Simon Sahner on the Impact of Disease Names and Diagnoses  Calling Diseases by Their Name

Sometimes a diagnosis comes as a relief; sometimes naming a disease only increases the burden. Simon Sahner takes a closer look at how the name of a disease impacts those affected.

In recent years, the number of ADHD diagnoses in Germany has increased sharply, almost tripling between 2015 and 2024 – especially among adults. Did fewer people have ADHD in the past? Probably not. The rise primarily reflects that more people are being diagnosed. What this means for the individuals affected varies greatly.

One Sentence, Many Consequences

For some, hearing “You have ADHD” is a relief, because it offers an explanation for a range of challenges that were previously vague and had unsettled them their entire lives. For others, the diagnosis gradually loses significance, because they find their own ways of coping.

Others again fear being labelled. They feel as if a heavy burden has been imposed on them, essentially a confirmation that something is wrong with them. Perhaps they had hoped that they themselves were to blame for the symptoms, and that with a little more willpower and energy, the problems would have been surmountable.

And then there are those who never receive an ADHD diagnosis, either because they don’t seek one or because the possibility never occurs to them – yet they experience the same difficulties and the same accompanying frustration.

The Weight of a Label

The way ADHD is handled illustrates the important role linguistic labelling plays in how we fundamentally approach and perceive physical and psychological processes that are seen as unusual, burdensome or dangerous. Ultimately, diseases we give names to – like AIDS, cancer or multiple sclerosis, or neurodivergences like ADHD and the autism spectrum – are at their core recurring physical or psychological processes that have been observed to follow a recognisable pattern. Based on this recognition, they have been given a fixed name or designation.

The process of naming and diagnosing diseases is ideally neutral and purely scientific – however, in practice, this is not always the case. For a long time, “hysteria” was considered a valid diagnosis, when in reality it mainly concealed misogynistic assumptions. Similarly, when the first cases of what we now call AIDS were discovered, the term did not yet exist. It took years to understand exactly what it was. For a while, it was called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), based on the assumption that the disease only affected homosexual men.

It's All About Context

As articulated labels, diagnoses, then, are not always neutral. They do not exist purely within a medical or psychological context; they also reflect social discourses, biases and assumptions that may later prove wrong. Nevertheless, they are vital and indispensable. Only through the act of naming are people enabled to engage with the underlying phenomena – to treat them, study them, manage them or even cure them.

For those affected, diagnostic terms are not simply labels for medical or psychological facts. Behind them lie narratives that can burden and stigmatise, or alternatively provide relief. For some, it feels as if a disease or condition only comes into existence through its diagnosis. When I was diagnosed with bone cancer about nine years ago, I had already been experiencing knee pain for years. But only at the moment when someone told me, “You have cancer,” did the disease become real to me – even though it had existed for a long time. The diagnosis did not create the disease, but it made it tangible for me, and it triggered fears and thoughts.

The most important insight is that medical and psychological abnormalities exist independently of their labels. But only through naming them do they become phenomena that can be understood – medically and psychologically. Handling this linguistic dimension responsibly is a challenge that extends beyond medicine and psychology.

April 2026