The Risks of Labeling Brain Injury

Key points

Diagnostic labels can stigmatize and limit recovery from physical problems like brain injury.

For example, those with brain injury are falsely assumed to be unintelligent and incurable.

Using specific, non-stigmatizing terms instead can aid in recovery.

In the 1980s, one of my psychology professors at the University of Toronto advocated against using labels for psychological or psychiatric diagnoses. "Why not?” I questioned. “How else will we know what illness they have? Labels being bad sounds like psychological mumbo jumbo.” By the end of that school year, I understood how labels stigmatize and limit recovery.

Humans use labels to distinguish between themselves and those not like them.

Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses are, by and large, labels applied to a congl