycho logical health. The doctrine of the four humours was one of the first clear classification methods, a system for distinguishing between normal and abnormal, analysing human characteristics and defining typologies. Today we order a multiplicity of symptoms into an almost endless list of disease profiles. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) was presented in 2013. This diagnostic guide, used around the world, contains descriptions of all the mental conditions based on their symptoms. The categories range from anxiety to depressive, bipolar and ad dictive disorders. Therapists can add or reject symptoms from
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