Dynamic Nominalism

In the May 13 New Yorker, Manvir Singh takes on the DSM and the problem with classifying and naming psychiatric conditions:

In DSM: A History of Psychiatry's Bible (2021), the medical sociologist Allan Horwitz presents reasons for the DSM-5's botched revolution, including infighting among members of the working groups and the sidelining of clinicians during the revision process. But there's a larger difficulty: revamping the DSM requires destroying kinds of people. As the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, labelling people is very different from labelling quarks or microbes. Quarks and microbes are indifferent to their labels; by contrast, human classifications change how "individuals experience themselves – and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behavior in part because they are so classified." Hacking's best-known example is multiple personality disorder. Between 1972 and 1986, the number of cases of patients with multiple personalities exploded from the double digits to an estimated six thousand. Whatever one's thoughts about the reality of M.P.D., he observed, everyone could agree that, in 1955, "this was not a way to be a person." No such diagnosis existed. By 1986, though, multiple personality disorder was not only a recognized psychiatric lable; it was also sanctioned by academics, popular books, talk shows, and, more importantly, the experiences of people with multiple personalities. Hacking referred to this process, in which naming creates the thing named – and in which the meaning of names can be affected, in turn, by the name bearers – as "dynamic nominalism."

On the subject of identifying with your DSM label, this is from a discussion of a memoir by Paige Layle about being autistic and how much the label has meant to her:

One of the few big changes implemented between the DSM-IV and the DSM-5 was the collapse of "pervasive developmental disorders," including Asperger's, into "autism spectrum disorder." The act that Layle considers such a violation – being deprived of her diagnosis and thus her identity – was inflicted on the entirety of the "Aspie" community. What's more, many people once diagnosed as having Asperger's learned that, under the new criteria, they wouldn't qualify as having as having autism spectrum disorder. The change caused fear and confusion, and, for some, felt like a denial of nature itself. "It surprises me that they'd remove that label when it's very clearly something that exists," a British man formerly diagnosed as having Asperger's told the psychologist Bethan Chambers. "I'm now a member of an endangered species."