The creation of mental monsters.

Another little piece on mental labels.

The disorder and disease thing.

Yesterday or the day before I read a post from a guy who was totally elated to finally know what he was suffering from, mentally.

There were several official disorders he’d recently received, and the most interesting, at least to me, was one that’s called NOS.

NOS stands for Not Otherwise Specified, and ‘it is used to note the presence of a condition where the symptoms presented indicate a general diagnosis within a family of disorders (e.g. depressive disorders, anxiety disorders), but don’t meet criteria established for specific diagnoses within that family’.

The new term for NOS is ‘unspecified disorder’.

This means, if I loosely translate it, ‘you have a couple of symptoms but they don’t officially add up enough to form a ‘real’ disorder’.

You’re sort of depressed.

Or kind of anxious.

Really?

Because these seem to be things that every human being experiences now and then.

And putting a label on something that doesn’t fit the existing collection of labels (that were totally made up by people anyway), feels very, very off to me.