Beyond the Label: Remembering the Wholeness Beneath Mental Health

What if mental health isn’t just about fitting into a framework—but remembering who you’ve been all along?

It’s Mental Health Month.

Although I’m grateful that conversations about mental well-being are happening more openly than ever before, I find myself holding a deeper question:

What happens when the systems that aim to support us also begin to define us?

In healthcare, especially in the mental health world, everything starts with frameworks:

• structures to organize experience...

• criteria to observe patterns...

• containers to name behaviors...

Frameworks can be helpful. They can offer language when life feels overwhelming. They can make invisible struggles visible. They can guide care and connection.

But frameworks are still frameworks. They are human-made lenses. Not Divine absolutes.
And lenses, by their nature, shape what we see.

The mental health system, for all its care and intention, often asks us to measure ourselves against an invisible baseline: a "neurotypical" standard of thinking, feeling, behaving, responding.

But where did this baseline come from?
Who decided what was normal?
And what was it based on?

Across history, across cultures, across environments, human brains and bodies have developed differently because they were meant to. Variation was, and still is, part of the design.

Yet modern society, with its drive for uniformity and predictability, often treats difference as deficiency.

We’ve created a world so rigid in its structures that when someone moves outside of them, whether through heightened sensitivity, unique perception, or divergent thinking, it’s assumed something must be wrong.

Sometimes, a diagnosis can be life-saving.
Sometimes, it can be limiting.
Sometimes, it can be both at once.

And sometimes, a person doesn't fit the boxes at all, but still finds themselves quietly wondering: "Is something wrong with me?"

I think of my own journey.
Growing up, I was often labeled "abnormal."
I didn’t quite move through the world the way others seemed to.
I was placed in gifted and talented programs because of how I thought, but that very same thinking sometimes made me feel... odd. Out of sync. Out of place.

Yes, I’m sensitive to sound.
Yes, bright lights can overwhelm me.
Yes, large crowds can drain me if I stay too long.
Yes, I sometimes break eye contact when I need to gather my thoughts, and then return, fully present.

But I live a rich, meaningful, creative life.
I love. I teach. I create. I contribute. I move through this world with care.
And none of these nuances of how I experience life mean I am broken or require a diagnosis.

It simply means I am human.

And yet, if I were filtered through certain modern frameworks, if someone was looking hard enough, a diagnosis might be offered. A label might be stamped.

Not because of who I am, but instead, because of the lens.

When we call someone "neuro-spicy," we're acknowledging difference, but often against a baseline that was never universally true.

When we say "on the spectrum," we are honoring complexity, but through a model that still assumes there's a fixed spectrum at all.

When we talk about mental health, we must be careful not to collapse people into their challenges, their diagnosis or their labels.

There is a world of being-ness that lives before ANY of that. It's the world of who you are, not just how you score on a diagnostic.

This is not a call to abandon your diagnosis if it has helped you.
This is not a call to reject the support you need and deserve.
This is not a call to pretend that real challenges do not exist.

This is an invitation:

• to remember that you are more than a framework...

• to recognize the humanity beneath the labels...

• to explore with gentleness the full story of your own becoming...

Maybe you have never been diagnosed.
Maybe you were diagnosed later in life.
Maybe you are raising a child who doesn’t move through the world the way others expect.
Maybe you are simply wondering what it means to be human in a world that often forgets how vast humanness really is.

Wherever you are...
whatever labels you wear or shed or hold loosely...

... you are still WHOLE.
You are still sovereign.
You are still soooo much more than ANY container could ever capture.

Questions to reflect on, if you feel called:

• Where have I unconsciously measured myself against someone else's definition of "normal"?

• What would it mean to honor my full being... even the parts that don’t fit neatly into boxes?

• How might I hold curiosity, instead of judgment, toward my own sensitivities and strengths?

• What new possibilities open when I see myself not as a problem to be solved, but as a being to be understood?

There’s space for all of you here.
The diagnosed. The un-diagnosed. The in-between.
The ones with names. The ones with none.
The ones still figuring it out.

You belong. Not because you fit. But because you are.

And maybe... just maybe... you were never meant to be measured by a system of edges and boxes. Maybe you were meant to be seen as light. Not a narrow beam, but a full, radiant spectrum:

from soft violet to bold crimson, from visible to invisible, from quiet to brilliant. Each wavelength, essential. Each variation, part of the whole. No one piece more valid than another.

Let that be the remembering. Not just this month. But always.