We dehumanise the human when we label their emotional experience as an illness.
The moment we attach a label to a life experience, we focus on the label and discard the merits of the experience.
We make people invisible when we deny the reality of their experience by suggesting that there is something clinically wrong with them, despite causality of their emotional upheaval being clearly associated with their experiences in life.
In other words, there is a clearly troubling or traumatising experience that they’ve endured to explain their emotional duress, yet we diminish their experience by ‘diagnosing’ them with an illness for feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or stressed, etc. simply because they’re affected by it for longer than we think they should be affected by it.
The victim readily embraces such labels because it offers hope where they feel hopeless, and allows them to abdicate responsibility for rising above it.
The oblivious or insensitive ones happily embrace such labels because it demands less emotional investment, or less accountability in their efforts to uplift or support those around them.
Our aversion to embrace the entirety of the human behind the troubled behaviour denies the victim a voice, or an opportunity to understand their painful experiences in life.
These labels are worn with shame because it denies us our humanness and makes us a symptom.
You cannot break the stigma of mental health by undermining the humanness of the ones affected by the stigma.
Kill the label, kill the stigma.
If you stigmatise someone’s real life experience, how can you possibly expect them to feel whole?
#mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthrecovery #suicide #suicideprevention #suicidalawareness #suicideawarenessmonth #depression #anxiety #ownyourlife #theegosystem #embracingME #zaidismail
Labelling humans
