utheneran:

mental illness is a spectrum of experiences which are constructed and categorized by social institutions as diagnoses

diagnoses aren’t sacred, essential, platonic entities floating in space somewhere, they’re descriptions of patterns of experiences

if your self-described experiences correspond with a a particular pattern, then congratulations, that’s how the process of diagnosis works

you may note that this is kind of fuzzy and ambiguous: that’s because that’s how mental illness works and why your medical metaphors are incoherent. there is no chemical/physical test for mental illness because it is entirely descriptive of self-reported symptoms, so stop acting like there’s some hoop people have to jump through to be Really Mentally Ill other than “having corresponding experiences” (which is really loose anyway because mental illness isn’t clearly delineated, because, again, it is not an a priori category that inherently exists)