VERY thought-provoking article followed by reader responses in the New York Times Magazine today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/op...f=opinion&_r=0

Maybe I'll post more letters in separate threads, but below I'm pasting two of the letters that I found compelling and disturbing at the same time.

Both of the below writers received psychiatric diagnoses and later became concerned with the label, stigma, and over-identifying with the diagnosis they were given. But what disturbs/intrigues me is that both decided to end all treatment based on these and other concerns. My question to people here is if there's a middle-ground: not letting the label define you, not losing sight of who you are beyond the diagnosis, while still remaining in treatment. Are they throwing out the baby with bathwater --what do you guys think? Other thoughts about the letters?

From the New York Times:

I write as someone who has received a psychiatric diagnosis, and as director of a recovery community for others who have been so labeled. Yes, many of us rail against the diagnostic system not only because it is theory masquerading as scientific fact, but also because those labels have the power to take away our most basic civil liberties. As someone who has received diagnoses of both ophthalmic migraines and psychiatric disorders, I can assure you that no one has attempted to hospitalize or medicate me against my will for the former.

On a regular basis through my work, people introduce themselves as a psychiatric diagnosis sometimes before even stating their name. Yes, it is true, as Dr. Pies claims, that many find relief in their diagnosis, but what about when relief becomes identity and resignation?

Had I resigned myself to the psychiatric labels I was given in my teens and 20s and followed the recommended course of treatment (hospitalizations, therapy and medication), I would not now be director, mother, wife and homeowner. Those are the labels that I find humanizing. The others I have shed.

SERA DAVIDOW
South Hadley, Mass., March 20, 2013

The writer is director of the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community.

From the New York Times:

When I was a teenager, I embraced a diagnosis given to me by a psychiatrist because I was desperate for an answer to the emotional and existential pain I’d been experiencing for several years. Initially, as Dr. Pies suggests, that diagnosis provided me relief. But that relief was short-lived, for in internalizing that diagnosis, I stopped thinking of my emotions as part of the spectrum of human experience, and instead came to see them as “symptoms” of a “disease.”

That psychiatric diagnosis stripped me of an authentic sense of self and of a connection to those around me, because my “condition” made me different. Only in leaving behind that psychiatric diagnosis and the treatment it required did I find a path through my emotional struggles to the other side, where I could accept myself as I was, and be fully human again.

LAURA DELANO
Boston, March 20, 2013