I’m on the spectrum. I’m dyslexic. I’m a CEO. I’m a Senior VP. I’m an actor. I’m fill-in-the-blank. America is the land of labels. And yet, as the number of labels we give ourselves has grown, along with the intensity and totality with which we identify with them, so has our health crisis. Our maladies, our diagnoses, our jobs, our titles, our sexual preferences, while very real, don’t define us. Or at least they shouldn’t — because if we’re defined by our labels, we’re also confined by our labels. This is one of the factors fueling the mental health crisis, which in fact points to a larger spiritual crisis.

In her book The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker, Suzanne O'Sullivan argues, as the title suggests, that our proliferating diagnoses can often make us less healthy, not more. “It could be that borderline medical problems are becoming ironclad diagnoses and normal differences are being pathologized,” she writes, “that ordinary life experiences, bodily imperfections, sadness and social anxiety are being subsumed into the category of medical disorder.”

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), known as “psychiatry's bible,” now lists 297 mental disorders. About 1 in 9 children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with ADHD, up by a million since 2016. And the rate for adults has doubled in the last decade.

Of course, diagnoses can be transformative and lifesaving. They can lead to an explanation for our suffering, a community of people going through the same thing, and, above all, treatment. As O’Sullivan told Derek Thompson on his podcast, a diagnosis “empowers people to be kinder to themselves and it empowers people to make changes that they found difficult to make before the diagnosis.”

But while labels are useful to give a coherent explanation of what’s going on, these labels do not define us. As Rachel Aviv writes in Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us, “There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us.” Overidentifying with the stories we tell ourselves and the labels the world gives us shrinks our reality. Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Equally as damaging as over-identifying with our medical diagnoses is defining ourselves by any job or role or label. It’s what is known as “role engulfment,” when one role in our life consumes all others.

For instance, researchers have studied how this can damage the mental health of athletes. Research has also shown that employees who have higher “work centrality” are less able to mentally detach and recharge outside of work. Another study found that making your job the center of your life is connected to higher rates of workaholism, and the stress and burnout that comes with it. Outside of specific jobs, this can also happen with excessive “organizational identification.”

 The consequences of over-identification with our work can continue even after our work ends, leaving retirees whose main source of identity came from their jobs with a loss of purpose after they leave the workforce.

And of course, when your entire identity and sense of self is parked in your job, the risk is that your whole self rises and falls with the job. Lose the job and you face the existential risk of losing yourself. I had a friend recently tell me that her very successful husband was miserable in his job and that it was even affecting his health. When she suggested he quit and reminded him they’d be fine financially without a job, he replied, “but who will I be without my job?”

By not being able to see himself on the other side of a job that makes him miserable, he can’t imagine himself inhabiting any possibilities beyond it. Being in a position where we think, who would I be if I’m not CEO, or Senior VP of Whatever leads us to miss opportunities to grow. That’s when labels become a hard limit on the circumference of who we can be. But when we free ourselves from overidentification with our labels, it’s as though we break through the roof of what we thought was our whole world and suddenly we can see the shining stars. 

We can see it in politics. It’s hard to imagine today that in 1797, George Washington chose not to run for a third term, even though most expected him to do so, and a third term did not become prohibited until the 22^nd Amendment in 1951. He voluntarily left the public stage because he wanted to set a precedent that the office would not be a lifetime appointment.

Today we see the exact opposite, with many elected officials hanging on to power long after it’s clear they are no longer up to the job. There was the cognitively-compromised Dianne Feinstein, who died in office at age 90 in 2023. There’s Mitch McConnell, who, after a series of health scares (including appearing to freeze on camera twice) announced in February that he will not seek reelection in 2026. There was Texas Rep. Kay Granger, who had not been on Capitol Hill for several months in late 2024 — it was later found out that she was living in an assisted-living facility and struggling with dementia.

Grimly clinging to a job that you can no longer do because you cannot imagine life without it is one more example of our culture’s overidentification with a single role or label. Tom Harkin, who retired from the Senate in 2015 and is now spending time as a crew member on a sailboat, had advice for his old colleagues: “I’d ask myself: Is this all there is to my life?” and “What am I missing out there?”

Research has shown that those who overidentify with only one group are less tolerant, more biased and less able to cooperate and mix with people outside their group. So seeing ourselves as members of multiple groups could help in our highly polarized times when social media creates silos and us vs. them echo chambers.

There are also labels about expectations of ourselves. Expecting ourselves to always be successful means any failure becomes existentially threatening if we see ourselves as always as flawless and perfect, we live in a state of constant anxiety and fear that our worth as a person will be diminished by anything short of an impossible standard. If we define ourselves by beauty, we’re setting ourselves for an identity crisis when aging inevitably takes its toll.

Carl Jung wrote about the risks of confusing our personas with our true selves. “Every calling or profession has its own characteristic persona,” he wrote. “A certain kind of behavior is forced on them by the world, and professional people endeavor to come up to these expectations. The danger is that they become identical with their personas — the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done.”

Our diagnoses or our job descriptions tell us what we have or what we do but they don’t tell us who we are. If “we are spiritual beings having a human experience” — as Teilhard de Chardin put it — that means we’re always evolving and no role, however magnificent, or diagnosis, however bleak, defines us.

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