These days, there are lots of "labels" in the world. As a counselor and minister, I see more than my fair share of them, both as part of continuing professional education, as well as as a result of my work with counseling clients...
Labels definitely can be useful as a way to help a person better understand their life, but sometimes they can also become a bit problematic.
One young counseling client regularly comes to me and will declare something like "I think I have XYZ Syndrome." Subsequently, we spend much of the session "unpacking" that and — most of the time — moving on to the realization that it was a hasty assumption.
Internet Wisdom and "Dr. Google"
With the advent of the Internet, everyone now has access to a vast repository of information. We have all manners of resources at our fingertips that simply weren't there, just 25 years ago.
Of course, the problem is that we must be mindful that what we are looking at is information, and not actual knowledge.
Not suggesting that doing your own research can't be helpful, but without wisdom and experience to examine what you find with a critical eye, you can actually get in the way of your own healing.
In the broadest sense, it's a fair assumption that people who are suffering with both mental/emotional issues and physical issues want to end their pain. However, trying to "shoebox" yourself into a thumbnail diagnosis can be problematic because we human beings are all unique and different.
The more problematic outcome can be that we latch on to a diagnostic "label" and actually end up allowing it to get in the way of our healing, because we start attributing everything in our experience to the label rather than to our individual life experiences.
Labels can also get in the way of healing when we feel tempted to "hide inside the label." What that means is that a person attributes everything that happens to them to the label and uses it as a limitation rather than an opportunity to heal — for example, "I can't go to the store because I have Social Anxiety" — thereby getting in the way of their own chance to feel better.
It's a way to get stuck and no longer work on actual improvement.
Overall, though, labels can be useful but they only offer a small snapshot into whatever might be troubling us... so they should be used appropriately.
