This categorization and atomization problem is pervasive throughout society right now.

I think this boils down to the relationship between duality and reality, and is best viewed through the lens of Tarski's undefinability theorem or Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

TLDR: to create meaning out of the abstract, we have to define things in increasingly atomistic ways, and then separate those definitions into various categories. But this process is also inherently, foundational, false. It’s an approximation.

And yet, there is something of objective reality. Things do exist. It’s a phase change problem where language (and even thoughts) are always going to be a step down from truth.

Dogma —around philosophies, gender, etc— tends to come from believing in the platonic reality of a concept on its own rather than letting that concept exist as a proxy for the bigger gestalt truth.

In relation to this article, mental illness designations are proxies. They are only useful insofar as they keep pointing us to better truth. Few or even none of them represent discreet things that we will still consider true in 100 years. And everyone knows that. Which leaves us with an entire academic discipline that is somehow both our best attempt so far at understanding a lot of really complex truths, and justifiably able to be second guessed at every turn by even moderately educated lay persons.