Problems of classifying in Psychology

In Psychology, classifications and labels are a risk. For this reason, we must be very cautious with diagnoses and the way we communicate them. Labels often provide people with a form of identification. Linking your identity to a diagnosis, for example, greatly biases the future and possible changes.

In the eagerness to name things, the human being usually exceeds. To name, to know, and to know, usually grant relief before the human subjectivities. However, this implies a risk because we can easily reduce people to a label or a diagnosis, and consequently, future possibilities can be tied to something that becomes a prejudice or preconception.

In recent years there has been a considerable increase in classifications in Psychology. Psychiatry manuals such as the DSM and the ICD accumulate Disorders and characterizations. Although it is understandable that certain features should be recognized that facilitate communication between professionals, it is very important to keep in mind that a diagnosis can never fully define a person. And it is essential to take this into account when working.

Many patients usually present with their diagnosis. And this in itself is already a problem. How to overcome a symptom with which the individual identifies so strongly? This is what Freud called the secondary gain of the disease, and it is a reason that implies that the position of the illness grants some type of identification that produces great resistance when abandoning it.

For this reason, the treatment of any individual has to conceive their symptoms or conditions as a part of themselves that in no way represents them in their entirety.

Through the classification, we find common points and features that are repeated, and we accentuate them, we emphasize them, to the detriment of others that move away or do not support the motion. It is a way in which rational thought seeks to establish connections that allow us to account for experience, research results and, in some sense, give us a certain sense of stability and power. However, so much systematization when it comes to mental health and human beings is complex. We still do not know many factors, the unconscious aspects and what always escapes us remind us that this desire has a limit. Limit that we must accept and respect so as not to exceed our ambition. 

This feeling of power and absolute truth can lead us to make many mistakes, dragging along the way the individuality of whoever is in front of us. 

To classify, we select what is shared, but let us not forget that in this biased process we leave out a lot of information that is separated, that establishes the difference, and these aspects do not have to be left aside.

Establishing points in common allows us to unite, and account for what is repeated, what is established constantly and repeatedly, what obeys certain patterns. However, we run the ever-present risk of conceiving, from here on, any initially similar situation as identical, anticipating equivalent developments and in some way influencing the results beforehand. In the manner of what is called a self-fulfilling prophecy, we must be especially careful not to intervene prematurely or be guided by prejudices, conditioning reality so that it conforms to what we think.

 

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