Labels are useless

labels don't solve anything for me and are just stereotypes and change all the time. Better solution to finding mental help instead of asking people "do I have this disorder" is to tell people about specific behavior (e.g. bad temper) and asked for methods or dietary supplements for overcoming those certain behavioral traits. This is the best cure for "mental illness" I know of. Just as an example, several years ago a doc put me on some medication to help me calm my thoughts and mood. It didn't have much affect and just made me more restless. Turns out cigarettes actually do a better job of calming me down than prescription pills do (read up on the health benefits of tobacco; might not be healthy for your lungs but it's a hell of a lot better for you than McDonald's is).

If you can get by on tobacco to calm yourself down and that is what you want all power to you. I don't think labels do much either, it's mostly guesswork.

Labels do a lot.

If people aren't dumb enough to ignore them.

Labels can be helpful to some people because it gives them a sense of being.

labels are a way of conceptualizing what the sciences of psychology and psychiatry concern themselves with.

there can be much debate on what they are based on, ranging from conceptualizing mental illness as a medical abnormality, a psychosocial aberration, a problem of life, a behavioural trait even as you suggested. currently, they are based on a so-called 'medical model', similar to physiological illnesses, like cancer.

what labels are is the best way people have dealt with organizing (a) research, (b) treatment and (c) education. everybody knows they are not very effective. let's take the most obvious flaw, the categorization. it is more accurate to represent behaviour on a continuum. however, labels operationalize and organize - in sum, make it more manageable for professionals to deal with mental illness.

that's the official description of labels.

in real life, labels are used by psychiatrists for their convenience. they don't have to deal with you as much after they neatly fit you into a set of criteria. if they had to evaluate every character trait of every patient they treat, they'd have like 5 patients in their whole career.

also, labels are there so there can be drugs to treat them. so that people who work for pharmaceutical companies can feed their spouses and children. hey, we're all surviving here.

labels are also, as racie suggested, give us a sense of security and organize our knowledge about ourselves. instead of being a weird wreck with a multitude of random, inexplicable quirks, we can say, "well, i'm just OCD". it's like saying, i'm male, i'm a teacher, i'm an ice-skater. sometimes people then forget that they can be anything more than their disease. but that's another topic altogether.

If people know what is wrong with them though, they can find ways of dealing with it.

Well labels are really just a collection of symptoms. Once you can label something, you can treat it. Don't really understand this whole anti-label thing really.