If I engage a mental health service provider I’m likely to receive a “diagnosis of a mental disorder” and be labeled in a certain way. How should I think about that label?

Naturally we human beings want to move from not knowing to knowledge. We want to move from not knowing how to cure a disease to finding a cure for that disease. We want to move from not knowing how to desalinate the oceans to knowing how to produce an inexhaustible supply of drinking water. Of course we want to know these things.

But this natural desire to know things ought not make us believe that we know something when we do not yet know it. This is the case for what, for a given individual, may be his most important personal problem: his emotional health. We do not know much about “what goes on” inside human beings. Nor may we ever. This is perhaps the largest “not knowing” that confronts our species and maybe also the hardest one to swallow.