Your Brain is not a Fixed Object
I have noticed a trend lately whereby people are beginning to ascribe all sorts of random aspects of their personality, from the way they walk, to the things they are interested in, to conversational peculiarities to a number of disorders that they identify with or have been diagnosed with. I understand the joy in finally seeing parts of yourself that you thought were strange or weird or ‘just you’ being represented and shared by many. However I do think that by grouping all elements of ourselves via disorder we both misunderstand how brains work, and also how mental disorders are categorised and pathologised.
Our brains are incredibly complicated structures and even now, while our understanding grows every day, there is so much we don’t understand about brains and how or why they do the things they do. What we do know about brains, however, is much like our bodies, they are highly adaptable and respond to the stimuli we expose them to.
When it comes to the diagnosis of psychological disorders things can get complicated, unlike when someone has a medical illness in their body (including their brain!) there is no physical test we can do, like an x-ray or a blood test, that gives us an idea of what is wrong with someone. Mental ill health is about our subjective experience of the world, therefore someone someone has to decide that your subjective experience of the world differs enough from the average or normative subjective experience of the world and in what ways in order to make a diagnosis. There are many professionals who are highly skilled at doing this, and the The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (The DSM 5, we are currently up to the 5th edition) which is the way in which most mental disorders are categorised and diagnosed has been developed over a long period of time.
However it is important to note, because we are dealing with people’s subjective experience of the world, that this is only one way of looking at mental health. It is in fact possible to conceive of an approach to mental health that does not rely on the idea of the categorisation of symptoms and diagnosis at all. The DSM 5 is just one way of determining how some people’s subjective experience of the world differs from what we consider to be the average subjective experience of the world. This means someone who is diagnosed with anxiety could be said to feel more worry (obiviously this is not the only element of anxiety but I am using this as an example) on average than the average person. This is all that a diagnosis actually tells us.
In our desire to see mental health treated with equal weight to physical health, I think we have begun to over-rely on the concept of diagnosis, because it mirrors the medical model with which we approach physical health. That is, of discrete diagnoses which each have their own treatments. But, there are issues with this in the field of physical health as well, both because bodies are complicated, but also because we are more than a bunch of discrete systems working together, human beings, as research on the microbiome has come to show us, are more than even single organisms, we are entire ecosystems. Take a second to comprehend the complexity of that.
What I am getting at here, is that when we over-identify with mental health diagnoses, we are both treating a specific lens for understanding mental health as the only lens for mental health, and also treating our brains as if they are fixed unchanging objects, something that truly belies the reality of brains. Here is a small list of things that can literally alter the physical structure of your brain*: meditation, regular exercise, how we eat, menstruation, learning to talk, learning a new skill, learning a new language. This list barely scratches the surface, and just reflects where I personally have looked into some evidence.
This does not mean that if you are struggling with your mental health, that it is your fault or because you are not doing enough. Just that using a model of chronic illness maybe isn’t helpful or useful, and instead we can start to think about what are the parts of our internal (the way we think, our individual behaviours etc…) and external (our family, work, community and wider world environments etc..) eco-systems that are supporting our mental health and what are the parts of them that are working against them.
*By physical structure I mean: brain volume, ratio of grey matter to white matter, density of brain connections, and brain chemistry