The Problem With Labels: Why I Reject the DSM’s Boxes

We live in a world that loves categories. We organize books and music into genres, people into demographics, and our experiences into neatly labeled boxes. Nowhere is this impulse more pervasive—or more damaging—than in the realm of mental health, where the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) serves as the definitive catalog of human suffering.

I get why it exists. Insurance companies need codes to decide what they will and won’t cover. Clinicians need a shared language. The DSM provides that. But the moment we begin to believe that a person is their diagnosis, we lose something essential—something sacred.

The Tragedy of Diagnosis as Identity

There’s a difference between identifying a pattern and reducing a person to it. The DSM excels at the former but often leads to the latter.

A client comes in, struggling with deep anxiety, chronic self-doubt, or the weight of past trauma. Instead of asking, What is your unique path through this? What wisdom is emerging from your experience?—the system pressures us to ask, What’s the closest label we can slap on you?

If we can call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Major Depressive Disorder, we suddenly have a code, a treatment plan, and a billable service. But we also have a conceptual prison. We have a person whose lived reality has now been translated into a term that was never meant to describe them, only a statistical cluster of symptoms.

This is where the DSM—and the mindset it breeds—fails us. It mistakes the map for the territory.

The Danger of Fixing What is in Motion

Human beings are not static. We are evolving processes, unfolding stories, fluid expressions of life force moving through time. Diagnoses, by their nature, attempt to fix something in place.

A label says, This is what you are.

But a person is never just what they are in this moment. They are what they are becoming.

I see this all the time in my work. When people internalize a diagnosis, it subtly rewires their identity. Instead of saying, I am moving through an experience of depression, they begin to say, I am depressed. Instead of recognizing trauma as an unintegrated chapter in their story, they start to see themselves as fundamentally broken.

And yet, what I see time and again is that even the most painful experiences contain the seeds of transformation. Anxiety is not just suffering; it is often the body’s way of demanding alignment. Depression is not just chemical imbalance; it is often the soul’s protest against a life that does not honor it. When we reduce these experiences to diagnostic codes, we strip them of their wisdom.

Sacred Uniqueness: A Different Approach

Each of us is a singular, never-to-be-repeated expression of existence. No label can fully capture the nuances of a human life.

Sacred uniqueness—what Marc Gafni calls Unique Self—recognizes that we are not just generic expressions of human nature. We are each an irreplaceable part of the whole, with a path, a purpose, and a way of showing up that is ours alone.

From this perspective, healing is not about fitting people into diagnostic categories. It is about helping them become more deeply themselves. It is about liberating the energy that has been trapped in trauma, in conditioned patterns, in self-limiting narratives. It is about working with the whole person—body, mind, and spirit—so that life force can move freely again.

Beyond the DSM: What We Need Instead

If we must have a DSM, let it be a tool, not a doctrine. Let it be a reference point, not a cage.

But beyond that, we need an entirely different paradigm—one that recognizes suffering as part of an evolutionary process rather than a fixed disorder. We need a language of healing that does not require people to pathologize themselves. We need to meet people in the totality of their being, not just in the sliver of their experience that fits into a diagnostic framework.

Because real healing doesn’t come from being told what’s wrong with us. It comes from discovering what is most profoundly right with us, buried beneath the layers of pain, conditioning, and fear.

And no diagnosis will ever capture that.