Identifying pathology and pathologising identity

The role of self-diagnosis in philosophy of psychiatry

Abstract

This paper is concerned with psychiatric self-diagnosis, a topic that seems to be overlooked in the academic literature (except for a few studies based on autistic communities and individuals), while being increasingly discussed in the context of activism. Since awareness about mental health has been increasing in the past decades, and autism is one of the most targeted conditions in the social and philosophical literature concerning psychiatry, self-diagnosis has become a topic worthy of academic discussion. I will introduce the topic and review the limited literature that explicitly targets it (§ 1-2). I will then proceed to highlight the key features of self-diagnosis that emerge in the context of autism (§ 3). Then, I will explore the connections with its official counterpart – that is, diagnosis proper – and with broader discussions in the field of philosophy of psychiatry (§ 4). Our final claim will be that self-diagnosis can have significant socio-political consequences, and therefore an understanding informed by social models(§ 5).