Learn how we changed the professional conversation in Denmark with one, magic word: Nonpathologizing.

When you’re up against systemic problems and cultural paradigms, you need to think and act in accordance with the power differential between you and the people who uphold the status quo.

We realized that we sorely needed a shorthanded way to express the need for discussions on mental distress and diversity where the psychiatric approach was definitively disregarded. This was coined in the concept “nonpathologizing”

The Danish psychiatric debate scene – much like in the rest of the Western world – has been massively dominated by psychiatric discourse. This dominance meant that it was almost impossible to engage anyone in discussions that did not assume the validity of psychiatric diagnoses. Most people have been culturally and systemically indoctrinated to accept mind pathology without question. By offering and using the word ‘nonpathologizing’, we’re challenging this basic assumption simply by commucating the desire to understand phenomena without employing psychiatric pathologization.

The plan

So how do you squeeze a novel concept into a conversation that is so insistingly pathologized? We developed a plan-of-action in multiple steps.

1) Use it

Don’t necessarily explain it. Just use it as though it was already normal vernacular. And so we did: We pushed it on social media, wrote it in opinion articles submitted to major Danish newspapers, and we spread it by word of mouth.

2) Legitimize it

We founded the Network for Nonpathologizing Psychology as a new professional network within the Danish Psychologists Association. This network is still operational and thriving in inviting both professional and lived-experience expertise to educate psychologists on nonpathologizing aspects of diverse psychology-related themes.

3) Popularize it

This is where we’re at now. Nonpathologizing has found steady footing in the professional conversation surrounding mental distress, but it has yet to enter the public discourse sufficiently to impact discourse. This is the next step.