20 Feb Words to Ponder # 43
The opening paragraph of “We’re Obsessed with Labelling Suffering, But Our Power to Think about it Matters More,” a post on Mad in America by Charlotte Beale
The philosopher Ian Hacking described a looping effect, whereby people adjust themselves to become more like the labels foisted upon them. “Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before,” he wrote in “Making Up People” (2006). By constructing types of being, with clusters of traits that correspond to a psychiatric classification, medical authorities “make up” embodiments of their invented category. One’s subjectivity is captured by those elements delineated in the classification. To be recognised, one learns to express oneself by those parameters. Not to conform is to be unable to be helped.
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