Ep 3.12 - Into the Hall of Mirrors: Deciding What (and When) to Pathologize

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A Therapist Can't Say That

Riva Stoudt

46 episodes

4 months ago

Therapy is full of cliches. There are things we’ve all been taught as therapists not to question, even when we get that feeling deep down in our guts that the truth might be a bit more complicated than that. Riva Stoudt wants to talk about it. Each episode dives into a cliche, truism, or best practice of therapy to look at how it really plays out in practice. Whether you agree or not, you’ll appreciate a candid look at the things therapists don’t normally talk about.

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Ep 3.12 - Into the Hall of Mirrors: Deciding What (and When) to Pathologize

A Therapist Can't Say That

26 minutes

11 months ago

Ep 3.12 - Into the Hall of Mirrors: Deciding What (and When) to Pathologize

As I’ve been trying to wrap up this season of the podcast, I’ve been reflecting, in particular on my conversations about psychiatric diagnosis with Dr. Awais Aftab and Dr. Miri Forbes.

I keep coming back to this question: How do we decide what human traits, behaviors, and subjective experiences to pathologize? What makes something about a person a problem that we try to fix?

It’s a deeply complicated question, with few, if any, absolute answers. Yet I still think we have to wander that hall of mirrors, and I believe that how we conceptualize and approach the question is actually more important than any conclusions we might make.

Because when we are able to articulate the various factors that influence what we pathologize and when, we actually increase our ability to apply those factors across contexts without needing to have an ultimate conclusion that is true for all people, in all contexts, at all times.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

How even using suffering as a metric for a problematic trait is often complicated by context
Why we cannot discount the sociocultural context for an individual’s expression of traits
Why pathologizing states as problematic across the board falls apart in real life
How the medical model of optimal human functioning fails to translate to psychopathology
Why we have to stay open to uncertainty in viewing our clients’ suffering and how we can help ease it

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