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  "description": "How mental health diagnosis can be both a good and a bad thing 🎭",
  "path": "/diagnoses-the-power-and-the-peril/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-16T06:00:34.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.gilespcroft.com",
  "tags": [
    "What actually is ‘Mental Health’",
    "Are we looking in the wrong direction",
    "Looking upstream, to simplicity and root causes",
    "The role of biology in mental health",
    "A new definition for mental health",
    "come to me for help",
    "The diagnosis trap",
    "46 years",
    "restless",
    "had an actual experience of Innate Health",
    "3 Principles",
    "series of insights",
    "nothing wrong with me",
    "gradually went away",
    "eventually",
    "8+ billion of us",
    "should",
    "Labels are for jars 🔖The origins, usefulness and perils of mental health diagnoses. (Premium Written & Audio Content.)The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft",
    "Visit The Store"
  ],
  "textContent": "It's #MentalHealthAwareness week, so we've been getting a different perspective on the subject over the past few days; one that has its sights set firmly on the Innate Health within each and every one of us.\n\n🛋️\n\nIf you want to catch up, here's what we've covered so far:\n• What actually is ‘Mental Health’__?__\n• Are we looking in the wrong direction__?__\n• Looking upstream, to simplicity and root causes\n• The role of biology in mental health\n• A new definition for mental health\n\nFor consistency, I suppose we could simplify things to this:\n\nWhich I suppose begs the question: where do diagnoses fit in?\n\nI'm in the somewhat privileged position of not being constrained by ‘the system’ when it comes to diagnoses, either as a service user, or a service provider.\n\nIf you come to me for help with a particular difficulty, we're unlikely to spend much (if any) time or attention on any diagnostic label you've been given, because the fact you're seeking help with your experience means the diagnosis can't have _worked_.\n\n> _“‘Worked’? What do you mean, worked?”_ I hear you ask.\n\nYes, from an Innate Health perspective (certainly mine, anyway), the real power in a diagnosis is when it helps someone to ‘think less, and live more’.\n\nBecause at the fundamental level, that's literally _all_ that's going on! (Have another look at the diagram above.) And being given a diagnosis—especially if the mind's been going on safari, looking for answers—can do that.\n\nBeing told by someone ‘in the know’ that this is what we _call_ this observed pattern of thought/feeling behaviours has the potential to come as a huge __ relief to a mind. (Especially if there's a lot riding on _receiving_ said diagnosis, which, here in the second quarter of the 21st Century, sadly, it seems there is.)\n\nBut when a diagnosis doesn't ‘work’ is when it becomes an identity and/or limits what the mind says you can do. When a diagnosis _doesn't_ work, there's a tendency for people to ‘think more, and live less’.\n\n> _“Oh, I'd like to, but I can't really do that. It's my [insert diagnosis here], see?”_\n\nThat's the peril inherent in a diagnosis. ‘The diagnosis trap’, as my mentor Judy Sedgeman calls it.\n\n😞\n\n## The day I received my diagnosis\n\nI feel like I spent 46 years seeking a diagnosis. I absolutely, unequivocally felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I had all the evidence – almost half a century's-worth!\n\nI just wasn't cut out for contentment. I was restless; always on the move. Always seeking the next thing, in a way that others didn't seem to be (minds will do that to you – thought is the great separator)!\n\nThe symptoms:\n\n  * Capricious (projects, careers and relationships)\n  * Short tempered\n  * Drank too much\n  * Default state of unhappiness/dissatisfaction\n\n\n\nI bet I could have been labelled with something and/or managed to get a prescription, had I sought one out. Depression? Personality Disorder? I dunno – make something up!\n\nWould it have helped? Unlikely. From here, inside the Giles Ego Construct 📦 I can tell you for nothing that I'd have just used it as an excuse for my behaviour, and it wouldn't have changed a damn thing.\n\n💁🏻‍♂️\n\nAnd then that fateful day, almost 8 years ago, when I stood up on a stage in front of a hundred people, and had an actual experience of Innate Health, I received my diagnosis, clear as a bell:\n\n😲\n\n****Oh. I'm human.****\n\nI'd been pointed in the direction of the 3 Principles, I'd taken it on board, logically, and then a series of insights had made it all very real for me.\n\nI saw that there was nothing wrong with me at all – I had just _thought_ there was!\n\nAnd with that, the diagnosis ‘worked’. Without really trying, I stopped thinking about myself (the Giles Ego Construct 📦) and all my (its) problems quite so much… and the symptoms gradually went away all on their own, too.\n\nLike my thinking, I settled.\n\nI became more patient and understanding. I stopped drinking (eventually). I relaxed into the happiness & contentment that had always been there… I'd just not noticed.\n\n* * *\n\nNow, I'm more than aware that _bloke-has-insight-onstage-and-his-problems-melt-away_ is not everyone's experience. (It can't be. There's 8+ billion of us and we all have different Thought Systems!)\n\nSo I'm not suggesting your experience will (or should 🚩) look anything remotely like mine.\n\nBut here's what I will say: the diagnosis trap—the perilous aspect of a diagnosis—is made entirely of thought. Which means it _isn't_ a life sentence or ‘just how you are’ or anything like that. It just looks that way. (And someone may have tried to tell you that.)\n\nIf you've been given a label, are seeking one, or are in a position where you _assign_ them yourself, there's something in you—in _everyone_ —that exists _before_ diagnostic labels, and that a label can't touch.\n\nThat's what this whole week has been pointing to.\n\nThat's Innate Health. It's not something you earn, or build, or achieve.\n\n_It's already there._\n\n💖\n\nGiles\n\n### Related\n\nLabels are for jars 🔖The origins, usefulness and perils of mental health diagnoses. (Premium Written & Audio Content.)The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft\n\nMore on Diagnoses for ****Premium 🔖 Subscribers****. Includes Audio 🎧 content.\n\nREADY TO GO DEEPER?\n\nNow available in Digital Store: the ****Models of Mental Healthcare**** Topic Deep Dive: a myth-busting 38 minutes where we cover (among other things):\n\n  * A plain-English tour of the standard ‘medical model’ of mental healthcare (****Biological-Psychological-Social****) and why, for all its clinical utility, it keeps us trapped, focusing on symptoms, rather than causes\n  * Caspi & Moffitt's landmark journal paper __“All for One and One for All: Mental Disorders in One Dimension”__ - and the profound implications of a ****single general factor**** underpinning all mental illness\n  * A thoughtful ****‘Inside-Out’ focused commentary**** piece on the article, from 3 Principles teachers Kelley, Pettit, Pransky & Sedgeman, that takes these scientific findings one step further\n  * What the Innate Health understanding has to say about ****the root cause**** of all psychological suffering\n  * Why ****the answer lies in simplicity**** , not ever-increasing complexity… and what that means for mental healthcare in practice.\n\n\n\nThis isn't a critique of psychiatry for its own sake. It's an invitation to look in a genuinely fresh direction – one with profound implications for how we understand suffering, and what we can actually do about it.\n\n\n                            Visit The Store\n                        ",
  "title": "Diagnoses: the power and the peril",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-16T06:00:34.314Z"
}