The high cost of letting our jobs and our diagnoses define us

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1764089238 The high cost of letting our jobs and our diagnoses.jpg

I’m on the spectrum. I am dyslexic. I am the CEO. I’m the senior vice president. I am an actor. I fill in the blank. America is the land of labels. However, as the number and intensity of the brands we wear has increased, so has our collective health crisis – mental, physical, and even spiritual. Our diagnoses, illnesses, jobs, titles, sexual preferences—they’re all real, but they don’t define us. Or at least, they shouldn’t — because if our labels define us, then we are also limited by our labels. When we live within our labels, we narrow the scope of who we can become. This is one of the factors fueling the mental health crisis, which actually points to a larger spiritual crisis.

Neurologist Susan O’Sullivan, in her book The age of diagnosis: How our obsession with medical labels is making us sickerHe warns that “borderline medical problems have become strict diagnoses and normal variations have become pathological,” and that “ordinary life experiences, physical defects, sadness, and social anxiety have come to be subsumed into the category of medical disorder.” The most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the so-called bible of psychiatry, lists 297 cases. One in nine American children have now been diagnosed with ADHD, which is 1 million more than in 2016, with adult rates doubling in the past decade.

Of course, diagnosis can be life-saving. They can help build communities with shared experiencesand enabling access to basic treatment. As O’Sullivan noted in a recent interview, the diagnosis “enables people to be kinder to themselves and make changes that they previously found difficult.” But a useful explanation is not identity.

How stories save us and trap us

As Rachel Aviv wrote Strangers to Ourselves: Unstable Minds and the Stories that Make Us“There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us.” The danger comes through over-identification. The stories and labels that help us can also trap us, diminishing our reality. Or as Wittgenstein said: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

This dynamic goes beyond medical diagnosis. In fact, any job or role that completely consumes us can lead to what sociologists call “role swallowing.” Studies show that athletes who focus their identity solely on their sport suffer mental health consequences when their roles change or end. Employees with high “work centrality” struggle to disconnect and recharge outside of work hours. Workaholism and burnout are closely linked to this narrow sense of self. Retirees whose primary source of identity is their jobs often face a painful sense of purposelessness when they leave the workforce.

When your identity and sense of self are stuck in your job, your entire self rises and falls with the job. I saw this in action recently when a friend who had a very successful husband who was miserable at work told me that she suggested he quit. “But who would I be without my job?” he asked. When we can’t imagine who we are without a label, we miss out on growth opportunities that lie outside the label. Labels become our ceiling.

And you see this happening in American public life as well. It is difficult to imagine today that in 1797, George Washington chose not to run again for president. It becomes especially difficult when we watch elected officials like Dianne Feinstein, who has clung to office despite her obvious cognitive disabilities, or Mitch McConnell, who has clung to office despite a series of health scares (including twice freezing on camera). As retiring Sen. Tom Harkin advised his colleagues to ask themselves: “Is this all there is to my life? What am I missing out there?”

Sticking to one label incurs real costs. Studies show that the more we define ourselves by a single group or role, the less tolerant and adaptable we become — something our polarized culture cannot afford. Social media amplifies this effect, pushing us into echo chambers that reinforce a limited sense of self.

When we define ourselves by our success or appearance, failure or aging become existential threats. Carl Jung wrote about the dangers of over-identification with our personalities: “…the professor with his textbook, the content with his voice. Then the damage is done.”

Diagnoses and job descriptions tell us what we have or what we do, but never who we are. If Teilhard de Chardin is right, and “we are spiritual beings with a human experience,” then our possibilities are limitless. No label, no matter how authoritative, no job, no matter how important, can contain the full constellation of what we might become.

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