The Pool of Explanations

I'm loathe to return to this subject. Sensible Twitter voices have lamented the repetitive diagnosis debate, and it fuels ugly disagreement. But it is an issue I care about, and one that really matters, so here goes.

A couple of years ago I wrote a post in response to DCP guidelines on psychologists' language in mental health. This week a sharper, wittier writer has made similar points. It brings up all the same arguments, which have played out on Twitter in a remarkably similar way. 

For the avoidance of bad feeling, I would like to address this post directly to people who would normally disagree with me. I want to make a short, good faith argument and try to persuade you of the merits of what I said then. But I want to do it in a way that brings you with me. I plead for your good humour and open mindedness. Despite the siloing that happens in social networks, virtually everyone who engages in this debate is on the same page in one major respect. Everyone wants better mental health care. 

Why does such a goal lead to concern about the DCP guidelines? It has to do with the pool of explanations. The pool of explanations is the set of viable theories a person has available to them to make sense of their psychological suffering.

The great liberating component of opposition to diagnosis has been in the push to a wider range of explanations for people to use in making sense of their experiences. We want to move beyond limiting and dominant accounts like simplistic versions of the chemical imbalance theory, or over attachment to DSM categories. However, the mind is so mysterious that very a relatively small proportion of historical theories (see e.g. the "schizophrenogenic mother") can really be conclusively junked. For the time bring,  more is better. Frameworks that emphasize the importance of trauma, of relational and interactional factors, and of intrapsychic processes have pulled back successive layers of mire from our vision of the field, and have liberated many people. Frameworks that talk in terms of illness and diagnosis continue have real meaning for others. This isn't controversial.

Until a new epoch of more comprehensive mental health theory, it is absolutely incumbent on us to continue to grow the pool of explanations rather than shrink it. Shrinking the pool pushes people out. Enlarging it means more imagination, more discovery, and more choice. This is not a call for a slide into relativism. We need a range of ways of getting at the single inarticulate truth. We need a cacophony of voices in order to approach understanding.

The DCP language guidelines were not an expansionist project. They sought to shrink the pool of available explanations. This was for noble reasons, but with unintended effects. They alienated people who do relate to diagnostic/illness language, and they policed the language of professionals who already prize reflectiveness and theoretical pluralism. As someone who works with the confounding complexity of mental health every day I value explanatory pluralism. You can refine language to avoid harm, but you cannot make reality more tractable by dispensing with whole swathes of lived experience. This is not an ill tempered intellectual game we are playing. It is real people and their real sense of self. It matters.