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Replies

Feats of Strength 💙 Trauma Healing @featsofstrength.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Excellent essay about the value and limitations of mental health "diagnosis." I never would have started healing if I hadn't learned about complex trauma, I thought I was born defective. Great comments abt this at end of article, see below👇 www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Here’s What Psychiatrists Mean When They Say You Have A.D.H.D.

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Feats of Strength 💙 Trauma Healing @featsofstrength.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

I get where this fellow is coming from 🙌

Thanks for the piece which i read with great interest. The main value of my diagnosis was to greatly ease my perpetual self-shaming and feelings of incompetence. This almost eliminated my self-deception and belief that I was a fraud. The benefit was realism. That's it. After this step, I was able to actually benefit from therapies that supported radical self-acceptance.

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Feats of Strength 💙 Trauma Healing @featsofstrength.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Great response by the author here too 🙌

This is beautifully put and shows how, at its best, a diagnosis can be liberating by separating the person from the problem and allowing for the possibility of therapeutic change. There was a pattern to your difficulties that had a name and that others shared. That reframing made self-acceptance possible, and self-acceptance made treatment possible. I’ve previously written in an academic article: “Fundamentally, a clinical diagnosis invites patients to see their experiences through a medical lens. The medical interpretive framework recognises suffering in ways that everyday language often can not, because the latter tends to characterise problems as personal inadequacies. Clinical language is also more standardised than everyday language, which offers at least the appearance of a cohesive explanatory framework for a person’s impairment. The philosopher Miranda Fricker uses the example of postpartum depression to illustrate how the act of naming a phenomenon can serve as a transformative moment of understanding.”

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