The Mental Health Project is a Seattle Times initiative focused on covering mental and behavioral health issues. It is funded by Ballmer Group, a national organization focused on economic mobility for children and families. The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over work produced by this team.

I’ve recently been writing about mental health diagnoses, and how a label might help a person better understand themself. At the same time, we need to be mindful of the danger of reducing a person’s experience to their diagnosis.

Today, I want to look at how diagnoses affect one’s access to health care and other services.

Clinicians hold a lot of responsibility to give accurate diagnostic labels. Though it is not talked about nearly enough in our field, we hold immense power to affect how

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