What my field learned to undo
An anniversary, a global day of recognition, and the slow work of reclaiming what was wrongly diagnosed
Today is May 17. In the world of clinical psychology, today carries an anniversary that rarely makes the headlines, although it shaped the contours of my profession from the inside out. Thirty-six years ago, on May 17, 1990, the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its International Classification of Diseases. For decades, the entry had remained recognized as a disorder. On that day, it was withdrawn.
The American Psychiatric Association had made the same correction in 1973, removing homosexuality from the DSM after years of internal argument and a great deal of external pressure. The WHO’s decision in 1990 brought the rest of the world into formal agreement with what a generation of researchers, clinicians, and people simply living their lives had long understood. Difference belongs to one category and disorder to another. Healing presupposes illness as its starting condition, and where the illness was a fiction, the healing itself became the harm.
I was in graduate school when these corrections had been settled into the textbooks. Some of my supervisors had trained under the older framework, and they spoke of it with the particular care of people whose field had to grow past something. What stayed with me was the recognition that a discipline devoted to healing had spent decades pathologizing a real part of human life. The error was catastrophic for the people who lived inside it. The correction was hard-won. And the lesson for those of us coming after was that the diagnostic gaze is fallible. What gets called a disorder is, at least in part, a reflection of what a culture is prepared to see.
Today is also International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia, observed in more than 150 countries. The date was chosen to honor the WHO anniversary. The theme this year is “At the heart of democracy,” meant to highlight that a society’s treatment of its differences is one measure of its health. Beyond the political layer of that theme sits a psychological one, and it concerns far more than questions of sexual orientation.
Every life carries verdicts that arrived from outside it. A parent’s worry about a particular trait, framed as protection but received as diagnosis. A school’s assessment that this child is too sensitive, too loud, too slow, too much. A church’s teaching that a particular longing is sinful or that a particular desire is dangerous. A culture’s insistence that grief should be brief and resilience constant. We absorb these verdicts when we are young, before we have the capacity to evaluate them, and we carry them into adulthood as the supposed truth about who we are. Jung named this territory more than a century ago. Hollis has spent a career describing it. The second half of life, when it goes well, is the slow and often unglamorous work of distinguishing inherited diagnoses from accurate descriptions. The verdicts that turn out to have been wrong are returned, with some grief, to the people who issued them.
In my coaching work, this pattern arrives in a hundred different shapes. A man in his fifties realizes that the irritability he has carried since adolescence is grief that was never given room to move. A woman in her forties recognizes that the perfectionism she had taken for a personality trait was a survival strategy in a household where mistakes felt unsafe. A younger client describes a part of himself he has been calling broken for as long as he can remember, and we spend a year discovering that what was actually broken was the mirror he had been handed, rather than the face it was reflecting back.
In practice, this is small and ordinary work, the steady habit of bringing curiosity to what has been called a problem, sitting with it long enough to see what it actually is, and then either keeping it because it is yours or releasing it because it never was. Milton Erickson would have said it more simply. He spent his clinical life trusting the unconscious to know things the conscious mind would only later allow itself to consider. The shadow holds gold, Jung said, and the gold often takes the form of a part of you that someone, somewhere, decided was the disorder.
When my field corrected itself in 1973 and again in 1990, it made a structural admission: the same work needs to happen at every scale. What had been called pathology was, in fact, life. The institution had to relearn its job. The manual itself turned out to be the thing in need of revision, and the people who had been forced into its margins were the patients only in the eyes of a system that had misread them.
That same movement plays out in each individual life, although it is harder to date or to publish. You discover that a part of yourself you have been treating as a defect is, in fact, a feature, and you stop trying to fix it. You learn its shape, its history, the role it has played in your survival, and you let it back into the room. The space that opens is the space that was made for what had been exiled. The relief that follows tends to be subtle and steady, closer to the experience of being finally told the truth about something you had been half-suspecting for years.
If this resonates, the work runs through the heart of A Life Aligned, particularly the chapter on shadow integration, which sits with this question of what we have been taught to call ‘wrong’ about ourselves and what happens when we begin to challenge those verdicts. The book is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook formats on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other major retailers.
For today, though, the question I am sitting with is simpler than any of that. Where, in your own life, have you accepted a verdict that deserves a second look? What part of yourself were you taught to treat as a problem? And what might shift if you stopped trying to fix it and started trying to understand it?
The work of becoming aligned is, in large part, the work of returning what was wrongly diagnosed. May 17 is a good day to begin.
— Mark
A Life Aligned is a companion text for those moving through meaningful transition, drawing on depth psychology, Jungian shadow work, and the mythic arc of return. Available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other major retailers.
Dr. Mark Arcuri is a psychology professional, integrative coach, educator, and author writing from Querétaro, México. If this letter found you at a useful moment, consider forwarding it to someone who might benefit.