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How Labels Shape Your Mental Health

Have you ever noticed how differently you feel about yourself after someone gives you a label? Maybe a teacher called you “the smart one,” or a friend described you as “always anxious.” These labels might seem harmless, but they have a surprisingly powerful impact on how you see yourself and how you navigate your mental health.

Labels in mental health can be helpful tools for understanding and treating conditions, but they can also create unexpected challenges. Understanding how these labels work in your mind can help you take control of their influence on your well-being.

What Are Mental Health Labels?

Mental health labels are terms used to describe emotional, psychological, or behavioral patterns. They range from clinical diagnoses like “depression” or “anxiety disorder” to everyday descriptors like “stressed,” “perfectionist,” or “highly sensitive.”

The defining symptoms for each mental illness are detailed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association. This manual is used by mental health professionals to diagnose mental conditions and by insurance companies to reimburse for treatment.

But labels aren’t just clinical terms. They also include:

  • Self-applied labels: “I’m bipolar,” “I have social anxiety,” “I’m a worrier”
  • Social labels: “She’s the dramatic one,” “He’s always depressed”
  • Identity labels: “I’m a perfectionist,” “I’m broken,” “I’m resilient”

How Labels Change Your Brain and Behavior

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Effect

When you accept a label about yourself, your brain often works to make it true. Modified labeling theory suggest that “when an individual is diagnosed with a mental illness, cultural ideas associated with the mentally ill become personally relevant and foster negative self-feeling.”

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Label Assignment – You receive or adopt a mental health label

Step 2: Stereotype Activation – Your mind connects the label to cultural beliefs about what it means

Step 3: Behavior Change – You unconsciously start acting in ways that match the stereotype

Step 4: Confirmation – Your behavior reinforces your belief in the label

When Labels Become Identity

Research shows that diagnostic labeling increases the perception that people experiencing marginal problems require professional treatment, and some evidence that it increases empathy towards them and support for affording them special allowances at work, school, and home. However, labels may reduce the control people are perceived to have over their problems and their likelihood of recovering from them.

The Hidden Ways Labels Affect You

They Change How You See Your Emotions

When you have a mental health label, you might start interpreting normal human experiences through that lens. Feeling nervous before a presentation becomes “my anxiety acting up.” Being sad after a breakup becomes “my depression getting worse.”

This isn’t always wrong, but it can make you feel like you have less control over your emotional life than you actually do.

They Influence Your Relationships

An estimated one in four adults has a diagnosable mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. That’s about 76 million Americans who live with the fear that others may find out about their disorder and think less of them or even keep them from getting jobs or promotions.

Labels affect how others see you and how you expect to be treated. This can lead to:

  • Self-isolation: Pulling away from relationships to avoid judgment
  • Performance anxiety: Feeling pressure to hide symptoms or appear “normal”
  • Reduced expectations: Others treating you as more fragile or less capable

They Shape Your Treatment Expectations

Research shows that “when individuals are diagnosed with a mental illness, they are placed into a cultural category” and this placement can create a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, which could exacerbate a patient’s conditions and lead to less well targeted treatments and interventions.

The Two Sides of Mental Health Labels

When Labels Help

Mental health labels can be incredibly valuable when they:

  • Provide clarity: Understanding what you’re experiencing and that you’re not alone
  • Guide treatment: Helping professionals choose effective interventions
  • Build community: Connecting you with others who share similar experiences
  • Reduce self-blame: Recognizing that your struggles have a name and aren’t character flaws

When Labels Harm

Labels become problematic when they:

  • Limit your identity: Making you feel defined by your diagnosis
  • Create hopelessness: Believing you can’t change or improve
  • Increase stigma: Leading to discrimination or self-judgment
  • Oversimplify complexity: Reducing your rich inner life to a single category

The Science Behind Label Effects

Research on Diagnostic Impact

Studies show that diagnostic labels for mental health conditions can inadvertently reinforce harmful stereotypes and exacerbate stigma. If a diagnosis is incorrect and a label is wrongly applied, this may negatively impact person impressions even if the inaccurate label is later corrected.

Importantly, the diagnostic label continued to influence person judgments after a clear retraction (strong or weak), highlighting the limitations of corrections in reducing reliance on person-related misinformation and mental health stigma.

Professional Bias in Labeling

Research found that diagnosing patients with medical labels to describe mental health conditions or illnesses can have negative impacts on professionals working with them, with labels like ‘borderline personality disorder’ or ‘schizophrenia’ having adverse negative effects on the patients diagnosed with them.

This shows that even trained professionals can be influenced by labels in ways that affect treatment quality.

How to Take Control of Your Labels

Question Your Labels

Ask yourself:

  • Is this label helping or limiting me?
  • Do I feel more empowered or more restricted when I use it?
  • Am I using this label to understand myself or to excuse myself?

Separate Symptoms from Identity

Instead of thinking “I am anxious,” try “I am experiencing anxiety.” This small shift reminds you that:

  • You are not your diagnosis
  • Symptoms can change
  • You have agency in your healing

Choose Your Language Carefully

Research on language used to describe people with mental health conditions suggests that while person-first language (like “person with depression”) was thought to reduce stigma, studies found neither an effect of linguistic form nor an interaction effect with familiarity.

What matters more than the specific words is being intentional about:

  • Focusing on strengths alongside challenges
  • Using language that feels empowering to you
  • Avoiding language that makes you feel hopeless or stuck

Build a Balanced Self-Concept

Don’t let any single label define you. You might have depression, but you’re also:

  • A friend, partner, or family member
  • Someone with talents and interests
  • A person with goals and dreams
  • Someone capable of growth and change

Working with Mental Health Professionals

Advocate for Yourself

When working with mental health professionals:

  • Ask about the purpose of any diagnostic labels they suggest
  • Understand the benefits and risks of receiving a formal diagnosis
  • Request information about how the label might affect your treatment
  • Express concerns if a label doesn’t feel right or helpful

Focus on Function, Not Just Labels

NIMH has launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetic, imaging, physiologic, and cognitive data to see how all the data, not just the symptoms, cluster and how these clusters relate to treatment response.

Ask your provider to focus on:

  • How you’re functioning in daily life
  • What symptoms are most distressing to you
  • What goals you have for treatment
  • How to build on your existing strengths

Supporting Others with Mental Health Labels

Challenge Stereotypes

About half of the people with schizophrenia believe that former psychiatric patients are less trustworthy than others. The patients who believed this tended to isolate themselves from social support, a course of action that can increase the severity of psychotic symptoms.

When someone shares their mental health label with you:

  • Listen without judgment
  • Ask how they’d like to be supported
  • Focus on them as a whole person
  • Challenge your own assumptions about what their label means

Avoid Casual Labeling

Be mindful of casually labeling others or yourself:

  • Instead of “She’s so bipolar,” try “She seems to be having a tough time”
  • Rather than “I’m so OCD,” say “I like things organized”
  • Replace “He’s crazy” with “His behavior seems unusual”

Moving Forward with Awareness

Labels are tools, not truths. They can help you understand your experiences and connect with appropriate support, but they don’t have to define your entire identity or future.

Research shows that the most prevalent theme impacting individuals following being labelled with a diagnostic label is psychosocial impact, with both negative psychological impact and positive psychological outcomes being documented.

Remember:

  • You are more than any label
  • Labels can change as you grow and heal
  • Your worth isn’t determined by your diagnosis
  • Recovery and resilience are always possible

The goal isn’t to avoid all mental health labels, but to use them consciously and strategically. When labels help you understand yourself, access treatment, or connect with others, they’re serving you well. When they make you feel trapped, hopeless, or limited, it’s time to reconsider their role in your life.

Your mental health journey is uniquely yours. While labels might be part of that journey, they don’t have to be the destination.


References:

1 – https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmen.0000096

2 – https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2864081/

3 – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11469-022-00967-y

4 – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953611003716

5 – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182400297X

6 – https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.725877/full

7 – https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-017-1389-9

8 – https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/mental-health-labels-can-do-more-harm-than-good/

9 – https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1621&context=senior_theses

10 – https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/06/stigma