star-anise:

Today’s therapist thought:

Diagnosing someone doesn’t have to be like fitting them into a box.  It can be like drawing a map of them. There are thousands of types of maps. Topographical maps; road maps. Water table maps. Population density maps. They are all very different ways of understanding a space. None of them tells the complete story of it, and none of them are the same as the space itself.

A correct diagnosis, like a good map, should serve to orient and clarify; to make the relationships and distances between things easily apparent.  The map of depression can draw together anger and poor memory and stomach pain into a coherent space, letting you see the lightless void where grief is hiding like a deep aquifer. The map of autism can link a hundred days alone on the playground and the small pinpricks of light that were understanding and acceptance into a constellation of stars, something with hope for the future. 

Bad diagnoses obfuscate, confuse, lead astray; they end in ROAD CLOSED signs of failed therapy or plateaus of stalled progress. The worst diagnoses come from hardly glancing at the ground; they’re a single session, “That looks like a river i saw once.” The best diagnoses are drawn by hand, using the best grids and measures available, with frequent reference to the land itself.

And the land is never, never the map. It is always so much more.